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A victory for common sense, not al-Fayed
Times Online
02 March 2007
The decision to hold the inquest into the death of the Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed is less a victory for Mohamed al-Fayed than for common sense.
The ruling was generally welcomed in legal circles this morning, causing far less surprise than Baroness Butler-Sloss's decision to hold the inquest without a jury in the first place. Most inquests are not heard by a jury, but under the Coroners Act 1988 certain cases deemed to be in the public interest, such as deaths involving police officers or deaths in custody - inquests, in other words, in which the authorities have to bend over backwards to show their hands clean - are. So why shouldn't an inquest involving accusations of state collusion in the death of a Princess warrant a similar level of transparency?
Neill Blundell, a partner at Russell Jones & Walker, said: "When you have a set of facts that are disputed, when you've got one of the families up in arms as to the causes of death, convinced a conspiracy existed, then it's certainly the case that it needs to be conducted extremely cautiously."
Any conclusion reached by the deputy royal coroner on her own could be too easily dismissed by al-Fayed as the establishment looking after itself.
The reaction to today's ruling is in no way an endorsement of Mr al-Fayed's claim that his son was murdered. Lawyers merely have faith in a jury of ordinary people to cut through the ballyhoo and reach a reasonable conclusion based on the facts. "There are an enormous number of people out there who, if you ask them, believe the conspiracy theories surrounding Diana's death," Mark Stephens, a partner at Finers Stephens Innocent, said. "But while they may come with preconceived notions, when they get the hard facts and actually look at the evidence, they may realise there is no basis."
One Queen's Counsel even suggested that the judges may have felt that holding the inquest before a jury was the only way to silence Mr al-Fayed. "Give him the transparency he wants - have the matter decided by 'the people'. Then, when the inevitable result is arrived at, he will have no soap box left from which to shout 'fix' and, 11 years on, the matter will be at an end."
One thing surely at an end is the office of the royal coroner, which is set to be eliminated under the Draft Coroners Act 2006. In future, if the act passes, deaths in the royal family will be dealt with by an independent coroner from the appropriate jurisdiction. "It may have worked in Henry VIII's day," Mr Stephens said, "with all the politics and intrigue of court, but it doesn't work in the modern world where princesses die in tunnels in Paris. The ordinary coroner's inquest process is perfectly good for commoners and royals, and that's what the court has recognised today."