I'm amazed that Lord Stevens has let the paparazzi off the hook for their part in the death of Princess Diana. It was their presence outside the hotel in Paris that began the chain of events which led to them getting into the car driven by Henri Paul - who had drunk far too much - and the reason that he drove so fast through the underpass.
Yet Stevens said today: "In relation to the paparazzi we are not putting guilt in any area. A crash of this nature is similar to a major crash of an airliner. It is a long chain of events. Take any link out of that chain and this would not have happened." Excuse me, Lord S, but the paparazzi were not "a link". They were the catalyst for the incident, which is very different indeed.
But Stevens's report does have some interesting passages relating to the media, as Press Gazette's Dominic Ponsford points out. Stevens interviewed the Daily Mail journalist Richard Kay because he spoke to Diana the day before she died. Kay said: "It was a social call, part social and part to find out what was going on in the press. The Princess of Wales dreaded the Sunday papers coming out. She was asking what was likely to be in the Sunday papers." This is a further example of her obsession with how she was portrayed in the papers.
Kay also quashes the theory that Diana was intending to marry Dodi Fayed, a major reason for the conspiracy theorists' argument that she was murdered. In fact, says Kay, she had previously told him: "I've just got out of one marriage and I'm not going to get involved in another one'.
Now comes the most interesting question of all: how will the Daily Express - purveyor of endless wild Diana conspiracy theories to its decreasing audience of readers - report all this tomorrow morning? I'd guess that they will call it a cover up. That's the problem with conspiracy theorists. They can't be convinced that they're wrong, seeing every official rebuttal of their fantasies as further "evidence" of a conspiracy.
