Another Princess Di theory we don’t need

If the police must take this seriously, why don’t they check without the fuss?

Footage of the Princess and Dodi Fayed in a hotel lift immediately before their fatal drive was among the evidence presented to the inquest that determined their deaths to be an accident. Photo / AP

Christmas has come early for conspiracy theorists, courtesy of an unlikely Santa Claus: Scotland Yard.

The Yard has announced it’s looking into an allegation that Princess Diana and her lover, Dodi Fayed, were assassinated by Britain’s SAS. It would seem to follow that people in high places ordered the hit and instigated the cover-up.

The couple died in a car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997. Each year around about this time, a new claim or theory finds its way into the public domain.

This is partly attributable to Dodi’s father, the Anglo-Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed who used to own Harrods. He has long claimed that the couple were killed by Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6, at the behest of the Duke of Edinburgh.

Fayed snr has reason to detest the British establishment, so it’s not altogether surprising that in his grief he convinced himself that the ruling class would go to any lengths to stop the people’s princess and mother of a future king marrying the playboy son of an Arab arriviste.

But this new “scope” – as the Yard calls it – was prompted by a two-year-old letter from the parents of a former SAS man’s ex-wife. Princess-Diana-e1357368509710 It seems he made the claim as part of a campaign of intimidation against his estranged wife and in-laws, along the lines of “we knocked off Di and got away with it, so getting rid of you lot would be a doddle”.

The man, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was discharged from the army after being convicted of illegal possession of firearms. It seems clear that he has post-traumatic stress disorder, the symptoms of which include delusions and paranoia.

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Diana and Dodi weren’t wearing seatbelts. Their chauffeur was three times over the drink-drive limit and taking anti-depressants. The inquest, which was preceded by a three-year Scotland Yard investigation and overseen by a jury, concluded their deaths were an accident, as did a separate French investigation.

It’s one thing to claim a British conspiracy, but to believe Britain and France could collude in such an exercise when they’ve hardly agreed on anything for 900 years suggests a perilous detachment from reality.

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