The private investigation conducted by Fayed also zeroed in on other unexplained occurrences: the fact that surveillance cameras in the tunnel were switched off; that the Mercedes may have been deliberately forced into the tunnel; the roadworthiness of the car, which had been stolen and tampered with three months before; and that just before the accident a blinding flash was seen by certain witnesses aimed at the driver. Much conjecture surrounded the driver, Henri Paul, who was fingered as a possible secret-service informer based on his freelance work as a tipster and the large and unexplained amount of cash in his many bank accounts. There was speculation too that his blood sample, which showed his high level of alcohol and drugs, had been, accidentally or deliberately, switched. Evidence for his apparent sobriety was the fact that CCTV footage showed him tying his shoelaces in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel without any evident problem. After carefully reviewing all the available evidence, Mohamed Fayed’s firmly held view that it was Prince Philip – rather than Prince Charles – who had ordered the British secret service to murder Diana and Dodi.
While the supposed mastermind behind her ‘murder’ was a matter of debate, certainly the most popular conspiracy theory concerned the involvement of Britain’s secret services in Diana’s death. This was given extra weight by maverick former British intelligence agents, Richard Tomlinson and David Shayler, who cited a plan to kill the former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in a fake car crash in Geneva. Even the KGB, the Russian secret service, found this hard to swallow. The espionage writer Philip Knightley quoted a KGB agent as saying, ‘It takes a genius to make murder by car look like an accident.’
Yet the car crash theory seemed utterly plausible when ranged against the 36,000 conspiracy theory websites devoted to Diana’s death. Hypotheses ranged from claims that she was killed by international arms dealers because of her support for a ban on landmines, to those that say Osama bin Laden had her murdered as she was a bad role model for Muslim women, to some that insist that she was murdered by the royal family. On the wilder shores of credibility is a theory that she was killed by the shadowy Babylonian Brotherhood as she was named after the moon goddess and Pont de l’Alma, the underpass where the crash occurred, means passage of the moon goddess.
The truth is that, at heart, people find it difficult to believe that a modern-day goddess could meet her maker in the banality of a car accident where a drunk driver simply drove too fast. It seems that psychologically, individuals need conspiracy theories to make the chaotic, inexplicable universe more ordered and bearable. As Dr Patrick Leman of Royal Holloway College, University of London, who has conducted research into mental attitudes, observed: ‘When a big event happens we prefer to have a big cause. It upsets our view of the world if there isn’t a significant powerful explanation.’ So the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the death of Elvis and even the attack on the World Trade Center are surrounded by a multitude of competing and ever more elaborate hypotheses. In times gone by, the Jews and Freemasons were at the centre of every conspiracy. These days, given the increasing disrespect for and disbelief in authority, it is the secret service, the hidden agents of a malign Establishment, who are held responsible. ‘The new irrationalism,’ remarked the writer Francis Wheen, ‘is an expression of despair by people who feel impotent to improve their lives and suspect that they are at the mercy of secretive, impersonal forces, whether these be the Pentagon or invaders from Mars.’ We may be less deferential but we seem to be more gullible.
The plain fact of the matter, as a correspondent to the Daily Telegraph pointed out, was that if Diana truly believed that she might die in a pre-arranged car accident then why did she not wear a seat belt? The world-weary comment of former royal coroner Dr John Burton captured the official exasperation with the continued focus on secret plots. ‘When it’s all over,’ he commented, ‘ninety-five per cent of the people will still disregard the facts and want to go back to their conspiracies.’
While the maelstrom of scandal swirling around the Prince of Wales has diminished his standing, it has done little to enhance the reputation of Diana, Princess of Wales either. Her letter of foreboding, which was both pathetic and comic, served to seal the growing perception that she was, as The Times noted, either a ‘drama queen or a tragic princess’. The witty, self-deprecating, courageous, caring and humane woman who her friends knew, and to whom the world responded when she died, was becoming lost in the riot of lurid allegations and theories. In life she had always feared that she would be dismissed as mentally unstable. Now, in death, she was described at best as flawed, by many as mad, a woman who had preserved her reputation by dying young. The commentator David Aaronovitch figuratively shook his head in despair at the confluence of conspiracy theories and Diana’s volatile personality. Writing in the Guardian he commented: ‘The polls show me to be in a minority. They suggest that Diana was indeed the people’s princess. She, it turns out, was barking – and so are we.’
With the passing of the years her critics felt more able to speak out. Her behaviour, particularly her seemingly ill-judged relationship with Dodi Fayed, concerned many commentators. The Queen’s biographer Robert Lacey told talk-show host Larry King in March 2004: ‘I think she was out of control and that it would have got worse. And I think – this is a tragic and maybe cynical thing to say – her death was the best possible thing that could have happened to her reputation.’ Others, like royal writer Hugo Vickers, joined the growing chorus of condemnation: ‘I still think she was spiralling into chaos. I don’t think it was going to get any better. It might have been a very sad middle age for her.’
