Le Cock-Up or le complot? If we believed Princess Diana was the victim of a drunk driver caught in a high-speed chase with paparazzi, the conspiracy theorists would have us think otherwise, writes Rachel Donnelly in London.
Depending on which school of thought one follows, two television documentaries shown in Britain in the past two days have raised interesting and somewhat bizarre questions about the real cause of Diana's tragic death in August last year. Some nine months after Diana and Dodi Fayed died in Paris with their chauffeur, Henri Paul, commentators still refuse to believe that their death was nothing more than an accident.
A Channel 4 Dispatches documentary shown last night attempted to demystify some of the events surrounding their deaths, preferring instead to put the blame squarely on the chauffeur, Henri Paul. The programme was made with the co-operation of the Harrods boss, Mr Mohamed Al Fayed, who also advised the programme-makers of ITV's documentary shown on Wednesday night, Diana: Secrets Behind the Crash, which took the line that Diana's death was part of a grand establishment conspiracy. Early figures suggest that 12 million people watched the programme.
The Channel 4 documentary claimed that Henri Paul was drunk before he drove Diana and Dodi Fayed from the Paris Ritz, but, in a statement released through his solicitors yesterday, the former bodyguard, Mr Trevor Rees-Jones, who survived the car crash, denied Paul was drunk.
But Channel 4 stood by the documentary, saying claims by witnesses to the events leading up to the crash "show that the driver was drunk, that he sped off into the night". The station's commissioning editor, Dorothy Byrne, said the "sober facts" of the accident were that the people sitting in the back of the car were not wearing their seatbelts.
The sensitivity surrounding the death of the princess was reflected in the reaction to ITV's documentary. The British Royal expert, Lord St John of Fawsley, described the programme as "deplorable".
Mr Al Fayed's spokesman, Mr Laurie Meyer, said nine months had passed since the accident but there were still many unanswered questions about the car crash.
However, Granada Television, which made the documentary, said it raised "new questions" about the secret life of Henri Paul and a possible connection to the intelligence service in France.