Thursday, February 04, 2010 

Diana in outrage hell.

We all know how much I love Twitter, which reading back now, seems to be one of the most staggeringly hypocritical and self-fulfilling statements that I've ever put together here:

... it's a glorified instant messaging service where every stalker and sad sack can follow your ever so fascinating immediate thoughts ...

Err, yeah. Doesn't describe me at all. Sorry.

This though is hilarious (via Anton), although it's doubtless already spreading around like an online version of the clap. The Express, that journal which dedicated itself to keeping the memory of Princess Diana alive by splashing almost every Monday with a new conspiracy theory fresh from the fevered imagination of the owner of a certain fuggin' Knightsbridge department store, has discovered that someone is besmirching their favourite dead ex-royal by pretending to tweet as Diana from heaven. Cue the outrage:

A SICK prankster has set up a social networking website as Princess Diana.

The macabre Twitter page pretends the messages come from heaven. One says: “I can’t talk about Dodi (Al Fayed) for legal reasons.”

The fake Diana criticises the small numbers turning up to her memorial fountain in London, claiming nobody realises it was filled with the Queen Mother’s gin. Referring to the site of her fatal car crash, she says: “Now looking down at Pont de l’Alma tunnel. Bigger turnout than at Memorial Fountain.”

Alan Berry, co-founder of the Diana Appreciation Society, urged Twitter to ban the page. He said: “It’s sick that some people can pretend to be Diana. What respect is that showing?”

Twitter allows people to impersonate others as long as it is clear it is a joke but last night the firm failed to respond to questions about the Diana page.

It seems that @dianainheaven is in the wrong business. Pretend to be someone dead in a humourous fashion on a social networking site and you're sick; pretend to be a journalist and you can become the royal reporter on the Express.

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Monday, December 01, 2008 

News of the Screws in telling lies shocker.

The Press Complaints Commission adjudication into the News of the World's super-splash back in June, headlined "BURRELL: I HAD SEX WITH DIANA" is another wonderful insight into the world of Sunday tabloid journalism, if not tabloid journalism in general.

A classic story of one man's word against someone else's, Burrell in making the complaint accepted that the PCC could not rule on whether the report was accurate or not. Instead, he complained that the newspaper had not contacted him to put the allegations against him. The Screws argued firstly that it feared Burrell would attempt to get an injunction to stop publication, which is the latest excuse for not putting the claims to the person about to be drawn into a firestorm, and secondly that Burrell was a "self-confessed and notorious liar."

That tells you how much the paper cared about the actual veracity of the claim. If Burrell's such a notorious liar, why should we believe the claims of his brother-in-law about a conversation the two had 15 years ago? The Screws claimed that it had the backing of an "anonymous source", as well as the backing also of Burrell's brother-in-law's son, both of whom had signed affadavits. This though was irrelevant to actually putting the allegations to the person in question, who, as the PCC ruled, should have had the opportunity to deny such prominent claims against him, with the possibility that readers would have been misled into believing he accepted the allegations by there not being any denial.

The entire story was one which the like of the News of the Screws dream of. Completely impossible to prove, and also completely impossible to disprove, while being sensational and completely lacking in any integrity whatsoever. Who after all cares if Burrell had been having sex with Princess Diana, or indeed he hadn't? The only people who do would have been Diana herself (and possibly her sons, who have in the past made clear their distaste for the necromancy the papers practice), who is still very much dead, and Burrell, already disgraced for admitting to lying to the Diana inquest, meaning the paper could say whatever the hell it liked. The News of the Screws after all has never ever been about journalism or investigations; its number one priority is to make Mr Murdoch pots of money, which it still does. Anyone who gets caught in the crossfire is completely inconsequential, as this ruling will be, just as the collapse of the trials involving the "fake sheikh" and the recent victory by Max Mosley were. The ends always justify the means, and until the PCC can do more than just force newspapers to print their adjudications, they will keep on having complete contempt for the self-regulatory code they signed up to.

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12/01/2008 11:58:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, April 07, 2008 

Teeth-gnawing tedium.

It's nice to be proved wrong:

Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed were unlawfully killed by the reckless driving of their chauffeur, Henri Paul, and the paparazzi who chased them, jurors in the inquest into their deaths decided today.

