Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (27 page)

But had he stopped and turned it over in his mind, as perhaps the boneheaded and smug did, Glover would have realized that the letter constituted supporting evidence for her murder only if you believed one of three very unlikely things. The first possibility was that Diana was genuinely psychic and could forecast the future. The second possible causal explanation was that the future assassins, having got hold of the letter, looked at it and agreed with her that this would indeed be a good way of arranging her permanent exit. Or third, that Diana was warned by someone else that a car accident was the preferred method of her execution, but that for some reason she neglected to include this information in her letter. None of these seems ordinarily plausible, and we are therefore left with Glover’s simple desire to believe. As the journalist and Paris correspondent for the
Daily Telegraph
Colin Randall noted in his online diary, “I long ago accepted that in any gathering of five otherwise sensible people, there will probably be at least two who sincerely believe Diana was murdered.”
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It was not wholly unexpected that the conclusions of the Stevens Report failed to satisfy Mr. Al Fayed, though its 832 pages, written in agonizing forensic detail, answered and countered almost every aspect of the main conspiracy claims from motive to aftermath, its failure to get around to the Order of the Solar Temple notwithstanding. Nevertheless, it might have been anticipated that Stevens had shown to any reasonable and intelligent observer that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. Sadly, this was not so. The day after publication of the report, the
Independent
newspaper, founded in 1986 to be an impartial journal of record, declared itself unhappy with Stevens’s conclusions. “No one,” its editorial began, “likes to be labeled a conspiracy theorist” and therefore to be associated with the kind of people “who believe the world is run by aliens disguised as humans,” but the newspaper was concerned that too officious a desire to avoid such a label might impair its capacity to ask questions. “Skepticism,” it pointed out, “can be a healthy instinct.”

This proposition is, in abstract terms at least, undeniable. But where would such skepticism lead one in the case of the Stevens Report? There were, concluded the
Independent
, a number of awkward questions that had not been resolved. For example, there was the issue of the white Fiat Uno belonging to a conveniently dead French paparazzo, which might just have been the one clipped by the princess’s Merc in the Paris underpass. There was also the problem of “all of the closed circuit television cameras monitoring the underpass [which] inexplicably failed to record the incident.” In addition, said the newspaper, “the question of whether anyone had the motive to murder the couple remains unresolved. The report says there is no reason to believe Diana and Mr. Fayed were preparing to marry. Mr. Fayed’s father maintains that there was.”
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These observations came close to being perverse. In fact, Stevens, in exhaustive detail, showed both that the Fiat Uno in question could not conceivably have been the one in the Paris tunnel, and revealed, camera by camera, that almost all the CCTV installations en route were trained on the entrances of the buildings to which they belonged. Furthermore, Stevens established that everybody in whom Diana had regularly confided did not believe that she was planning marriage, and some said that she had explicitly ruled it out. In fact, only Mohamed Al Fayed, owner of the Mercedes that crashed and employer of the man who was driving the car at the time, testified to having been told that there was to be a wedding.

It wasn’t clear whether the writer of the
Independent
editorial had plowed his or her way through the Stevens Report or not, but in any case, the newspaper allowed itself two tangential arguments that by now may be familiar to the readers of this book. The first was that the absence of complete certainty (“We should beware the assumption that all the circumstances of this case have now been fully explained and all the loose ends neatly tied up”) somehow permitted an almost impossible explanation to be regarded as being as true, if not truer than a likely one. The second was that the prevalence of an opinion somehow conferred a degree of truth upon it. “According to a recent poll,” said the
Independent
, “a third of the British public believe what happened to Diana was not an accident. This cannot be written off as a fringe belief.”

