One year ago last May, I was walking back to my London flat after a vigorous match of tennis in Belgrave Square when two men came up to me. “Are you Mr Taki?” “Sadly yes,” I answered. They looked as if they meant business. “I am inspector detective so and so, and this is detective inspector so and so. Can we have a word with you?” In view of the fact I had not broken any laws since 1984—the year I was busted—I was not unduly worried.

“How do you know my name?” I asked in my most supercilious manner. “Oh, we know you play tennis and we know where you live, and in view of the fact you were holding a racket….”

Well, it wasn’t what I thought. For the last three years Lord Stevens, ex-head of the London Metropolitan Police, has been holding an inquest over the death of Princess Diana, an inquest, I might add, which came about after the rib-tickling charges of Mohamed Fayed (the Egyptian tycoon whose son died alongside the princess that fateful night in the underpass of the Place de L’Alma in Paris). Fayed charges that the tragic couple was murdered by people unknown under orders from people very well known. In short, Fayed has accused Prince Philip of murder most foul, and in the plot he includes Prince Charles. Basically he says that Diana was pregnant by his son Dodi, and that a conspiracy was hatched to get rid of the mother of a future king of England and her half-Arab child. And now he’s saying it in court: On March 19, Fayed (who can afford to waste his lawyers’ time) launched a lawsuit against two hapless British cops whom he claims are leading a cover-up of the conspiracy to murder his son and the princess. What a lot of bally nonsense, as Bertie Wooster would say.

So far so bad. But back to my flat in Cadogan Gardens. The two detectives could not have been more polite. They told me what they were doing and when I asked them how did I fit in the equation, they said that mobile telephone records showed that I was among the last people to have spoken to Diana. In fact I remember it well. I rang her that afternoon from Gstaad, and when she teased me about being stiff and formal I said to her I was calling as a journalist for the London Sunday Times, where I was writing a column at the time. “Will you be wearing a chador soon?” I asked her. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “Are you having a mad love affair?” “You know better than that.” “Is it all a big joke?” “What do you think?” End of story. I wished her well and that night I heard that she had died.

Which brings me to the point of the story. Diana’s best friend, Rosa Lawson, married to Dominic Lawson, son of the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson,  and I agree on this. Rosa went on the last trip Diana took before her death and realised that there was nothing going on between Dodi and the princess. She said nothing at the time, but after her death, when I openly declared I thought there was no hanky panky going on, just a gigantic hoax in order to bother the royals who had so cruelly abandoned her, Rosa went public with her opinions, but being a lady she did not go as far as the gory details.
Dodi was not sleeping with Diana, hence if she were pregnant at the time of her death, it would have been a far greater story than it was. It would have been the second Immaculate Conception.

We must, of course, feel sympathy with Mohamed Fayed, who dreamed the whole thing up in the first place. The royals had gone off to Balmoral for the summer. Poor Diana was left alone in London, pursued by the ghastly paparazzi, unable to see her real love of the time, a Pakistani doctor. In stepped Fayed, a man of charm, a fantasist, and one not afraid to take on the big boys. He suggested a holiday on his boat and his St Tropez villa, and arranged for his son Dodi to escort her. Both Diana and Fayed had it in for the royals, and they sure made them pay for past snubs. The press went wild, and then came the tragedy.

But let’s stick to the facts. Ten years on, after numerous inquests by the French and British governments, it is undeniable that the couple died because Mohamed Fayed’s employee, Henri Paul, was drunk, drove too fast, and neither Dodi or Diana were wearing their seat belts. Tests proved that Diana was not pregnant, and I hate to say what other tests proved—mind you, tests which special branch detectives claim proved she had not been making love. I took this with a grain of salt at the time, but after ten years of an open and shut case, I feel it’s fair to mention it. Mohamed Fayed may hate Prince Philip, and I do feel for him having lost his son, but it’s scarcely credible that an inquest which opened in 2003, and whose facts were so clearly established, can still be used to claim a conspiracy against Dodi and Diana by the British establishment.

All this is part, of course, of the movement by those who hate the real England and the real English to purge that land of its culture and institutions—to undermine its monarchy (as that sausage-eating vulgarian Rupert Murdoch is constantly trying to do), to indoctrinate its schoolchildren with self-hating nonsense, to replace its population with the worst backwash of the Empire in the form of murderous mullahs, to replace fox-hunting with honor-killing, and to rip up its ancient Constitution and liberties. It pains me to see my old friend, a good-hearted girl who died in a drunk-driving accident, dug up and employed by these ghouls to suit their squalid purposes. Requiem aeternam dona eae Domine.