The verdict, by a nine-to-two majority, brings to a close a six-month inquest that has heard from more than 240 witnesses and is expected to have cost more than £10m.

The verdict implicates the paparazzi and Paul much more so than previous investigations.


Contrary to Fayed's statement, the jury has once again indicted his own employee, Henri Paul, as one of those responsible for Diana and Dodi's death. His lawyers also abandoned his arguments at the close, something that previously couldn't be reported. Despite his contention in the witness box that he would accept the verdict of the jury, he's tonight consulting his lawyers over yet another further appeal, on the spurious grounds that because the Duke of Edinburgh and some other figures weren't forced to appear that not all the evidence was heard. £10 million down the drain; how much would it have cost to give him that passport again?

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4/07/2008 10:26:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, March 31, 2008 

The final curtain.

Seeing as Scott Baker has finally commenced his summing up, it should now be safe to end the boycott of mentioning the Diana inquest.

It would be nice to think that this inglorious, ignoble waste of time, effort and money, all for the purpose of flattering the ego and demands of a very rich and very deluded individual, has served its ultimate aim: to let Fayed get his ridiculous theories fully out in the open, where they can be suitably mocked, and then debunked, as they undoubtedly have been. The reality though is the opposite, as Lord Baker himself has said as much, noting that there will always be individuals who believe that she was murdered on the orders of Prince Philip, or alternatively by the Reptilians in league with al-Qaida who are in turn in association with international freemasonry, the Flat Earth Society and the Greys. Nothing you can say to such individuals will ever convince them they're wrong; the most you can hope for is that they betray at least a moment's doubt and think for a second, before returning to the comfort of their original belief.

Does anyone honestly believe then that this is the last of it, that whatever verdict the jury reaches will end the cult of Diana, alter Fayed's mind one iota, or change the view of the guy who's turned up every day with Diana and Dodi painted on his face? While Scott Baker was certainly right, both legally and intellectually to not allow the jury to even consider returning a verdict that the death was connected to a conspiracy, this will almost certainly be where Fayed and the others will home in on; they'll say that the jury didn't have a chance to rule on the possibility, despite it being laughed out of court, through either judicial arrogance or yet again, a conspiracy.

The verdicts offered to the jury itself show the futility of the entire exercise. I'll go out on a limb and predict that the jury won't be able to find a majority on it being the fault of the paparazzi or Henri Paul or the involvement of both, and instead return that it was an accidental death, as we have known for oh, closing on 11 years. You can blame Paul or the paparazzi and say both were culpable, but can't say with any sort of certainty that either directly caused Diana's death. In any case, as we've also known for a while, if she or Dodi had been wearing their seatbelts, they likely would have survived, but that doesn't seem to have come into it at any real point.

All of this was established, if not within hours of the crash, then in the next few months that followed. The inquest hasn't really told us anything about the night that we didn't already: we already knew how the paparazzi had behaved, if not quite in as much detail, and knew that Paul had drank alcohol in combination with medication with which it should not strictly be mixed. We didn't perhaps knew that one of the drinks he consumed was a Ricard, but even that was probably in the more verbose accounts of that night. Everything else was a sideshow, from the essential revelation that Diana's mother had called her a whore for sleeping with an "effin Muslim man", right down to her menstrual pattern, whether Dodi had bought her a ring or not, to Paul Burrell's sensitive secret information not being sensitive secret information at all. This was wonderful entertainment for the tabloids, who delighted in the whole thing, but did nothing whatsoever for the memory of Diana herself. Perhaps even that was epitomised by the ramshackle inquiry: a woman and a press that were as schizophrenic in their attitudes towards each other as the "evidence" at times seemed.

To the end, there's been a continuation of this almost knockabout aspect of some of the evidence given. Scott Baker has identified three as directly lying - James Andanson, Paul Burrell and John Macnamara, to whom he could have added the former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, who hilariously said that during his time in the service MI6 had never assassinated anyone. As a Steve Bell cartoon featuring a conversation between the current head and the Duke of Edinburgh retorted, what on earth are we paying you for?

