Mohamed Al Fayed did not go into the hospital, but was met, on the entrance steps, by an official. He did not, as he would claim later, view Princess Diana’s body, and did not talk to a nurse who, he would later announce, had given him the princess’s last words. Those were the tycoon’s private fantasies, and did not take place. It is indisputable that the billionaire’s pathetic lies, probably intended to enhance the importance of his minor role in events, caused a great deal of hurt to Diana’s children and others, and they will find it very hard to forgive his behavior. But at the time he was uncharacteristically subdued. When the official showed them around to the morgue, where a hearse was waiting, they had to wait while the keys were found to let them in. Al Fayed simply stood there, deep in shock, saying nothing.
There was some good news from the hospital official. Trevor Rees-Jones was in poor shape, but he was alive. Kez telephoned this news to the Ritz to be relayed to London and Trevor’s family.
Including the time it took to claim Dodi’s body, Al Fayed was at the hospital for less than ten minutes. Their convoy then returned to the airport, via Dodi’s apartment where they collected Diana’s luggage which had already been packed.
As the Harrods helicopter carrying Dodi’s body back to England took off from Le Bourget airport, a different kind of machine entirely was being driven down the Alma tunnel.
Incredibly, the Criminal Brigade had ordered that the municipal street cleaner be sent through the tunnel. Using mechanical scouring brushes, and spraying strong detergent, disinfectant and water, the cumbersome green machine made two passes over the section of road where Diana had died. Any forensic evidence that might have been available was destroyed in the deliberate cleanup. Or was it the start of the cover-up? Had this been a normal accident, involving a visiting VIP, the road would have remained closed for at least twenty-four hours so that a thorough, inch by inch, examination could be made. There were only three crash-scene experts at that time at police headquarters in Paris. By the time one of them could be found to send to the Alma tunnel, the road-sweeper had been through and done its damage.
Six hours after the crash, while the Harrods helicopter was still only half way across the channel, the tunnel was fully reopened to traffic. The only clue to a major crash having taken place there was a large chunk of concrete missing from the base of the thirteenth pillar. Said Christopher Dickey,
Newsweek
’s Paris correspondent, “I went there at seven o’clock to view the scene, and was stunned to find it already reopened. I would have thought that for an incident of that magnitude, involving the death of such a famous individual, the police might have kept it closed for days in their search for evidence.”
The Paris traffic police had already made a cursory examination of the site earlier, but their report would prove to be of academic interest only. Martine Monteil, in charge of the Criminal Brigade investigation, announced that she had no interest in reading any report, factual, technical or speculative, from the traffic police. There was never any consultation or cooperation between the two police departments. Nor was the traffic department asked by Judge Stephan to submit a report to his inquiry.
Equally inexplicable is the Criminal Brigade’s blatant rejection of an immediate offer of help from Mercedes-Benz, which manufactures the Mercedes, to send engineers to examine the wrecked car and assess possible causes of the crash and its condition and behavior leading up to impact. It is incontestable that Mercedes-Benz would have provided the best assessment possible.
It was to be a morning of unusual decisions. One of the most controversial was the priority command from London to perform a partial embalming of Diana’s body, from the waist up, before an autopsy was undertaken. The order was passed on to French authorities by Sir Michael Jay on behalf of Prince Charles’s St. James’s Palace office. Whether these orders originated from the prince himself or from some nameless, faceless member of the Establishment is not known. Either way, they did not come from Diana’s next of kin, making the orders illegal under French law—not that the French complained at the time. They seemed perfectly willing to cave in under the combined diplomatic and royal pressure. They also turned a blind eye to the breaking of another French law, which bans embalming if a postmortem is to be carried out, because the formaldehyde corrupts some toxicological tests.
One of these susceptible tests is for pregnancy.
The only comment from the French police came six years after the event, from Commander Mules. “The decision was taken by a higher authority than myself, before the body was released.”