Conspiracy on Trial

But there are other ways of determining whether a belief is justified. It seldom happens that conspiracy theories are held to the same evidential standards as official versions; the 1934 trial of the Swiss publishers of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
was a rare example of the propagators of a theory being forced to substantiate it in court. However, this is more or less what occurred between October 2007 and April 2008 in London’s Royal Courts of Justice. In the beechwood environs of Court 73—many of the press and public accommodated in a large overspill room, watching on TV monitors—coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker presided over what became, in effect, a trial of the assertions that Diana was murdered. Despite Lord Scott Baker’s early suggestion that the process was not an adversarial one, the jury of five men and six women saw highly paid counsel for the various protagonists cross-examine witnesses with antagonistic vigor.

Al Fayed’s team was led by one of the most celebrated and radical Queen’s Counsel in England, Michael Mansfield—as one
Guardian
journalist put it, “the light shining off the silver highlights in his well-coiffed hair, his brilliantly colored silk ties illuminating an otherwise drab courtroom.”
⁵⁵
A TV technician covering the event described Mansfield to me as “chasing every hare he could; trying to force open every little chink. But they were all dead ends.”

One dead end was the possible role of the queen’s husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, for a decade the target of accusations by Mohamed Al Fayed. Al Fayed’s team simply could not provide any evidence that would make the octogenarian consort a material witness at the inquest. But major figures within the Establishment certainly did testify, including Lord Stevens, Sir Richard Dearlove (former head of MI6), and Lord Fellowes, the queen’s private secretary and also brother-in-law to Princess Diana.

The most theatrical performance belonged to Al Fayed himself, who, during his day in court, named as conspirators the duke; former Prime Minister Tony Blair; two former commissioners of the Metropolitan Police, including Stevens; Lord Fellowes; Diana’s older sister; the former ambassador to Paris; and the Prince of Wales. His own former bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, the only survivor of the crash, was a “crook” and also in on the plot, according to Al Fayed. Others were castigated. Dodi’s former girlfriend Kelly Fisher was “just a hooker” and Diana’s former boyfriend, the heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, was dismissed as a man who “lived in a council flat and has no money.” However, none of this talk, so colorful on the page, seemed convincing in court, especially as the props of conspiracy collapsed one by one, to be replaced by evidence of the incompetence of Al Fayed’s own security operation, an incompetence originating with the Al Fayeds themselves.

Diana could not have been pregnant, as Al Fayed had insisted she had told him she was. Postmortem examination established this fact, and it was corroborated by Dodi’s former masseuse, as well as the yacht
Jonikal
’s former stewardess, giving evidence on a videolink from New Zealand, who had seen contraceptive pills in the princess’s bedroom. The accident itself could easily have not been fatal, a collision investigator told the court. The Mercedes hit the corner of a column in the tunnel, creating a much greater impact than had it struck the column’s face or the opposite wall. Furthermore, some key conspiracy witnesses, who had testified to such phenomena as the “blinding light” in the tunnel, turned out under questioning to be fantasists. “A number of people,” said Lord Justice Scott Baker in his summation, “seem to have had a compelling desire to pretend they were there when, in truth, they were not there at all.” Worst of all, former MI6 employee Richard Tomlinson, who had originated the strobe-gun theory based on plans he recalled from his secret-service days, now admitted that he might have got the whole thing wrong, and that there was no blinding-light plan after all. As a BBC reporter put it at the time, Tomlinson’s credibility had been damaged “because he doesn’t have really the evidence to back up what he told Mohammed Al Fayed nine years ago.”
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What was established as fact, however, was that Henri Paul, the driver called in by Dodi Fayed to drive the couple that night, had been drinking and was well over the alcohol limit. “Henri Paul was not fit to drive when he got into that Mercedes,” concluded a leading toxicologist. Worse, Al Fayed employees had then lied to the press about how much Paul had drunk. What also emerged in court was the culpability of Dodi and Mohamed Al Fayed for what had happened. Mansfield suggested that the Al Fayed bodyguards should have resisted the plan to have Henri Paul do the driving. Michael Mansfield interrogated bodyguard Kes Wingfield on this point.