Some will doubtless argue that the whole debacle has, in the horrible cod-psychological neologism, provided some sort of closure. Perhaps it will to some extent mean the end of the incessant, niggling media coverage of the past 10 years, although it was finally starting to abate in any case, only reignited by the inquest itself. For those at the centre of it however, the tragedy of that night will never leave them. Fayed's undoubted anguish at the death of his only son in such circumstances is all too real; what has never been real is his theories for how it occurred, and how he has used it as an excuse to take on and blame the establishment itself for all his subsequent woes. Subconsciously, maybe, this is his way of dealing with the pain that it was in the company of his employees that his son and the princess died, something he seemingly has never faced up to. Fayed has to face up to his own demons, and the state should never have let itself be used as a replacement for him doing so.

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3/31/2008 09:12:00 PM | | | links to this post

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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1/16/2008 08:08:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, January 08, 2008 

Diana: She's still being buggered.

The Diana inquest has hardly gone to plan for Mohammed al-Fayed in his crusade against the British state for refusing him a passport, masked by the futile and pathetic attempts to prove that the death of his son and his contemporary girlfriend was a security services inspired conspiracy. The paparazzi have been proved to have been acting with the predictable contempt they have for those whose lives they try to ruin; al-Fayed's driver Henri Paul, in spite of some conflicting evidence, has been described as being drunk and having drank alcohol while also on prescription drugs; there has been no evidence presented whatsoever to substantiate claims she was pregnant; and the Duke of Edinburgh, who supposedly loathed Diana, has been shown through letters exchanged between the two to have been both sympathetic and affectionate towards her, with Diana even addressing him as "Dearest Pa".

There has been absolutely nothing to warrant or justify the huge cost of staging such an inquest into her death when previous reports by both the French themselves and latterly by Lord Stevens have considered all the available evidence and concluded that her death was the result of a tragic, ordinary car accident, nothing more. Despite this, it's provided the tabloids, especially the mid-market ones which for some reason have always been more besotted with Diana than the red-tops, with plenty of front-page leads with news which is years' old.

Both the Mail and the Express splash today on the evidence given yesterday by Grahame Harding that he found a suspected bugging device in the wall in Diana's bedroom in her Kensington Palace apartment two years' after her split from Charles, although he never actually extracted it and the "signal" from it disappeared within the day. Even if we immediately accept on face value that it was put there by MI5, it's hardly surprising, is it? Diana was quite possibly the most famous woman in Britain at the time, as well as a former royal; she would have been and was a target for every nutball in the country. As we now know, far less famous and laughably smalltime members of Trotskyist and communist groups were under constant surveillance by the state, their groups infiltrated and their every movement logged, whether they were the slightest threat to anything whatsoever or not. Even if this was scaled down after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it's only recently that the focus of MI5 has switched from political extremists of left and right and Irish paramilitaries towards Islamist radicals. There were doubtless contingency plans in place in case Diana found herself kidnapped or even, whisper it, an attempt was made on her life. Whether such surveillance is/was justifiable is one thing; that it took place and continues to do so is surely quite another.

Then there is of course the other possibility about who could have planted the bug. Have we forgotten so soon about Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire and their dilettantish efforts at "bugging" Prince William? What about "Squidgygate" and "Camillagate", where the source of the recordings of both has never been confirmed? The tabloids themselves had more than enough reasons to attempt to bug Diana: the sort of stuff that could be recorded in her bedroom would have been beyond their most wild liquid-soaked dreams. They'll never admit that they have used and will continue to use such subterfuge to get stories; the lack of coverage they gave to the revelations by the information commissioner last year after a raid on a private detective agency only confirms that.

Diana then continues to bugged or buggered, whichever you prefer, even in death by those who slandered her one day and made literate love to her the next.

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1/08/2008 07:56:00 PM | | | links to this post

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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10/04/2007 08:35:00 PM | | | links to this post

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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10/03/2007 07:41:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, August 31, 2007 

10 years of turning in the grave.

As tempting as it is to ignore the whole sorry spectacle of today's ostentatious yet banal processions of manufactured grief and remembrance, or dismiss it with a post like "10 years on: Diana still dead", it's hard not to conclude that Diana's death really did change Britain, although not in the way that either the tabloids or most of the more serious pontificating hacks have tried to claim.