The partial embalming presumably achieved what it was intended to achieve. It certainly resulted in two outcomes. It limited the chances of there being a successful, full autopsy in either France or England, and it made it difficult to confirm if Diana had been pregnant at the time of her death.
One of the doctors who carried out the procedure, Professor Dominique Lecomte, still maintains that she behaved correctly. “We did nothing wrong,” she says. Because of the embalming, she and the other forensic pathologist Professor Andre Lienhart did not carry out a full autopsy. The professors merely confirmed the nature of the injuries which caused Diana’s death.
Full notes, including an account of the embalming and the pathologists’ observations, were handed to French authorities, but were not included in the report to Judge Stephan’s inquiry. A decision was taken at the highest level to suppress this part of the medical report because, according to police leaks, Diana was pregnant and the evidence was deliberately concealed to save the princess’s family embarrassment.
Other leaks claimed that a quantity of cocaine was discovered, by police, in the back of the Mercedes, and that it was evidence of the victims’ use of this drug that was suppressed to save embarrassment.
Whatever the truth, embalming destroyed forever any positive evidence which would have revealed, beyond any doubt, if Diana was expecting a baby when she died.
According to Robert Thompson, an assistant at the Hammersmith and Fulham Mortuary in West London where an autopsy on Diana’s body was later performed, “There had been some wadding inserted into the body. I presume it had been soaked in formaldehyde or formalin, because I could get that smell.” When the mortuary blood-test results came through, they showed no indication of any alcohol in Diana’s body, even though Thompson said that her stomach contents smelled strongly of alcohol. “It permeated the room,” he said. “Indeed it was so strong that it forced me to step back a pace. Most of the others reacted to the smell. This leads me to the conclusion that there had been a deliberate attempt to cover up a potentially embarrassing situation.”
Glasgow University Professor Peter Vanezis, a former London police pathologist, said, “Nobody should be embalmed before a postmortem. There is no good reason why this should have been done in the case of the princess.”
According to Robert Thompson, at one point during the autopsy, forensic pathologist Dr. Chapman announced that Diana wasn’t pregnant. But he did not himself see the evidence for this remark. “Another person, who was present, just as categorically told me that the princess was expecting a baby when she died.”
Confirmation of this came after six years from highly rated
Daily Mail
journalist Sue Reid, who in December 2003 quoted a source, who wished to remain anonymous, saying that, in the days before she joined Dodi on holiday, Diana went to a leading London hospital to undergo a pregnancy scan. “Of course, at the time it was kept incredibly quiet,” said the source. “The princess might have been divorced, but the idea of the mother of the future king becoming a single mother was too controversial to contemplate.”
Possibly the last word on the pregnancy issue goes to Diana’s self-confessed best friend Rosa Monckton, who claimed the princess had menstruated only a week before the crash, while they were holidaying together on a boat in Greece.
So that’s that. Or is it?
According to ex-British spy Richard Tomlinson, Rosa’s brother, the Honorable Anthony Leopold Colyer Monckton, a sometime diplomat, was a serving officer in MI6. In his book, published in Moscow in 2001, Tomlinson alleges that Rosa’s husband, Dominic Lawson, provided journalistic cover for MI6 officers while he was editor of the
Spectator.
It was claimed that Lawson, son of the Tory Chancellor and brother of famous British cook Nigella Lawson, was on MI6’s books in the early 1990s and provided cover for an agent named Spencer, who was put on the case of a young Russian diplomat, Pluton Obukhov, in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.
In an excerpt from Tomlinson’s book published in
Pravda
, it was revealed that Spencer, returning from a visit to Information Operations, which deals with the British media to arrange bogus journalistic credentials, remarked, “Flippin’ outrageous. They’ve got the editor of the
Spectator
magazine on the books. He’s called ‘smallbrow’. He’s agreed to let me go out to Tallinn undercover as a freelancer for his magazine. The only condition is that I have to write an article which he’ll publish if he likes it. The cheeky bastard wants a story courtesy of the taxpayer.”