Even before the release of Diana’s damning letter, supporters of the royal family had given occasional glimpses of how Britain’s First Family felt about the lost princess. A television documentary by William Shawcross, now the Queen Mother’s official biographer, which was broadcast during the Golden Jubilee weekend, featured two of the Queen’s close friends, Countess Mountbatten and Lady Penn, a lady-in-waiting, casting doubt on Diana’s character. ‘The Queen found Diana’s ill health or mental instability very hard to understand because she’s a very matter-of-fact person,’ was the damning verdict of Lady Penn.
Charles’s biographer Penny Junor twisted the knife further when she wrote a laudatory book about the Prince of Wales, arguing that the late Princess suffered from Borderline Personality Syndrome, a recognized medical condition. She had been briefed by St James’s Palace which had read the final manuscript. The profile of Diana by American writer Sally Bedell Smith reached a similar conclusion, presumably influenced by off-the-record sources. As Diana’s former private secretary, Patrick Jephson, noted, ‘It passed into the public consciousness that the Princess of Wales was mentally ill in some way.’
Mad and, like Princess Caroline before her, seemingly soon forgotten. The fact that there were only a handful of bouquets outside Kensington Palace on the sixth anniversary of her death was seized upon as a sign of her wilting legacy and fading memory. It gave ammunition to those eager to dismiss the cult of Diana, the primacy of feeling over reason, of the personal over the political, as nothing more than a disguised version of self-love, a fad as ephemeral as the Carolinian movement. Intellectuals who had viewed with alarm the outpouring of public grief at her death now regarded this phenomenon as a symbol of society’s general retreat from reason and rationality, the death knell of the Age of Enlightenment.
At the same time, many of the grandiose plans to honour Diana’s memory had petered out. Senior politicians, who in the immediate aftermath of her death had suggested renaming Heathrow airport and the August Bank Holiday in her name, fell silent. Even those schemes that were launched were mired in endless controversy and acrimony. For a woman who considered herself a healer, her legacy was smothered in rancour and bitterness. A £3 million water feature in Kensington Gardens to commemorate her life symbolized the difficulties. During her life she had always sought out water, either by the riverbank or sea shore, as a soothing source of solace
and reflection. Yet when the Memorial Committee, chaired by the strong-minded Rosa Monckton, came to select the final design, they were so divided that the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell was called in to make the final decision. She chose the design by American landscape artist Kathryn Gustafson in preference to one submitted by the Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor. No sooner had she made her choice, than the critics piped up, Diana’s mother saying that the fountain ‘lacked grandeur’. A place of contemplation and deliberation was turned into an unseemly but all too predictable wrestling match about what she would have wanted. In the face of sustained criticism of the royal family and of their treatment of the late Princess, the Queen agreed to unveil the principal memorial to her at a ceremony in the summer of 2004, attended by Spencers and Windsors. The move was seen as a long-overdue attempt at reconciliation between the two families.
A children’s playground and a memorial walkway in Kensington Gardens fared better and are both now enjoyed by the public. Noticeably no member of the royal family attended the opening of these projects, much to the ‘sadness’ of Rosa Monckton, who, accompanied by Earl Spencer, opened the playground, and the ‘irritation’ of Chancellor Gordon Brown who inaugurated the walk. For the royal family seem all too happy to let Diana rest in peace, her memory unobserved and all but forgotten. They are conspicuous by their absence at any event relating to the late Princess. So a hospice outside Cardiff, a hospital in Grimsby, a community-nursing scheme for sick children and other projects, all named after the late Princess, have been dedicated without remark or support from the royal family.
They took no part in discussions about a memorial and left the Memorial Fund charity to fend for itself (although unnamed courtiers were always quick to express ‘dismay’ at its many and varied difficulties). Even Prince Charles’s former spin doctor Mark Bolland was moved to suggest, ‘If the royal family want to learn lessons from Diana it is still not too late. Why don’t they build their own memorial to her? Encourage William in some way to honour his mother’s memory in a public way?’
The response was a collective shrug of the shoulders. After all, the huge turnout for the Queen Mother’s funeral – the controversy over the fact that BBC newsreader Peter Sissons wore a lilac, rather than black, tie showed that knee-jerk deference was not dead – and the affectionate popular response to the Queen’s Golden Jubilee confirmed the monarchy sans Diana in people’s hearts. At a parade which formed the centrepiece of the Jubilee celebrations, the late Princess was relegated to a drive-on part, appearing as a cut-out figure on one of a convoy of floats that paraded down the Mall past the royal party, which included Mrs Parker Bowles. The irony would not have been lost on the late Princess. As the writer Robert Harris was moved to point out, ‘Not since Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 has a prominent public figure been so comprehensively airbrushed out of a nation’s public life.’ When the royal yacht Britannia was decommissioned in December 1997, it was noticeable the Queen and the rest of her family shed more tears for their floating palace than they had for the late Princess. ‘Diana is never mentioned, it was as though she never existed,’ commented a friend of the royal family.