Like a decade ago, it's Private Eye's front cover that's provided an alternative narrative to the more mainstream one. Then it punctured the lachrymose, sanctimonious and overbearing mood which most of the press were attempting to enforce on the nation, pointing out the most base hypocrisy of a media which had spent most of its time criticising the Princess, sometimes in the most strident of terms, only then to beatify her once she can no longer actually respond to it, so much so that it was temporarily removed from some shops for daring to speak up for those alienated and appalled by the turn of events. This week it's again both poked fun at and pointed the finger at the media, having exploited her image for their own ill-gotten gains for the last 10 years, with Diana saying she hopes that they haven't just used one of her well-worn photographs to sell more copies.

While it's just a coincidence, it's also intuitive that the latest series of that other tedious behemoth, Big Brother, comes to a close tonight. Just as some celebrate the notion that Diana's death brought us together, made us more comfortable with expressing our emotions and established a new era of understanding and openness which has resurfaced recently with the desperate cases of Madeleine McCann and Rhys Jones, she also did more than anyone else, or rather the media's endless pursuit of her did, to establish the cult of celebrity. While Helen of Troy may have launched a thousand ships, it was Diana that has helped launch thousands of magazines, books and other paraphernalia, an avalanche of low culture which even now shows no signs of abating.

Whether you ascribe to the theory that the media "killed" Diana or not, whether through the paparazzi who chased her through the Paris streets into that fateful tunnel, or just the editors' who demanded the never ending stream of photographs which meant she was followed wherever she went, it's not that far a leap from the cameras stalking one woman to the cameras watching contestants out for a fast buck, both being used as cash cows while pretending to care for their wellbeing. Diana was a real-life soap opera, her Panorama interview the most cathartic episode in its history, only to be overshadowed by a killing off that some doom-mongers may have predicted but was never expected to actually happen. What else is reality television if not the controlled chaos of throwing numerous incompatible people together and seeing what happens? Doom-mongers like myself have long been predicting that this most unethical and distasteful of junk programming will eventually end in a preventable tragedy; while it is yet to happen, judging by how this latest series of BB has been denounced as both the worst and most boring yet, you almost imagine that the producers would actually have liked something similar to happen. They only have themselves to blame: what do you expect when you throw photogenic but completely empty and self-absorbed, mostly young individuals together? Then again, who else would want to go on such shows? It's like flies trying to stop themselves from sitting on shit.

At the very least, Diana occasionally had something of interest to say, or a cause to support that others in her position wouldn't have touched with a bargepole. The very fact that she was far from perfect, a flawed person just like all the rest of us, made her both great friends and great enemies. When her death brought about the biggest reverse ferret in tabloid history, it showed how if there's one thing that riles up the gutter press, it's someone who doesn't always get things right. They hated her because while she indulged them, she also knew when to draw the line, as well as the fact that she was more popular than they could ever possibly be. Only in death could they truly love her, as only then was every little detail about her profitable: while she could object, answer back or tell her side, they couldn't get away with printing the crap they've spent the last ten years selling and producing.

Rather than learning from this model though, today's celebrities have gone the other way entirely; doing everything they possibly can to suck up to the media, even though it holds the key to both their success and their potential destruction. Without Diana, there could have been no Jordan or Kerry Katona, or all the other hideous, talentless morons that have filled the vacuum of the last ten years. Does it saying something about us or about our popular culture that a former glamour model with expandable on command breasts could be worth millions, producing a perfume, lingerie, "writing" novels and have cameras follow her everywhere without anyone suggesting that this is the most facile, vapid, ridiculous and obnoxious of insults to collective intelligence yet seen?

In actuality, the last decade has seen the media learn how to both exploit and even engineer breakdowns and personal problems. While some of this is cynically produced by the women's gossip magazines who are in cahoots with the celebrities themselves, flagging up every slight wobble in a relationship, some of it is voyeurism bordering on the morbid. The recent obsession with Amy Winehouse, a young, somewhat talented woman obviously addicted both to drugs and her husband, with the paparazzi following her every movement, from alleged fights to the beach, has surely been reminiscent how Diana was chased around during her last summer. That some have made reference to "Sid and Nancy" almost makes you wonder whether they'd actually like history to repeat itself so that they can sell some more newspapers and say "I told you so". Something similar has gone on with Pete Doherty and Kate Moss, although both are far less sympathetic figures. Rebekah Wade's blast against her hacks for their failure to get an interview with Doherty, saying that they had "lost any journalistic ability they had ever had" was indicative of just what has happened to tabloid journalism: no longer for the people, but for the rich to tell their sob stories to.

