Wednesday, January 16, 2008 

Time for a Diana-free zone.

With perhaps the exception of the campaign against apartheid South Africa, boycotts tend not to work, and the one I'm proposing here (somewhat prompted by this post by Roy Greenslade) most certainly won't. I've made a number of posts in the past about the undead princess, and the extraordinary press relationship which is now still going strong after ten years, but this week's latest non-revelations at the inquest into her death seem to have at long last turned a corner in some quarters.

As the Guardian leader points out, just what does the fact that Diana's mother called her a whore have to do with her daughter's death? That she is now also dead, and probably still insulting her child for going around with "effin Muslim men" in a distant corner of hell while hopefully being sodomised with a ladle makes it even less relevant. The latest supposed amazing piece of new information that has emerged is that the police didn't bother to investigate a complaint from Diana that she feared being bumped off. That they most likely already had contingency plans for protecting her and treated it with the contempt that such narcissistic paranoia deserved isn't worthy of a mention.

It's time therefore in my view that we initiate a complete boycott of any mentions of Diana or the inquest from now on - and completely ignore the farce continuing at immense cost for the benefit only of Mohamed Al-Fayed and the tabloid press which plagued her until her dying day. The Grauniad ought to practice what it preaches and cease any coverage, although it deserves to be congratulated for its far from serious or sincere reporting of what has been going on by Stephen Bates. Al-Fayed's other main reason for demanding this circus, apart from his vendetta against the establishment for refusing him a passport is his endless lust for publicity; without it his ignorant and insulting conspiracy theories would never have reached such a wide audience, even if most rightly reject them and are similarly disgusted by the continuing almost necrophilia-like obsession of the popular press. Stopping perpetuating it in any way, including even mocking it, is more likely to bring this tasteless, morbid and revolting spectacle to an end than anything else.

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Thursday, October 04, 2007 

Express-watch: Diana: the lies.

If there's one headline that all newspapers should avoid using, it's THE TRUTH. Not only because the Scum infamously used it on the day that it printed the lies about Hillsborough, but because as we all know, the truth is a very loose concept.

It's an even more loose concept when it involves the Daily Express, and especially when it also has to do with Diana. Out of the three statements on the front page, only one is true: Diana was indeed on the pill. One would think that this would rather undermine the consistent, incipient claims that Diana was pregnant with Dodi's child, but not when you're the Daily Express or a conspiracy theorist. Rather, this proves that they were having sex and that she therefore quite possibly was pregnant, except if she was still taking the pill at the time, this would rather undermine the theory that she knew about it, that Dodi knew about it and that this was one of the reasons for why MI6/the Duke of Edinburgh/Muffin the Mule decided that she and Al-Fayed's son had to die.

All the above contradictions though are nothing to the average conspiracy theorist, and so the Express continues with its blatant misinformation. The Express claims that the inquest heard definitively that Henri Paul was not drunk, when it heard nothing of the sort. On the contrary, the court today heard that Paul had at the very least consumed two Ricards, and yesterday it heard conflicting evidence. The blood tests, which Al-Fayed in his fully swivel-eyed conspiratorial mind claims were "switched", showed that he was over both the French and British drink-drive limits, but those who saw him on the night claimed that he did not appear or seem drunk. That on its own proves nothing: you can look completely sober but still be unfit to drive due to what you've drunk, especially when you're mixing alcohol with drugs like anti-depressants.

Finally, it's true that Dodi had bought a diamond ring. You can make your own minds up on what he was going to do with it, but the simple fact that he had bought a ring does not mean that it was intended to be an engagement ring, let alone that he already asked Diana to marry him. Even if he had, what difference would it have made? Were MI6 so prepared for the eventuality and bugging their conversations that they would be able to organise such an op within potentially hours of learning of it? Leaving aside the spectacularly convoluted and complicated assassination plot necessary in order to kill the pair, with the driver apparently willing to sacrifice himself, or the "white Fiat Uno" being in exactly the right spot at the right time, does Al-Fayed's claim that the monarchy would be threatened by the step-father of the heir to the throne being a Muslim hold any water whatsoever? It would have meant precisely nothing - Diana had already had her title taken from her, and the royal family were already more than prepared to exclude her altogether and forget about her. She was a nuisance to them, but not one which meant that she had to be disposed of.

