Cover-Up Fears Grow With Delays For Diana Inquest

Padraic Flanagan
Daily Express
Monday, April 30, 2007

The fight for the truth about the death of Princess Diana was hit yesterday by fears of a new Establishment plot to delay the inquests.

A highly-placed insider warned that the hearings will not go ahead until next year, 11 years after the death of Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed in a Paris car crash, causing Princes William and Harry further anguish.

Legal sources warned that last week’s decision by Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss to quit as coroner will almost certainly prevent the hearing taking place before a jury this year.

The delays and legal obstacles hampering the inquest process have prompted allegations of an Establishment cover-up. Those fears are echoed in recent polls, with the vast majority of the public believing the deaths were not the result of a simple accident.

Notes: I was no great fan of Princess Di when she was alive. But her death affected people in this nation like no other.

My reaction, when on waking up to hear the news that she had died was, as someone who lost his own mother in a car crash (I was 3 at the time and still remember it as I was in the car, or rather, found myself lying on the grass verge of the M1 next to my sister after it had happened in view of an upturned car), was, of course, to feel immensely sorry for her boys. I watched her funeral on TV and remember the moment when a TV camera caught a zoom-shot of the lonely funeral hearse with police outriders bringing her “home” to Althorp in Northamptonshire on the M1, the very road on which my mother died. I was overcome with this strange urge to drive to one of the bridges crossing the M1 to watch the hearse go by and to say goodbye. Why? I had never much cared for Diana when she was alive. I suppose it was the urge to say goodbye to the person I never had a chance to say goodbye to when I was a child.


During the funeral, thousands of people who had never known Diana grieved openly. Oliver James, a kind of celebrity psychologist, said that the extraordinary outpouring of grief was probably as a result of people’s private, personal tragedies. I think I know what he means. As I said, I didn’t have much time for Diana when she was alive, but grieved with the rest of my fellow countrymen on the day of her funeral. But I think there was a further reason for people’s sadness. Most fairy-tales end with the words, “And they lived happily ever after.” But this marriage, which had seemed to begin like a fairy tale, was to have no such ending.


When Al Fayed, owner of the world famous London store, Harrods, started mooting the idea that the accident in which his son, Dodi, was killed in the crash along with Diana and the driver, Henry Paul, was no “accident”, I dismissed it as a sad attempt by a father who’d lost his son to find someone to blame. Ten years later, as I’ve begun to look more deeply into events surrounding the “accident”, I’m not so sure.