Of course there was no ‘flash before the crash’

The heavyweight legal collision between the coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker’s evidence-driven inquests into Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s deaths, and Planet Fayed’s evidence-free legal and media circus, had always threatened to be messy. Last week was the first full week of witness evidence from Paris and London, and it produced ominous signs. Planet Fayed’s three QCs are his performing elephants — already dubbed ‘Hugefee QCs’ by Private Eye. Three heavyweight legal teams support the Hugefees — representing Fayed, his hotel and his dead driver’s parents. Planet Fayed’s objective is to secure an ‘open’ verdict from the inquest jury; any other outcome would see the eclipse of Mohamed’s fantasies.

Planet Fayed exists to exculpate the Fayed family from its responsibility for Diana’s death. The Hugefee QCs argue that Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed were murdered on the orders of the royal family. They spent the first half of the year at the inquest pre-hearings resisting the coroner’s entreaties to ‘tether allegations to evidence’. Last week the Hugefees discovered just how insubstantial Planet Fayed’s troupe of travelling charlatans really is.

Heralded by the Times as the ‘father of a thousand conspiracy theories’, the first Planet Fayed witness to appear was a petty criminal — the shaven-headed, bug-eyed François Levistre (né Levi). Levistre appeared by video link from Paris to augment his crowd-pleasing ‘flash before the crash’ performance. He starred in ITV’s never-repeated 1998 classic Diana: The Secrets Behind the Crash. Over 12 million British viewers watched the film, and it was responsible for sowing conspiracy seeds in the public imagination. The Hugefees have been hired to harvest the fruits at the inquests.

The coroner’s sceptical QC, Ian Burnett, threatened to blight the crop before it had a chance to flower. The inquest learnt that well before Diana died, Levistre had become particularly experienced with hostile police audiences when he first trod the boards.