Stranded on Planet Fayed

‘Bastard’! hissed Mohamed Fayed when he saw me in the Royal Courts of Justice during the pre-hearings for the inquests into Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s deaths. This was my welcome to Planet Fayed — the parallel universe currently dominating the inquest pre-hearings. I had never seen my quest for evidence into how Diana died in personal terms, but Mohamed clearly begs to differ. I have often asked Fayed for an interview in the past ten years to quiz him about the Paris crash, but I have only heard two words in response; his salutation when he saw me in court the following week was identical. After his second greeting he flicked me a V sign before being ushered away by his hired muscle and Michael Cole, the Egyptian’s freshly ‘unretired’ spokesman.

Cole tells anyone who will listen that ‘the truth has nothing to fear from the clear light of day’. The evidence I found while writing my book Diana: The Last Days and directing two Channel 4 Dispatches documentaries indicates that the reverse is the case. Fayed and his organisation have much to fear from the coroner’s probe into ‘how’ Diana and Dodi died — the only contentious element to be decided by the jury of Justice Scott Baker’s October inquests. The other inquest staples of ‘who’, ‘where’, and ‘when’ are straightforward.

Fayed appears to believe that lawyers will be capable of saving his family from history’s verdict that it was responsible for Princess Diana’s death.

On any given day, up to half of those in court are paid for by Fayed — three teams of QCs, barristers, solicitors and clerks representing Fayed himself, his Ritz hotel and the parents of Henri Paul — as well as his bloated PR and personal protection. Diana’s sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, watches silently on behalf of the Spencer family as Fayed’s gilded legal troupe gorges itself in a trough of Fayed’s munificence.