MANSFIELD:
You see, at the very least—at the very least—although you weren’t in the car, there was a responsibility by your colleague to ensure that Princess Diana did have her safety belt on before they moved off. Do you agree?

WINGFIELD:
Without a shadow of a doubt, Trevor will have mentioned that, but he can’t physically grab the Princess of Wales and put a seat belt on her.

And later:

MANSFIELD:
You didn’t get authority or clearance . . . for this plan, did you?

WINGFIELD:
When we spoke to Dodi, he told us the plan had been okayed by Mr. Fayed.

MANSFIELD:
I am so sorry, just answer the question and we will be much quicker.

CORONER [ JUD GE]:
I think the witness is answering the question.

MANSFIELD:
You didn’t telephone through?

WINGFIELD:
I personally never telephoned, no.

CORONER:
Would there have been any point if it had been authorized by the boss?

WINGFIELD:
No, sir, because Mr. Fayed is so hands-on with every aspect of his organization . . . Once Dodi had said to me, “It’s been okayed by my father,” that really closed the door on any further discussion.

MANSFIELD:
I am going to suggest to you that whatever you are being told . . . it’s part of the instructions that you are given when you do this job to make sure that his name is not taken in vain, particularly by those offspring who have bodyguards. That was well known to you, wasn’t it?

WINGFIELD:
I wouldn’t call him “offspring.”

CORONER:
What age was Dodi?

WINGFIELD:
He was forty-two, sir .
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In the end, Al Fayed’s counsel was forced to admit that he hadn’t sufficient evidence—in fact, hadn’t any evidence at all—even to support the accusations of a conspiracy. Mansfield accepted that there was no evidence incriminating the Duke of Edinburgh, MI5, MI6, the police, the unknown driver of the white Fiat Uno; no medical evidence of a Diana pregnancy, nor a plot to cover up such a pregnancy; no evidence that the French medical services were involved in a deliberate delaying of necessary treatment.

At one point, toward the end of the inquest, the following, rather pathetic exchange took place between Mansfield and the coroner. It concerned the allegations made by Al Fayed against Trevor Rees-Jones, and is worth quoting in full:

CORONER:
Are these allegations being maintained by Mr. Al Fayed? Because, if so, Mr. Rees[-Jones] is entitled to be told of any evidence in support of them and to give us his explanation.

MANSFIELD:
Sir, I have been very careful in the examination. I have not maintained those and I am not in a position to produce any material to support them.

CORONER:
Why haven’t they been withdrawn by Mr. Al Fayed since February 9, 2006? They are very grave allegations, and one would have thought that a man with any decency who was not going to pursue them would withdraw them.

MANSFIELD:
May I say this with regard to that? I appreciate the nature and gravity of the allegations and I hope that in the longer term his position will be appreciated, and that is this: that he has been very concerned from the beginning to discover the circumstances of the crash and obviously what lay behind it. There have been many beliefs that he has held, and in my submission he was quite entitled to hold certain beliefs and obviously to see whether, in the longer term, when those beliefs were, as it were, exposed to this inquest, whether there was material which supports them . . . It’s very difficult for those people in those circumstances to relinquish a belief that has been firmly held, even though, as it may turn out, there is very little material to support the belief that they have, for example that it’s not suicide or it is suicide, whatever it is, and therefore I hope that it will be understood that obviously it’s for the person individually to obviously make that clear.
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Even that humiliating climbdown wasn’t quite the end. An actor friend of Al Fayed’s, Keith Allen, revealed that he had been making an undercover documentary, filmed partly in the press overspill room at the inquest. “It’s not about a conspiracy before the crash,” said Allen, “but there definitely was a conspiracy after it.” And it was announced that filmmakers were seeking backers for a movie titled
Underpass
. Based on Gordon Thomas’s
Gideon’s Spies
, it would tell the tale of “the infiltration by Mossad into the Ritz.”
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