Can you honestly believe we've another 6 months of this shit to listen to? I don't think there's ever before been such a fantastical waste of time and money for the benefit of one lying, completely untrustworthy schemer with a more than open vendetta. When you consider that the government are denying an inquiry into 7/7, when 52 people died and where we still don't properly know whether the attacks could have prevented and how far the conspiracy went, it's even more aggravating, even if the two are separate issues. That there are newspapers prepared to back up Al-Fayed's bluster only shows how power, money and influence continue to determine far more than the deaths of numerous innocents does.

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Wednesday, October 03, 2007 

Tabloid-watch: Glorious Diana humbug.

You might recall that earlier in the year Channel 4 came under heavy pressure, both from the tabloids and as a result of their fury, Prince Harry and William themselves, to pull a documentary that was alleged to contain images of Princess Diana lying in the smashed Mercedes in the Paris tunnel, being treated before she died. While Channel 4 quite rightly refused to remove the programme from the schedules, it obscured one image to "avoid any unwarranted intrusion into their [the Princes'] privacy or that of their families".

At the time Private Eye pointed out that the Scum, one of those newspapers noisily complaining about this latest unwarranted distress to the Princess's children, had in fact already previously published the photograph at the centre of the whole storm, also blanked out, splashing it on the front page when an Italian magazine went ahead with an article that used the already freely available on the internet photographs of the late Princess receiving treatment.

Fast forward to yesterday, which saw the opening of the inquest into Diana's death, only 10 years' after the fact, and the release of a number of previously held back photographs, including those that see inside the car a matter of minutes before the crash that killed three of the occupants and badly injured Fayed's bodyguard. They clearly show all three of those in the picture, Henri Paul, Trevor Rees-Jones and Diana, with her back to the camera, looking highly agitated and trying to get away from the paparazzi that were taking the shots we're now seeing for the first time.

How then did the tabloids (and Telegraph) react to the release of these potentially highly insensitive and upsetting set of photographs? Why, by splashing them all over their front pages with appropriately sensational headlines of course!




While these photographs are central to the inquest, there was no need whatsoever for them to be published in such a way, but then with the tabloids ever more desperate to boost their circulation it was no brainer decision, even if it shows how flagrantly hypocritical their faux-outrage over the Channel 4 documentary was, or indeed last year's publication of the same photographs by the Italian magazine, coming at the same time as some genuinely "shocking, sickening, outrageous" photographs were emerging from both Israel and Lebanon. Amazingly, the Express resisted the temptation to throw them on their front page, although I have no doubts that they're used inside. The Grauniad's coverage of the inquest, written in a humourous style by Stephen Bates, managed to avoid using them; the tabloids, regardless of their past attempts to savage anyone who dares to impugn either her memory or publish the graphic photographs of her passing, had no such qualms.

The whole inquest is a pointless, hugely expensive waste of time. We know how and why Diana died; as a result of a tragic car accident, exacerbated by the presence of paparazzi desperate for shots of both Dodi and the princess, something which was also not helped by how the driver, Henri Paul, having taken a toxic mix of anti-depressants and alcohol, was clearly unfit to be in change of a motor vehicle. It's also quite possible that both Diana and Dodi would have survived if they had been wearing their seat belts. All of this has already been set out in Lord Stevens' exhaustive report that considered all the conspiracy theories that will be debunked once again, this time in court, and found that they were complete bunkum.

This is all being done for the benefit of a man who is already certain of what happened. Whether it's because of vanity, guilt, pigheadedness, denial or a vendetta against the British establishment that denied him a passport is impossible to know for sure perhaps without a psychiatrist intervening, but Mohamed Al-Fayed is never going to be satisfied until a court decides that the accident was in fact murder, something which is never going to happen. Why we are continuing to indulge this wealthy egomaniac is the only question remaining about what happened that night, and it's one which the court cannot pass judgment on.

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