HARRODS COLLUDING HAUL

I have a confession to make – or, as they say nowadays, I want to ’fess up. I was part of the conspiracy to kill the Princess of Wales. Yes, me. Little me. Shocked you, didn’t I. Of course, I wasn’t in it on my own. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a conspiracy. Jade Goody was in it too. And Britney Spears. And Michael Winner. And oh, Derek Conway, you know, the MP who put his ne’er-do-well sons on the parliamentary payroll. And Sir Elton John. And Wayne Sleep. And John Travolta. And Gianni Versace. And Diana Dors, Diana Ross, Dame Diana Rigg, Lady Diana Mosley, Lady Diana Cooper, Diana Vreeland, Diana Krall, Diana Wynyard, all of whom deeply resented the way the Princess annexed a name they had hitherto considered to indicate themselves. Resented enough to kill. Oh, and Guy Fawkes. And the Count of Monte Cristo. And Alice in Wonderland.

Of course, we all resent even more the failure of that wise and astute observer of the scene, Mohamed Al Fayed, to drop our names in court. After all, he dropped so many. I think he should have played it like Bette Midler did in her stage show at a time when many revelations were emerging about the late American president. She pointed melodramatically to herself: “Hey, guess what, I have a secret to impart. I slept with Jack Kennedy”. And then, raking the audience with both hands, she shrieked: “And you know what? They slept with Jack Kennedy”.

What I admired so much about Mr Al Fayed’s testimony was the forensic detail into which he went in his evidence of this truly astounding conspiracy. A lesser man would have taken advantage of the freedom that a law court permits to make accusations without fear of slander. Mr Al Fayed could so easily have taken that low road. Instead he went into astonishing detail.

For instance, his revelation that the Duke of Edinburgh is a German Nazi whose actual name is Frankenstein clearly changes our very conception of the Royal Family. We had always understood His Royal Highness to be of Greek nationality. Perhaps after all it is the Queen who is the Greek. Her consort probably hails from the Schwarzwald area of south-west Germany that borders Switzerland (Dr Victor Frankenstein was, after all, Swiss by birth; also of course – which may be news to Mr Al Fayed – he was fictional). I hope the Harrods boss will endeavour to confirm these origins, perhaps by means of his charming spokesman, the famously coiffed Michael Cole.

Where Mr Al Fayed rashly overplayed his hand was in speaking out on the street outside the high court. He told a journalist he was “an idiot” which is surely not likely to provoke legal action (the greater difficulty would be to ascertain that a journalist was not an idiot). But he further accused him of being “part of the conspiracy” before he was hustled away by his minders. It would be the worst of luck for the Harrods boss if he happened to fling this accusation at the one man in Britain who was not in fact in on the conspiracy, In that case, I hope the journalist is public-spirited enough to sue Mr Al Fayed for slander. Then the great conspiracy can finally be tested properly in court and Mr Al Fayed can at last have the opportunity of laying out his compelling evidence for the public to marvel at, an opportunity so grievously denied him by the terms of the inquest.

Should the case go against him, Mr Al Fayed may of course refuse to pay the substantial compensation to the reporter that the court would certainly levy. And then he would be liable to go to jail. Mr Al Fayed might then take the route of Mr Pickwick and elect to be incarcerated as a matter of principle. This might prove to be a mistake. Notoriously, Mr Al Fayed is not a British citizen. Indeed, there is a widely but doubtless scurrilously held view that Mr Al Fayed’s conspiracy theories all stem from the persistent refusal of the British authorities to award him citizenship. I wonder if Mr Al Fayed is sufficiently familiar with the regimes commonly pursued in the jails of Egypt to wish to serve his sentence in one of them.

Perhaps the most incredible aspect of this whole fantastical episode is Mr Al Fayed’s announcement that he will accept the findings of the inquest. We would do well to remember that this is one Mohamed who is not a prophet.