IT'S YOUR MONEY | April 5th 2008

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As the Diana/Dodi peepshow dribbles on, Stephen Hugh-Jones implores all fuzzy-headed conspiracy theorists--including Mohammed al Fayed--to cease and desist ...

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He owns Harrods, London's grandest department store. He owns Fulham football club, one of its less distinguished teams. He also owns the largest stock of chutzpah on display west of Tel Aviv. Does any of this justify the British taxpayer being compelled to fork out millions to massage the troubled ego of Egyptian-born Mohammed al Fayed? I think not.

It's six months since the opening of the British inquest into the 1997 Paris car crash that killed Princess Diana, ex-wife of the heir to the throne, and her lover Dodi Fayed, the Harrods owner's son. Six months, one coroner, 11 jury members, 250-odd witnesses, thousands of pages of testimony and some £7m ($14m) of public money later, the show this week dribbled to its end. And what more do we know that we didn't know before? Precious little.

And how much did that little matter? Even less. You could well wonder why the British should hold an inquest at all into a ten-year-old accident, in a foreign capital, that had already twice been exhaustively investigated. But let that pass: when Britons are involved, a peculiarity of British law allows it (though it does not require it--it was gutless officialdom that did that). Indeed, these days the same peculiarity is being cheerfully misused to hold random inquests into the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't recollect such courtesies in 1939-45, but the British then had trivia on their minds like fighting a world war, and maybe by now we've learned a proper sense of values.

Or maybe not. When this absurd, almost obscene, Diana/Dodi peepshow of an inquest started, I wrote in this column that one day of formalities should have been the end of it, and that almost the only reason for it was to put to rest the potty conspiracy theories dreamed up by al Fayed senior and his hangers-on. I don't think that will happen.

True, among them the 250 witnesses did not offer a jot of evidence to support al Fayed's oft-repeated claim that the crash was no accident at all but the result of a murderous plot masterminded by the British royal family. That was hardly surprising: the conspiracy theory demanded wild improbabilities, not least the readiness of a French hotel's French security man to get himself killed because Britain's secret services paid him to do so. Still, al Fayed and his legal team had had ample opportunity, and resources, to find and bring forward some evidence of a royal conspiracy, if any existed. The inquest heard none.

But that will not deter cries of "establishment whitewash" from the sort of airheads ready to believe that the moon is made of green cheese. One can think of plausible arguments, be they true or mistaken, for seeing a conspiracy in the murder of Jack Kennedy. I can think of none for seeing murder in the death of Diana and Dodi, and plenty against. But I'd be astonished to be told that al Fayed does not agree that "whitewash" is the word, and not much astonished if he were soon to start publicly saying so.

If he does, it will be time to say that enough is more than enough. The man may be grief-stricken at the death of his son. But ten years have passed. Millions of parents have lost their sons, some in far more atrocious circumstances over which the victim, unlike Dodi, had no control whatever. They mostly manage to live with it without accusing guiltless people of murder.

My father used to have dealings with a man whom he privately called an "impudent mountebank". I suspect he'd have applied the phrase to al Fayed, but let's not: no doubt al-Fayed's grief is genuine, and even if it weren't he still has ample resources to mount libel actions too. But what a pity it is that convention prevents members of Britain's royal family from seeking the same remedy. Little as I esteem British libel law, for once it would be justified. And for the sort of public calumny that the Duke of Edinburgh has had to endure, a £7m award of damages would be little enough from the wallet of a multimillionaire.

And if the Duke isn't short of the odd fiver, he could always pass it on to the taxpayers.

(Stephen Hugh-Jones is a former writer and editor for The Economist, where he wrote the Johnson column from 1992-99. He lives now in West Sussex.)