Allegations that Lawson, who was editor of the
Spectator
from 1990–95 before becoming editor of the
Sunday Telegraph
, had connections with MI6 were also made in parliament, but he has always denied ever having been their agent.
Paris-based journalist Jane Tawbase headed a
EuroBusiness
investigation into Rosa Monckton and Lawson. She wrote, “Rosa Monckton, a generation older, made an odd friend for the often unhappy princess. A svelte sophisticate and a wealthy working woman, her first relationships and loyalties lay, almost from when she was born, with the Queen. She was a regular visitor to the royal household all her life and was, for that reason, more given to loyalty to the crown than to an unhappy and disruptive outsider, one who was seriously damaging the public image of the royal family.”
When examined more closely, the friendship between Diana and Rosa, as Jane Tawbase observes, is an unnatural one: the older, very cerebral and refined woman of the world compared with a keep-fit fashion goddess whose pleasures were shopping and disco music. Tawbase poses two questions in her article. First, “whether Rosa Monckton introduced her brother to the princess and whether he was part of the MI6 operation. It was almost unthinkable that he was not,” she says.
Second, “did MI6 ask Rosa Monckton to do the key job of moving into the princess’s inner circle and become her confidante? It would certainly have made the job easier.”
Tomlinson offers detailed evidence to support his claim about Rosa’s brother, and if correct, it would make Anthony one of a long line of spies. Anthony and Rosa’s grandfather worked for Edward VIII and kept a close eye on him on behalf of the security services throughout the abdication and beyond. “It would indeed be ironic,” concludes Jane Tawbase, “if history had repeated itself and Rosa Monckton performed the same role for MI6 for Princess Diana.”
How terribly convenient it would have been to have a conduit to the woman to whom Diana told everything, and to whom she would pour out her heart almost every night. In this scenario it would not be surprising for Rosa Monckton to declare that Diana was not pregnant when she died. In the words of another celebrity witness, “She would say that, wouldn’t she?” After all, the reason for MI6 being involved in the murder was the abhorrent belief that she was expecting a Muslim child. If they killed to prevent it happening, surely they would go to great lengths afterward to prevent news of it getting out.
The conviction among the Establishment courtiers and their MI6 chums, before her death, was that Diana was pregnant. That is all that matters. Whether she was or not is now immaterial to the action that this belief helped to trigger.
The Queen’s Flight carrying Prince Charles, Diana’s two sisters—Lady Jane Fellowes and Lady Sarah McCorquodale—and a small group of aides and servants, landed in Paris shortly after 5
P.M.
They were driven directly to the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, Charles traveling with Sir Michael Jay in a silver-gray Jaguar bearing the royal standard.
They arrived at 6
P.M.
and were taken to the second floor to the room where Diana’s body was laid out. She was wearing a black dress and held the ivory rosary beads given to her by Mother Teresa. Her hair had been washed and blow-dried. Paul Burrell was already there, and he, Prince Charles and the two sisters stood quietly around the body for several minutes. Shortly afterward, Diana’s body was placed in a double coffin—a gray casket with a window, in accordance with French customs regulations, inside an oak coffin.
On the Queen’s Flight BAE 146 taking the body back to RAF Northolt, Prince Charles invited Burrell to join the main group. Burrell had flown out by scheduled flights early that morning to visit the hospital and pick up Diana’s effects from the Ritz Hotel. He had been advised there that all the Princess’s things had already been taken back to England by Mohamed Al Fayed and would be forwarded to Kensington Palace.
At RAF Northolt, eight men removed the coffin from the aircraft’s hold, covered it with the royal standard and transferred it to a waiting hearse. Diana’s body still had many miles to travel, but her lover, Dodi, in accordance with the Muslim faith, had already been buried before sunset in the warm, English earth of a private cemetery in Surrey.