This week’s little cocktail sausage was the evidence of Lady Annabel Goldsmith, that her friend the Princess of Wales told her that she needed marriage to Dodi Fayed “like a rash on my face.”
Last week, we had readings from Diana’s love letters; a witness in tears under cross-examination from Mohamed Fayed’s counsel; talk of Diana’s enthusiasm for her dear “papa,” Prince Philip.
The inquest into the death more than 10 years ago of Princess Diana has already provided weeks of prurient pleasure to the gossip-mongers. It has many weeks more to run, during which it would not be surprising to find Santa Claus, President Bush and Osama Bin Laden summoned to give evidence.
What, you might say, have any of them got to do with the proper job of an inquest, which is to discover how somebody died?
The answer, on the basis of the farrago that has taken place so far, is that Lord Justice Scott Baker seems willing to allow absolutely anyone with any sort of an opinion about the Princess’s life and lovers to have his or her say in court.
The outcome is a feast of intrusion upon and speculation about this unfortunate dead woman, which makes a mockery of legal procedure and of human dignity.
Many of us, I think, feel embarrassed to be presented each morning at the breakfast table with yet another rich dish of lovers’ tittle-tattle and lunatic speculation.
It is the consequence of a weakminded judicial system once again allowing an obsessively grieving father, Mohamed Fayed, to turn a formal legal inquiry into a circus, in pursuit of his quest to prove that his son, Dodi, and the Princess were victims of a plot involving Buckingham Palace, rather than of a tragic accident.
The outcome is that instead of an inquiry into the immediate circumstances of Diana’s death, we are being given a vaudeville parade of her unhappy life.
How on earth can it be relevant to an inquest to provide a list of her alleged lovers, as did a witness last month?
What possible merit attaches to a court catfight about whether she did, or did not, love Dodi Fayed enough to be considering marriage to him?
The judge’s view, I suspect, is that he wants to ensure that every possible avenue is explored, every dirty corner swept, so that once the proceedings close, Fayed will have no possible grounds for persisting further with his witch hunt.
Yet, if the $7 million inquiry conducted by former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens failed to achieve this objective, how can any inquest?
Mohamed Fayed has received a generous portion of sympathy from the Royal Family and from the British public because he lost his son. But long before that event, Fayed was perceived as a wholly unreliable, recklessly extravagant figure, who commanded scant respect in British business and deserved none from anybody else.
Fayed’s murky commercial dealings, his history of deceits about his own antecedents, were exposed to the world 20 years ago.
He has a long history of pursuing vendettas in court and out of it, of using his wealth as a club to beat supposed enemies and of a chronically distant relationship with truth.
Heaven only knows what Princess Diana thought she was doing, entangling herself with the Fayed family, and with a wastrel such as Dodi, who seemed to care only for girls, fun and cocaine.
Her judgment in matters of the heart was erratic, to put the matter politely. Suffice it to say that the supercad Major James Hewitt looks a positive gentleman alongside the young Fayed.
But none of this seems relevant to the only issue that the inquest jury is being asked to assess: How did Diana die?
This week, Chief Superintendent Jeff Rees, of the Metropolitan Police, told the court – narrating the same story as every officer engaged in this case over the past decade – that the French police never supposed for a moment that what happened that night in Paris could be anything but an accident.
Dignity still matters a great deal in all our lives – and deaths. Dignity is what is being stripped away from Diana with every day of the inquest proceedings.
A cynic might say: “It was her own fault for choosing her company so badly.” She was public property while she was alive and every detail of her life has been picked apart in public since her death.
But there comes a time when she should be allowed to rest in peace.
Reprinted from The Daily Mail.