We shouldn't be surprised then that the Daily Express, on today of all days, can't even hold back from splashing its bottomless barrel of conspiracy theories on its front page, while the Daily Mail had a guide to today's service, which if the Grauniad is to be believed, had a hand in making Camilla decide not to attend, having read a "devastating" article by Diana's "close friend" Rosa Monckton in the Mail on Sunday. Monckton was no doubt in attendance today, although Paul Burrell, having apparently offended everyone with his money making through his books wasn't invited. If that same principle had been extended to the press, Monckton herself, who has wrote a children's book associated with Diana, and countless others, no one would have been there. Everyone with as much as a passing acquittance with her has filled their boots, and why not, when that great example the Daily Mail abandoned its pledge to never buy paparazzi pictures again with a matter of days? Quite why both the BBC and ITV had to show the "service of thanksgiving", a classic example of the aristocracy pretending that it cares while still doing its best to stick two fingers up to everyone with a difference of opinion, shows how the broadcasters can't cope with the loss of ratings even on a Friday morning in August.

If there is to be anything gained from bringing up this whole regrettable torrent of sentimentality, it ought to be that from now on we let the poor woman rest in peace. If the media continue to bombard us with her image, if writers continue to produce sordid memoirs revealing nothing new except their abject lack of originality and desire to earn some quick cash and if Mohamed Al-Fayed and friends continue to spout their debunked and discredited theories, all deserve to have mass boycotts imposed upon them. We shouldn't let a media at least partly responsible for her death continue to profit from it, without demanding that they reform themselves so something similar never occurs again. That all of this is a pipe dream, an impossibility, doesn't mean that it isn't true or necessary. After all, who's responsible? You (we) fucking are.

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8/31/2007 07:47:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, August 08, 2007 

Making up your own insults.

This is most likely the perfect Daily Express front page. It combines the former People's Princess and her memory with the new People's Missing Child: Our Angel and Missing Guiding Light. One thoroughly beaten dead horse (in more than one sense) and another shortly to become a dead horse, together as one. Forever.

What then is this new, improved, all purpose, biggest ever, longest lasting insult to the People's Princesses memory? Has someone dug up her corpse, fucked it, fed it to the swine on a nearby farm, then reburied the coffin with the body of an asylum seeker who was wearing a niqab in it as the replacement? Did a small child run up to Prince Harry while he was out drinking, shout "Your mum's dead!", laugh and then run away? Did Gerry McCann say that Madeleine was bigger than that dead phony bitch? Was Gordon Brown heard to say that "Tony went a little over-the-top when Diana died"? Or was it that Diana is now remembered not for her good work, but rather the fact that Mohammad Al-Fayed has used her death to pursue his own campaign against the establishment in this country because he's never been given a passport? How about that her memory is now a laughing stock because "THE WORLD'S GREATEST NEWSPAPER" has been using her for years as a convenient front page story when there aren't any Muslims to bash or house prices to crow/panic about?

Sadly, it's none of these things. Apparently the biggest ever insult to her memory is that Camilla Parker-Bowles will be attending the memorial service (yes, another one) on August the 31st. Excuse me if I don't suddenly storm out onto the streets and start screaming about the injustice of it all.

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8/08/2007 08:30:00 PM | | | links to this post

Saturday, June 23, 2007 

Please sir, can we have some more?

There's a few things I think we could all agree we need more of. Social networking sites, for instance. Indie-rock bands basing themselves around the Libertines. Valedictory TV programmes and newspaper articles looking back over Blair's 10 years. Lawyers. No win no fee firms. Hideously tattooed, mouthy female singers. Adverts where those who've sold their soul to appear in them suddenly break into song for no apparent reason. Blogs. Hollywood sequels. Suicide bombings. Books on how all religion is evil.

Out of all of those, there's one I missed out that is perhaps a little too obvious. Ten years after her death, there just simply haven't been enough books written about Princess Diana. No one has so much as charted her short, tragic, some would say holy life in complete, minute detail. We haven't found out which vibrator she used, that she sometimes went naked except for a fur coat, how she struggled with bulimia or that she hated that disfigured horse-faced cunt Camilla.

