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The Spectator
8 January 2000
HOW FAYED IS PAYING FOR HIS DIANA LIES
Martyn Gregory says a court case in Paris this month could end in Mohamed Fayed being prosecuted by the French authorities
THE WORLD has probably forgotten, in the frenzy surrounding the Hamilton case, that Mohamed Fayed is involved in another legal action: a sadder, stranger case, and potentially more damaging for the owner of Harrods. Sometime this month the French Court of Appeal will decide whether to agree with Fayed, and overturn Judge Stephan's report into the crash that claimed the lives of his son Dodi, Diana, Princess of Wales and their driver, Henri Paul.
Fayed is challenging Judge Stephan's conclusion that the principal causes of the fatal crash were Henri Paul's drunkenness and his excessive speed, as well as the judge's decision not to prosecute any of the photographers who were chasing the Mercedes. Most legal opinion in France holds that Fayed's appeal will fail. If it does, a further appeal to the Supreme Court would represent Fayed's final chance of changing the verdict of history: that his Ritz hotel's head of security killed his son and Diana, Princess of Wales by colliding at between 80 and 115 mph with a concrete pillar while at the wheel of a car he did not possess a licence to drive, and when he was drunk. And if he fails then Fayed, for the first time, could face prosecution, either by the French authorities or by the man whose life he put at risk, the surviving bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones.
Neil Hamilton's libel action provided the first opportunity since the Princess's death for Fayed to be publicly questioned about his attempts to deflect responsibility for the tragedy. Time and time again we have been told by Fayed and his PR team that there are 'unanswered questions' about the crash; though in the court, unsurprisingly, it was Fayed who chose to leave the questions unanswered. I sat with an ITN reporter, watching Fayed's cross-examination by Desmond Browne, Neil Hamilton's QC. We counted him replying 'I don't know' or 'I can't remember' 70 times by the mid-after-noon break in a single day's proceedings.
As a tactic in the libel trial it served Fayed well, denying Browne the opportunity to probe him over his organisation's responsibility for the crash, or the lies he has since told about it. But the Hamilton trial provided a very brief glimpse into the parallel universe that Fayed has chosen to inhabit since the crash, in which life is made possible only by the micro-climate of confusion which Fayed himself has created.
There will be those who are sympathetic to his claims over cash for questions; but his evidence-free claims that the Duke of Edinburgh was responsible for the assassination of his son and the Princess have -- or so we must hope -- irretrievably shattered his credibility on matters relating to the Paris crash. The idea that the royal family could have been involved in Diana's death was first expressed by Executive Intelligence Review, which is run by the USA billionaire and convicted felon, Lyndon LaRouche. It was ignored by the royal household. That Fayed should attempt to provoke the Queen's husband from the witness box during a trial brought about by his claims to have corrupted a former Member of Parliament showed how desperate he had become in his attempts to deflect blame. The removal of the royal warrants from Harrods, if not a libel action, would appear now to be inevitable.
Among the details that slipped Fayed's mind during the Hamilton trial was whether he had authorised Michael Cole's statement to the infamous Harrods press conference on the eve of Diana's funeral. Cole claimed Fayed was in receipt of Diana's last words, and Fayed later claimed to have seen her 'beautiful and serene' corpse in the hospital where she died. The Harrods press conference became the template for many of the distortions which Fayed generated about Diana's death, and her relationship with his late son. Cole told me that he believed everything he told the world's press at that time was true; Fayed told the High Court he couldn't remember authorising Cole to say anything. Thus both men, who were in Britain when the crash occurred, consider that they can evade moral responsibility for misrepresenting events in Paris in the most convenient way imaginable.
While Diana and Dodi were courting in August 1997, Fayed revelled in the publicity, though it ensured that the couple would be pursued when they went to Paris. Max Clifford [Fayed's notorious publicist], for example, later acknowledged to me that he had been in contact with Mohamed and Dodi Fayed, as well as with their spokesman Michael Cole, in the summer of 1997 -- about a month before her death on 31 August. By his own account, Clifford had even been briefed, in advance, about Dodi's last-minute decision to take Diana to Paris to buy her a ring. Briefing Max Clifford has not hitherto been a recognised way of ensuring that a private visit remains secret.
After the crash Fayed's PR machine went into reverse thrust. It sought to place as much distance as it could between its pre-crash activities and the crash in an attempt to obscure the possibility that it might have played a role in encouraging the paparazzi's pursuit of Diana and Dodi. Fayed attempted to do this by creating a climate of confusion in which his fantasies could prosper, and the essential truths of the tragedy -- Henri Paul's drunkenness and the failure of the Fayed organisation to provide more than a fraction of the security for Diana that Fayed routinely insists upon for himself become obscured.
Judge Stephan ignored the shoal of red herrings, as he oversaw the most intensively scrutinised investigation into a single car crash in French history.
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