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(Continued from overleaf)
Stephan shrewdly anticipated Fayed's attempts to rubbish the incontrovertible autopsy evidence that his employee was drunk by insisting that a second set of tests was conducted on Paul's corpse, in his presence, four days after the crash. These tests were recorded and photographed from sample extraction to analysis. The results were identical to the first set, which were released to the world the day after the crash: Henri Paul was between three and four times over France's drink/drive limit. Stephan also established that some of Fayed's hotel staff knew that Henri Paul had been drinking before he drove the Mercedes from the Ritz. The night manager, Thierry Rocher, told Stephan that he had been responsible for relaying to Paul the instruction from Dodi that he, Paul, was to drive the Mercedes. Rocher told Stephan that Paul replied that 'he was just going to finish his Ricard with the English bodyguards'.
Rocher's superiors at the Ritz had attempted to mislead the French investigation even before Diana's body had been returned to Britain. Fayed's hotel officials informed the French police that there had been something suspicious about the crash as the Princess's body was being flown back to the UK. Precisely what justified this information has never been revealed, but Fayed's PR machine still continues to invent unanswered questions about what happened that it insists the French must answer. Those, such as the author Tom Bower, who sought to pose questions from a different perspective as to how Diana really came to die, were condemned in the High Court as 'garbage' by Fayed. For my own efforts I was branded a 'parasite'.
Fayed's initial target was the photographers ('vultures' and 'bastards') who pursued the Mercedes. Stephan, however, found that half of those placed under investigation did not arrive at the scene of the crash in the Alma tunnel until after the emergency services; one of them was captured on Ritz security cameras at 00 26 49. The crash had occurred at 00 26 00. He found no evidence that any photographer had been there at the time. As for the white Fiat Uno, which Paul had apparently brushed before crashing, it was of no relevance whatsoever.
Other Fayed targets have been the bodyguards he charged with ensuring Diana's safety, Kez Wingfield and Trevor Rees-Jones. On the first anniversary of the crash, Fayed's spokesman told the USA media: 'These guys fell down on the job. Part of the responsibility must lie with those two bodyguards who didn't do what they were supposed to do, and didn't stick by the rules.' The bodyguards, who had both quit Fayed's employ shortly before this attack, tell a different story. They have always maintained that the only reason the rules were abandoned on 31 August 1997 was because Fayed personally authorised, by phone from Britain, Dodi's unorthodox plan to leave the Ritz with Henri Paul at the wheel and minimum security. Stephan rejected Fayed's attempts to blame the bodyguards and, at the same time as his report was published in August 1999, Rees-Jones's French lawyer, Christian Curtil revealed: 'Trevor did warn the passengers as well as Dodi Fayed and Mohamed as to the plan. It did not reflect normal security,
the security plan was not sufficient.'
An unintended consequence of Fayed's appeal is that the court is obliged to review the entirety of Stephan's two-year investigation. The Court of Appeal will thus consider Rees-Jones's argument that the Ritz and Etoile Limousines should bear responsibility for the crash that came so close to ending his life. If the court should so find, the French public prosecutor would take up the case; and the former bodyguard, who is now recovered and works part-time at a sports shop in Oswestry, will not have to fund a private action against the Egyptian billionaire.
During the Hamilton libel trial Desmond Browne tried to demonstrate to the jury the manipulation that Fayed employs to force his staff to comply with the fantasies he has created about Diana, Princess of Wales and his son, their relationship, their aborted plans for the future and their deaths. Diana's bodyguards, Rees-Jones and Wingfield, had quit Fayed's employ rather than become part of such a process. After his departure Wingfield told me tersely that there was 'not a conspiracy to kill Diana but there had most certainly been a conspiracy to cover up why she died'. Browne's aim was to show how Fayed was capable of exerting similar influence over those of his employees who claimed to have been witness to Fayed's cash being passed to Neil Hamilton. However, Browne was unsuccessful in gaining the court's permission to show extracts from ITV's notorious June 1998 film, Diana: Secrets Behind the Crash, over which Fayed exerted an extraordinary and malign influence. It could have been a most significant contribution to Hamilton's cause.
The film represented the zenith of Fayed's efforts to persuade the court of public opinion that there was a conspiracy to murder Diana and Dodi. It was also a milestone in ITV's route-march away from current-affairs journalism. It featured liars, incomplete evidence and partial truths loosely strung together by shoddy journalism. Cobbled together, these elements apparently convinced 95 per cent of those polled the next day by the Mirror that the crash was no accident. For Fayed the Diana film was a triumph.
The central purpose of the film was straight from Fayed's agenda: to challenge the blood tests on Henri Paul which showed he was drunk. The film's presenter, ITN's royal correspondent Nicholas Owen, described the tests as 'suspect' without any evidence that they were, apart from ITV's failure to obtain the full test-results. A strange character, who chose to describe himself for ITV as François Levistre, convinced millions of British viewers that he had seen a flash before the crash. Judge Stephan knew that Levistre (aka Levi) was a former convict who, during a spell in jail, was described by his prison visitor as a "mythomane" (which means a pathological liar or fantasist). Stephan discounted his evidence, finding no proof that he was in Paris, let alone in the Alma tunnel on 31 August 1997. ITV gave it enormous weight and suggested that the flash could have been made by a gun used by 'special forces including the British'. Levistre/Levi's claims were reconstructed so effectively that an astonishing 9 per cent of viewers told the Mirror poll the next day that they believed his 'flash before the crash' tale.
A less controversial sequence, which owed its existence entirely to Fayed, best demonstrated the Egyptian's success in fooling ITV. It featured an elderly Spaniard, Gregorio Martin, the caretaker at the Villa Windsor, which Fayed has rented from the French government since the Duchess of Windsor's death. Martin, who had served the Duke and Duchess of Windsor before being retained by Fayed, guided Nicholas Owen around the lavishly appointed villa. He described how Diana and Dodi spent their last afternoon at the villa with a designer planning a future they would never live to see. He was a poignant and apparently plausible witness to Diana's last day for the 12.5 million ITV viewers who saw what the channel's executives took to describing as the most watched 'investigative documentary in a generation'. In his broken English, the Spanish caretaker described the visit to Owen: 'Everything is ready for [them] to come here… If somebody comes with a designer… it's clear. They came to visit everything They go all round the house… I think they were a very beautiful couple.'
Mohamed Fayed himself appeared next to cement the fiction that Diana, Princess of Wales was planning to make the Villa Windsor her base. 'She decided that this is the place she loved, she find that this is the place for her, and a very secure place and it's just near London, she will be at home… and was just the right nest for them to continue their happiness…
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