3.30pm UPDATE: Kamal Ahmed, head of news at The Observer, got back to me at about 3pm. He explained that he had been extremely busy, attending meetings, going about his executive tasks, "doing my job", and that that was the reason for the five-hour delay in reaching me. "I was not dodging your questions", he said. "That is a disgraceful slur."
He takes issue with the tone and content of my posting below. But, having tried at first to amend it, I realised it would make it much easier to make sense of his objections if I wrote this this additional posting.
First off, he states that he does not have guilty conscience, and that there is no reason for him to have one, because he and his team acted quite properly. Vanessa Thorpe filed the original copy - she was at the Hay-on-Wye festival at the time - and it contained the two central allegations in the intro which I have disputed, namely that the images were "graphic" and that they were being shown for the first time. These claims came from Channel 4 itself, he said.
He also states that more than 80% of the copy in the article was just as Thorpe wrote it. But she was snowed under with work in Hay so the news desk decided that David Smith should obtain reaction from people who knew Princess Diana. When Smith did so he read Thorpe's copy to each of them. Therefore, the respondents were not "manipulated", as I suggested. (James Robinson's byline was carried because he happened to be interviewing Andy Duncan, C4's chief executive that day, and he was asked by the desk to put questions to him (which Duncan evidently declined to answer).
Ahmed says there was no question of spinning the story. In essence, it reflected Thorpe's original story. For good measure, he also believes that the images - which he has since seen - were indeed graphic. But he stresses that his point of view is irrelevant: The Observer was doing its job responsibly by reporting "the facts".
He also points out that the paper's forecast that it would upset Princes William and Harry turned out to be correct. "I have nothing to apologise for," he says. "And neither has the paper."
I think you could say that Ahmed and I had a fairly frank exchange of views. I stand by what I wrote, though I accept - of course - that he was too busy to get back to me and that he definitely has no guilty conscience.