Thank Enya then for Tina Brown, who not only had the brilliant, original idea of writing such a book, but who has also produced one of the finest social histories, not just of this generation, but of any generation. The Diana Chronicles is a tour de force, a magnum opus, a truly wonderful achievement from a modest, beautiful, stunningly witty woman which will soon being taught on the Diana bachelor degree courses as the foremost set text. A wonderful example of just how fresh, exciting and completely honest Brown's portrayal of the undead Princess is has been provided by the current issue of Private Eye:


Brown's book is of course not just another vulture picking the very last, tiny scraps of pink flesh from Diana's corpse. It's a sexed-up, all revelatory biography to end all biographies, as Catherine Bennett's review of it shows.

With the princes' celebratory commemoration in the form of a music concert fast approaching, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that rather than being dead, Diana, like Elvis, Tupac, James Dean, Kurt Cobain and Marilyn, and perhaps Pete Doherty when he inevitably takes that one dose of skag too many, is going to be with us until the end of time. She's a license to print money, to pretend that you know what you're talking about when you're called on to comment on the celebrity culture, and like Marilyn, she's never going to get old. Her tits are never going to sag, her forehead isn't going to get wrinkled, her hair isn't going to turn to the colour which most resembled her existence that has since been painted any colour but, gray. She will be forever beautiful and young, while the rest of us will decay, wilt and shrink.

Andrew Roberts, when talking about Brown's book on Newsnight Review, was adulatory in praise, describing it as perhaps the first revisionist account of her life, but that's probably because he gets mentioned and because he quite obviously fancies her. He raised the all important point though: like those incessant books about Hitler and whether he really did authorise the Holocaust or just went along with it once it had been decided upon by others, we've got the rest of our lifetimes to look forward to this modern-day celebrity dictator being written about and eulogised and condemned over and over and over again. Or at least until someone assassinates Paris Hilton.

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6/23/2007 08:19:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, May 29, 2007 

The undead princess.

Princess Diana is dead, just in case you'd forgotten. She's been dead for close to ten years. In life, she was chased by newspapers trying to sell their sordid wares. In death, she's chased by newspapers trying to sell their sordid wares. Oddly, the very same newspapers which day after day filled their pages with paparazzi photographs of the woman, apart from suffering a few pangs of guilt in the immediate aftermath of the accident in the Paris tunnel, with the Daily Mail famously announcing that it would never again buy snatched shots, only to break its own declaration within a matter of weeks, have since then felt the need to act as her personal shield; she can't defend herself, so they will instead. Again, this was a surprising role reversal, considering that the Glenda Slaggs' had loved to rip Diana to shreds over whatever they saw fit, leading after her end to the biggest reverse ferret in newspaper history. No longer was she a silly bulimic girl who had betrayed the royal family, now she was the greatest Briton who had ever lived, whose beauty, principles and dignity were second to none.

It's therefore unsurprising that the middle-market tabloids are united in anger over Channel 4's decision to screen a documentary which allegedly features images of Diana laying in the car being treated before she died. We had the very same faux-outrage last year, when an Italian magazine published the far from shocking images, at the same time as some genuinely shocking photographs from Lebanon and Israel were being comprehensively ignored.


Even so, it's difficult to deal with the sheer level of chutzpah, especially of the Daily Express, accusing Channel 4 of being "ghouls cashing in on her memory". This is the same newspaper which has spent the last few years propagating the bullshit theories of Mohammad Al-Fayed, the man most responsible for the death of Diana in the first place, dedicating its front page time and again to false "new leads" and lies about what happened that night. If it wasn't for the Express's Diana obsession, it would probably be even further in the mire created by its asset-striping pornographer owner, Richard Desmond. The only surprise is that Desmond hasn't tried to combine the two by giving away Diana sex dolls with each turgid copy.


As for the Daily Mail, variously accusing Channel 4 of "trampling on her grave", and today printing the words of Rosa Monckton, urging Diana to be given the privacy in death she didn't get during her life (from the very same Daily Mail), could this possibly be the same Daily Mail which back in February was giving away a free Diana figurine from Royal Doulton "worth over £100", as well as Diana DVD entitled ten years on? That isn't trampling on her grave, that's just taking advantage of her, and as we all know, there's a great difference between the two.

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5/29/2007 08:45:00 PM | | | links to this post

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