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The Daily Telegraph
5 June 1998
She wasn't murdered
The documentary was made all the more nauseating by Nicholas Owen's protestations of his own sensitivity about the Princess's death
Tom Utley
For sheer, preposterous, humbug, it would be very hard to beat the attempts by the programme makers to justify Wednesday night's ITV documentary Diana: The Secrets Behind the Crash. Richard Belfield, the film's producer, came out with this extraordinary statement: "The irresponsible thing is just to say it's easy to explain. He [Henri Paul, the chauffeur] was fantastically drunk, he crashed the car and that's it."
Apart from fantasists and madmen, everybody who has given the matter any thought can see perfectly well that this is exactly what happened in Paris on August 31 last year. No other explanation stands up to a moment's serious scrutiny. The facts are certainly banal -- and since everybody has known them for months, they would have made a very dull film. But by what perversion of the English language can it be said to be "irresponsible" to accept the truth?
Nicholas Owen, ITN's royal correspondent and the documentary's presenter, made an even more remarkable claim. Winding up the programme, he looked gravely into the camera and said: "If the talk of conspiracy to kill the Princess of Wales is ever to be silenced, it must be right to tie up the loose ends, to make sense of the senseless..."
Here was a man solemnly trying to convince his viewers that his purpose in airing lunatic conspiracy theories about the Princess's death was to stop people from airing lunatic conspiracy theories about the Princess's death. Mr Owen is no fool. He is a knave.
Many years ago, the tabloid newspapers decided that they had a special dispensation, when writing about the Royal Family, to ignore all distinctions between fact and fantasy, all the rules of fair reporting and every consideration of ordinary human decency. By making their film, Mr Belfield and Mr Owen seem to be saying: "If it's all right for the tabloids, it's all right for us, too."
Well, it is not all right for the tabloids. But it is even worse for Mr Belfield and Mr Owen, with all the subtle and seductive techniques of television at their command. Those techniques were used to the full on Wednesday night: the moody, suspenseful piano music; the computer graphics; the soundbites from "experts"; the elegant locations. All were carefully chosen to lend gravitas to theories so fantastic as to insult the meanest intelligence.
Three moments from this indecent film will give a flavour of it to those who missed it. One was an interview with François Levistre, a shaven-headed motorist who claims that he was in the tunnel at the time of the crash. It was not revealed that many reports have dismissed the evidence of M Levistre, who, it is claimed, may not have been anywhere near the tunnel at the time he said. A caption described him simply, as: "François Levistre, eyewitness".
Sitting by an imposing baroque fireplace, M Levistre told Mr Owen that moments before the crash he had seen in his rear-view mirror a great flash of light in the tunnel, much brighter than any camera's.
Cut to voice-over from Mr Owen: "So we set up an experiment for François Levistre…"
This "experiment" was to sit M Levistre in a car and to set off two flashes of light behind him, the second much brighter than the first. Which was more like the flash he had seen on the night of the crash?
M Levistre chose the second. After a dramatic pause, as if this "witness" had said something of dreadful significance, Mr Owen said: "Are you sure? Are you quite sure it was the second?"
Cut to Mr Owen standing in the road. He said that the first flash in the "experiment" had come from a paparazzo's camera. "But M Levistre identified the much bigger second flash and that came from this piece of kit." At that, with a magician's flourish, he produced a large object looking like a telephoto lens. "This," he intoned, "is an anti-personnel device. Shine this in somebody's eyes and they will be stunned, disabled, blinded for a couple of minutes. We bought our anti-personnel flashlight in the West End of London for about £260. But there is another version of this kit. It is not available to the public but it is used by armed Special Forces around the world, including the British."
And there you have the standard of logic that Mr Owen applied in his film. In one bound, he jumped from a dodgy witness's assertion that a flash of light which he claimed to have seen many months earlier was brighter than a camera's to a suggestion that the Princess may have been murdered by British special forces.
Another example of Mr Owen's technique came when he interviewed James Hewitt, the carefully groomed former Army
officer who has made a profession of boasting about having slept with the Princess. Mr Hewitt claimed that during his affair he had received anonymous, threatening telephone calls saying that it would "not be conducive to my health" (as he archly put it) "to continue the relationship".
What was more, claimed Mr Hewitt, he had received a similarly threatening call from "a member of the Royal Family" -- not an "immediate member" but a member all the same. Asked who this was, Mr Hewitt said coyly in his prissy voice, as if he was a man of honour: "I am not prepared to say." Mr Owen let him get away with that extraordinary slur and then asked this disgraceful question: "The threats that you had received some years before -- did they come back into your mind when you heard about the crash in Paris?"
"Yes," said Mr Hewitt.
Mr Owen did not explain why the thoughts that went through this repellent nincompoop's head had the slightest relevance to the circumstances of the crash. But you could see what he was getting at.
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