The Diana inquest is just another trip on the great
British legal gravy train
This is no glamorous Parisian whodunit: we know what happened and don't need a jury. It's a simple waste of money
Simon Jenkins
Friday October 12, 2007
The Guardian
They flew to Paris in a
private jet. They saw the Ritz, front and back, and crowded into Diana's
bedroom suite. They glimpsed Posh Spice. They visited the site of Diana's death
a reported eight times, by day, night, coach, and on foot, back and front. They
even went to the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. This parody of a "homes of
the stars" Hollywood bus tour was accompanied by riot police and
outriders.
Welcome to another trip on
the great British legal gravy train. The 2001 French inquest into the deaths of
Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed reached the same sensible conclusion as did a
subsequent three-year British coroner's inquiry headed by the Metropolitan
police chief, Lord Stevens. The couple died because they were being driven much
too fast by a drunk. Dodi's father, Mohamed al-Fayed, appealed the French
conclusion and claimed his son was murdered, but he lost in a trial judgment in
April 2002. Conspiracy theories were relegated to addicts of The Da Vinci Code,
the templars and the holy grail.
British law is tabloid
journalism for slow readers. I was convinced of this after the case of the
wedding snaps of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose triviality
would have defied the imagination of a Dickens. The case had nothing to do with
Britain and merited barely half an hour in a county court. Yet it was staged
under the spotlights of the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand as a crude
sales pitch for the British bar.
The same applies to the
10-year-old Bloody Sunday inquiry, which is still munching its way through
£200m of legal aid in Ulster. It applies to the trial of the "Office of
the Metropolitan Police" over the De Menezes shooting, which should be
subject to a formal inquiry. Instead, under the guise of health and safety, the
case has been carried off as loot by the Old Bailey judges.
Diana's death was always
going to be the big one. The legal establishment would not readily leave it to
the French and Lord Stevens, especially with Fayed's millions and the Daily
Express in tow. Who cares that the French authorities spent two years on it,
interviewed 200 witnesses and prepared 6,000 pages of evidence? Who cares that
Lord Stevens, later columnist for the News of the World, capped that with three
years, 12 experts and no fewer than 300 witnesses? His report ran to 832 pages
and cost the taxpayer £3.7m. This was clearly a gold mine.
British law requires an
inquest into the death of anyone abroad whose body is returned to Britain. This
can be a formality, though not invariably. Hence the oddity of the Oxfordshire
coroner, responsible for Brize Norton, investigating the American zapping of
British soldiers in Iraq. The first coroner to consider the Diana-Dodi case,
John Burton, barred Fayed from involvement to limit publicity for his wild
accusations. In this he was upheld by the high court, but he retired in 2002.
Burton was followed by
Michael Burgess, who decided on a formal inquest and was the man who
commissioned Stevens. After four years, Burgess had had enough of Fayed and his
lawyers and was replaced by the former head of the high court's family
division, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss. She wisely decided that the inquest should
not have a jury, for which she saw no justification other than public
prurience. The attendant publicity could only intrude on the privacy of Diana's
family.
This outraged Fayed, the
Daily Express and three high court judges. Butler-Sloss was told she had
misdirected herself and was driven to resignation. Her trial itself employed
five QCs with attendant juniors and solicitors. A fourth coroner was now
summoned in the distinguished form of Lord Justice Scott Baker, operating not
from some hole-in-the-wall in the west London coroner's court but from the
Royal Courts of Justice and with a jury. His budget is £10m.
Coroners are ancient
officers of the crown (from whom they derive their name). Their job dates from
Saxon times, embracing judicial delights such as deodand (object that causes
death) and murdrum (fine), and was to present accusations for the king's judges
to hear. The use of coroner's juries was so that people who knew the parties
might confirm the circumstances of death. They were to assemble facts, not pass
judgment as in criminal juries. Their survival in inquests is pure legal archaism.
Even now they sit only where
doubt exists over identity or evidence (in some 3% of hearings). This is
because inquests have limited remits, to name the deceased and determine how
and where they died. There must be no discussion or declaration of blame or
liability, which is for any subsequent trial. The exercise is inquisitorial,
not confrontational, fact-finding not fault-finding. Butler-Sloss was thus
being reasonable in declining to summon a jury for what was seemed no more than
a confirmation of the French and Stevens conclusions.
The reason given by the high
court for overruling Butler-Sloss and requiring a jury was extraordinary. It
was that the deaths involved "circumstances the recurrence of which might
be prejudicial to the health and safety of any section of the public". The
circumstance was that the death of the mother of the heir to the throne was
preceded by paparazzi attention. But this was never in dispute. There cannot be
a person in Britain who does not know the cause of Diana's death.
As for a
"recurrent" threat to the safety of a "section of the
public", this must refer to an exceeding select band, nocturnal friends of
heirs to the throne. Given their preference, again on display last week, for
conducting their social life outside high-profile hotels and night-clubs, a
jury might recommend a quiet night at home. But while such a surmise might be
permitted the coroner, it is firmly beyond the remit of the jury.