Forlorn, foolish and forgotten, seven years after her death the impression is now given that the Princess inhabits a nether world where the flames of her memory are stoked only by scandal, her celebrity enduring by virtue of the latest sensation, be it voyeuristic TV shows revealing tantalizing glimpses of her dying in the underpass in Paris or titbits of gossip from former servants. It seems that the woman known to those in her circle, the irrepressible, kind, emotional, vulnerable yet sophisticated individual, never really walked on this earth and that her legacy is a chimera, a splendid firework that exploded dramatically and faded as rapidly. This one-dimensional portrait is now equally as misleading as the saccharine caricature that she was a saint in designer clothes. Her life, like her legacy, is much more complex and elusive, a journey of endless twists and turns. Ironically it is a journey to one of the world’s most remote and unknown regions which yields important clues to one of the century’s most famous women.
EPILOGUE
Passport to Parachinar
PARACHINAR IS NOT A PLACE for the unwary. This remote town lies in the notorious mountains of the North-West Frontier, the crossroads between Afghanistan and Pakistan. For centuries it has been an anarchic haven for drug smugglers, gun runners and refugees. In the local bazaar, hashish, opium, and Russian and homemade rifles are sold alongside mixed fruit and cattle. There is no civil law, only Pashtunwali, a tribal code of honour and conduct. Levels of literacy are among the lowest and those of child mortality among the highest in the world. Curfews are a regular feature of life, gun battles between feuding tribes not uncommon. One vicious firefight in September 1996 left 200 dead and scores of women and children raped and kidnapped. Bullet holes still scar the minarets of the local mosques. ‘The atrocities were out of the Stone Age,’ according to a paramilitary official.
Over the years these fierce mountain warriors, the Pashtuns, or Pathans, have fiercely defied attempts by the Moguls, the Sikhs, the British, the Soviets and the Pakistanis to control them. They have paid a high price; during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, helicopters and planes indiscriminately dropped thousands of landmines and booby traps that have killed untold thousands and left many, mainly women and children, brutally scarred and maimed. The impoverished North-West Frontier adds significantly to the annual tally of 26,000 victims of landmines around the world.
In this backward country it is now the turn of the United States to attempt control. Just a few miles north, the Americans and their allies unleashed their full military fury at the Tora Bora caves, the hideout for Osama bin Laden and his Taliban and al-Qaeda followers. Today American intelligence reckons that bin Laden, who escaped the pummelling, is hiding within a ten-square-mile radius of the town of Parachinar which is the capital of the Kurram tribal agency. Slogans on the walls proclaiming LONG LIVE OSAMA BIN LADEN reveal where local sympathies lie. These days it is a not a place where Westerners are welcome.
Yet, in the local general hospital, an enlarged photograph of Diana, Princess of Wales dominates the entrance to one ward, where men and women wait for artificial limbs to be fitted. In this region where suspicion and defensiveness are ingrained, her image is a passport, a guarantee of safe passage for the handful of Western aid workers. For the last year, a British charity, Response International, has been one of the few outside aid organizations allowed to work in this lawless land. Not only are its workers organizing the fitting of artificial limbs for landmine victims in the hospital, they are travelling around forts and villages teaching landmine awareness, first aid and trauma care. Everywhere they go musicians, children dancing and armfuls of flowers greet them. The reception is all the more extraordinary as the very idea of charitable organizations is alien to this proud, self-reliant people. Just one word guarantees a warm welcome and an assurance of security: ‘Diana’. The charity, which focuses on the forgotten victims of conflict in remote parts of the globe, has been financed in its work by the Memorial Fund set up in the Princess’s name, a tangible and practical legacy of her humanitarian work. The charity’s chief executive, Philip Garvin, was genuinely astonished by the impact Diana has had on the people in this remote region: ‘I was treated like a king because I had the image of Diana hanging over my head. We used her name ruthlessly to get things organized and make contact with local people.’ Her appeal lies in the fact that she is not seen as English or a typical Westerner, but as an apolitical humanitarian who worked for the removal of the landmines that were killing or maiming so many of their people. In a world where assassination is a way of life, the widespread belief that she was murdered by the royal family merely adds to her kudos. There is too a curious cultural symmetry about her appeal in this forbidding land; she is a heroine in a world where Osama bin Laden is a hero. At the beginning of the new millennium they are iconic bookends, one strove to br
ing East and West together, both in her relationships and her humanitarian mission and vision; the other is now violently and fanatically attempting to divide the world on religious lines.
So, much as the royal family and her critics would like not to imagine otherwise, Diana’s work does continue, unacknowledged and unremarked, helping the dispossessed, the unpopular and the forgotten, the very people that in her life she so fulsomely embraced. Since its rocky inception the Memorial Fund in her name has handed out more than £50 million in grants for 300 or so projects, ranging from assisting refugees to helping youngsters with learning difficulties in Britain and abroad. While it can never take the place of the Princess – ‘No one has come close to her since she died,’ in the words of David Puttnam – it has the money to make a genuine and continuing difference to people’s lives.
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