THIS is supposed to be the time of year for glad tidings, but it's difficult to imagine that there has been much comfort and joy this week for the still-grieving sons of the late Princess Diana, or for the rest of her family.
The inquest into Diana's death, and that of her companion Dodi Fayed, has now been running for almost 12 weeks, and it is becoming increasingly clear that there is no intimate area of the Princess's life into which the inquiry will not publicly probe
, in an effort to confirm or lay to rest the allegation – largely sponsored by just one man, Dodi's father Mohammed Al Fayed – that the two were murdered by British agents, with the connivance of senior members of the Royal Family, in order to prevent a marriage which the British establishment could not countenance.
In previous weeks, we have already heard much intrusive detail – the stuff of dreams-come-true for assorted voyeurs and fantasists – about the Princess's precise physical state at the time of her death, about her contraceptive arrangements, and about private details of her relationship with Dodi Fayed. This week, the inquest mounted further breathtaking invasions of privacy, publishing selections from the Princess's private correspondence with her father-in-law, and asking her friend Rosa Monckton to testify not only to the Princess's private feelings about her relationship with Dodi, but – incredibly – on the state of her menstrual cycle at the time of her death.
Now I don't know whether you wish to hear this stuff being read out by BBC newsreaders over your breakfast toast, but I certainly don't. It seems to me like some kind of legitimised rape of the privacy of a woman who has been dead for more than ten years, and if a stranger who holds no particular brief for the Royal Family can feel this sense of revulsion, it is difficult to imagine how distressing the process must be for her family and friends.
This is not, of course, necessarily to question the conduct of the inquest itself. Once the decision to hold the inquest had been taken, it was perhaps inevitable that every detail of the Princess's life at the time of her death would have to be exposed in order to settle the case, and, under the circumstances, Lord Justice Scott Baker seems to be doing his best to conduct the case with as much decency and sobriety as can be mustered.
The truth is, though, that by conceding an inquest under pressure from a grief-stricken father who has the money and influence to command endless publicity for his conspiracy theories, the British judicial system has committed itself to a distorted process whose agenda is almost entirely dictated by Al Fayed's allegations, and has therefore raised profound and disturbing questions about the real equality, before the law, of those who may have lost loved ones in far more suspicious circumstances, but who lack the cash to make the judicial system bend to their will.
Yet what's even more disturbing, in the end, is the extent to which even those who have entered the process with the best of intentions – hoping finally to lay all suspicions about the Princess's death to rest – seem to have reckoned without the toxic relationship between the judicial process surrounding the Princess's death, and the raging celebrity culture which made Diana such a dazzling global star, and played such a tragic role in her death.
This week, I went to the Playhouse in Edinburgh, to see the current touring production of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and I couldn't help being struck by the near-hysterical response of the audience to the two young stars of the show, Craig Chalmers and Keith Jack, both Edinburgh boys who recently shot to fame through the television talent show Any Dream Will Do. We can speculate, of course, about the deep psycho-political reasons for the obsession with fame and celebrity that now seems to define our culture, as if – all other dreams having failed – this is now, in truth, the only one that will do.
But whatever the cause, we live in a time when there seems no limit to the public appetite for detail about the private lives of the famous and glamorous, or to the willingness of an increasingly cash-hungry media to supply it. And under those circumstances, a full inquest involving a figure as famous as Diana inevitably turns into something uniquely ugly – a collision between the organised intrusion into privacy that is inevitable in all cases of violent death, and a continuing voracious appetite for Diana stories that guarantees the splashing of those details across endless news headlines, in an orgy of officially-sanctioned prurience that must, to those who really cared for Diana, seem like the worst of all possible outcomes.
For in the end, of course, the very impulse that creates those headlines – the unbreakable alliance between a powerful, raging father and a celebrity-driven popular media – will also guarantee that this story is never laid to rest, and that all this pitiful exposure will have been for nothing.
The least we can do, in the face of this tasteless spectacle, is to ask ourselves some tough questions about the bread-and-circuses madness, and the hidden despair, of a world in which so many millions gladly focus on this kind of celebrity story, while the Bali conference founders, and the planet begins to burn.
And we can also, if we choose, spare a thought for the two principal living victims of this particular orgy of exposure and exploitation: for the Princes William and Harry, two young men who – for all their privileges – still seem unlikely ever to be granted their simple wish that their mother's memory should be respected, and that she should now be allowed to rest in peace.
The full article contains 989 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