Indeed, as Geoffrey
Robertson and Andrew Nicol point out in their book on media law, coroner's
juries are not addressed by counsel or allowed to hear any coherent argument
other than the coroner's own summing up. "Their role is no more than
symbolic." After tragedies such as the Marchioness sinking, the public
tends to be satisfied only with proper inquiry rather than a coroner's hearing.
It is hard to avoid the
conclusion that judges and barristers were spoiling for a glamorous, if now
rather limp, Parisian whodunit, justified as "laying to rest" Fayed's
fanciful accusations. They would re-employ the legal teams for the six named
parties, re-interview witnesses whose memories of 10 years ago must be fuzzy,
and give the press daily video titbits of Diana and Dodi from the Ritz security
cameras. Nothing in this justifies another £10m of public money.
I may, of course, be missing
the point. Coroners retain one other historic function beyond establishing the
facts of a death. They adjudicate on treasure trove. They must ascertain who
found it and to whom (if not the crown) it might belong. Perhaps this holds the
key to the Diana inquiry. It is about helping to allocate the vast sums
swilling about in the lord chancellor's overblown fees budget. Here at least
the jury can be assured. There is no doubt where today's treasure will come to
rest.
=========================================
PRINCESS DIANA VERSUS THE
PROJECT FOR A NEW
AMERICAN CENTURY
If Princess Diana had gotten
so much as a meaningless paper committment on the landmines issue, she would
have been simaltaneously mocked & encouraged by different strata of the
anti nuclear left in the UK. Daring her to pick up the anti nuclear gauntlet.
If she refused, she would
have looked utterly ridiculous, banging on about landmines & not daring to
touch/ mention the nuclear issue. Keeping a diplomatic silence (or more
unlikely, justifying nukes), the pressure would have been remorseless &
unrelenting to the extent that it would have cast a pall over everything she
might hope to do. It would have cropped up everywhere, to the extent that all
public contacts would have had to have been vetted in advance to the extent
that she would have felt psychologically entombed by the machine she felt
trapped by.
BUT. If she made even the
most timid anti nuclear statements, this would have caused a storm/ continuous
psycho political engagement/ conflict, that could not be broken off, without
victory for one side or the other.
A festering problem.
But she could have been
dismissed as a bimbo right?
Wrong. For she could have
counted on the support 3 of the most important generals of the time (that had
made anti nuclear statements). General Lord Carver (UK), General Alexander
Lebed (then expected to succeed Boris Yeltsin) & General Robert MacNamara
(USA).
A moral cavalry charge that
would have seriously screwed up the `Project for a New American Centuary' &
its plan for `Full Spectrum Dominance' to control the oil/ gas of the mideast/ Central
Asia & Russia to prop up the Petrodollar...
(itself the geo strategic
extension of the Federal Reserve a Private bank controlled by a Rothschilds led
cabal that prints fiat currency it then lends the USA govt which then raises
taxes to pay said loans. Eg:
Executive Order 11110:
"On June 4, 1963
President Kennedy signed this virtually unknown Presidential decree, which had
the authority to strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money to
the United States Federal Government at interest, essentially putting the
privately owned Federal Reserve Bank out of business. The order returned to the
federal government, specifically the Treasury Department, the Constitutional
power to create and issue currency without going through the privately owned Federal
Reserve Bank. President Johnson reversed the order shortly after taking office
in November, 1963. Some conspiracy theorists believe this executive order was
the cause of President Kennedy's assassination.")
...establish the Petro
Amero/ North American Union at the point of a nuclear sixshooter through
nuclear war against Iran/ Pakistan.
She had to die.
The only Q is, did she die
in a coincidental accident before she was murdered?
Hello Mr Rothschild.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/evelyn_de_rothschild/2007/08/invested_interests.html
THE FINEST JUSTICE THAT
MONEY CAN BUY
There is a sequel to
Rothschilds' point man on Russia, Boris Berezovsky's latest antics:
(Jacob Rothschild is a
friend of Mikhail Khordokhovsky & also purchased this so called 'political
prisoner's' shares in Yukos http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3235429.stm
)
As well as:
Berezovsky wants
"orange revolution" money back from Ukraine
http://www.russiancourier.com/en/news/2006/04/07/56375/
(he is suing the UKRAINIAN
recipients of his aid to the `Orange Revolution' in the UK courts because they
did not adequately grab their ankles afterwards...)
Battle of the Billionaires:
Berezovsky to sue Abramovich
in British courts
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article296964.ece
...eg he claims he did not
get the full market value for the resources he axcquired for kopecks (when he
ran Yeltsin for the Rothschilds) from the Russian people when Putin forced
Berezovsky to sell to Abramovich (before in turn encouraging Abramovich to sell
up on more favorable terms - rather than risk his ire later on).
So naturally I have full
confidence that UK institutions that (after 94 years) cannot bring themselves
to reveal that the US Federal Reserve is a PRIVATE Bank...
Executive Order 11110:
...will locate the truth
about the `accident' that killed Princess Diana.