08.30 on a Sunday morning will not be considered by the moral descendents of those who hounded Mae West from films and radio to be debating her virtues, so I will begin by restricting quotations to the most neutral.
A man in the house is worth two in the street
(Belle of the Nineties).
Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.
Between two evils I always pick the one I've never tried before
(Klondike Annie) .
Don't marry a man to reform him, that is what Reform schools are for.
Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.
He is the kind of man who picks his friends- to pieces.
He is the kind of man and woman would have to marry to get rid of.
His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.
I don't know much about politics but I recognise a good party man when I see one.
I never loved another person the way I love myself.
I used to be Snow White and then I drifted.
I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.
Love conquers all except poverty and toothache.
Marriage is a great institution but I am not ready for an institution.
Men like women with a past because they hope history will repeat itself.
Its better to be looked over than overlooked.
It is not the men in my life I count, but the life in my men.
It is not what I do but the way I do it, it is not what I say but the way I say it.
She's the kind of woman who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.
There are no good girls gone wrong, just bad girls found out.
Too err is human but it feels divine.
To much of a good things is wonderful.
When I am good, I'm very very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better
(No Angel).
When women go wring, men go right after them.
Women are as old as they feel-and men are old when they lose their feelings.
Why don't you come upstairs sometime and see me?
(She does him wrong)
You are never too old to become younger.
May West was born in 1893 and died at the age of 87 in 1980. She was the most notorious of the Hollywood screen ladies employed to shock with their blatant sexuality as the great depression spread across the known world. Marlena Dietrich was one, Jean Harlow a second and Barbara Stanwyck a third The father of Mae West was a prize fighter, policeman and detective. Her mother was a corset and fashion model. One grandmother and other relatives were Roman Catholic. He mother was Jewish a Bavarian Jewish Immigrant and the family became Protestant. She went on the stage at 5 and performed professionally in Vaudeville at 12 as the Baby Vamp. She was encouraged by her mother who thought everything she did was fantastic. In her early twenties she commenced to write direct, produce and star in her own plays. And in 1927 she was prosecuted by city officials on the grounds the work was obscene and sentenced to ten days in jail. She was taken to dinner each evening by the Prison Warden, gaining two days off for good behaviour and media attention enhanced her career.
She then wrote a play about Homosexuality was performed in New Jersey but banned from Broadway. Her view was that talking about sex and sexuality was a human rights issue and her work poked fun at social strictures. Her works were always controversial but the publicity packed houses. He most successful work was Diamond Lil produced in 1928. She was 38 when she was offered a motion picture contract so the men of Hollywood knew what she had to offer and which could be exploited. Although her first part in a film with George Raft was small she was allowed to rewrite her scenes. In her first scene a Hatcheck girl exclaims Goodness what lovely diamonds to which Mae replied, Goodness has got nothing to do with it. Raft commented she stole everything but the cameras and did not work with her again.
Such was her success in Night after Night that she was able to bring Diamond Lil to the screen as She done him wrong in1933 and the film should also been seen for Cary Grant's first young role. The picture was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. So was her second film with Mr Grant, I'm no Angel and the two films saved Paramount from bankruptcy and she became the highest paid woman in the US second only to William Randolph Hirst. However her frank approach to sex and human relations outraged traditional moralists and in 1934 having failed to make alcohol prohibition work, attention was turned on the cinema and her films became heavily edited with the consequence that she increased the number of double entendres which also became more subtle. Her film It aint no sin was retitled Belle of New York. Her film Going to Town 1935 was also a great financial hit revealing the hypocrisy of the privileged rich class. Klondike Annie 1936 attacked religious hypocrisy She worked with Randolph Scott and then W C Fields in My Little Chickadee (1940) and although she is to have disliked the script she made the film to keep the producer from bankruptcy.
In 1937 she appeared in a radio play and a line " I remember our first date and the splinters to prove it" created panic among the radio censors but what caused the most furore was when she appeared in a Garden of Eden Sketch and she told Don Ameche on live radio, Get me a big one I feel like doing a Big Apple. She was banned from NBC and it was a decade before she was allowed on radio again. In what are described as her middle years she made occasional public performances of different kinds such as the Oscars in 1958 singing Baby its cold outside with Rock Hudson. Her autobiography was a success but it was not until 1970 when aged 77 that she appeared in her first film for a quarter of a century Myra Breckinridge that new generations took an interest in her work and it became the thing to do to invite her social events and private parties. She was described as the eighth wonder of the world. In her last decade she was answering fan mail and listed her [home number so fans could call her up and see her sometime.
10.00 Sunday The life of Mae West and Marie Antoinette could not have been more different although there are more similarities might usually be considered. First the facts. Marie was one of fifteen children of the Royal House of Austria who was engaged for aristocratic and political reasons to her second cousin when she was twelve and he fourteen. Three years later when she was 15 years old she was married by proxy in Austria on April 19th 1770 with her brother standing in as her bride groom. She was then handed over to the French on an Island in Rhine on May 7th and literally stripped of everything, Austrian, clothes, her pet dog and her friends and on May 16th she was married to the boy prince and future King of France who was more interested in hunting than girls. Not so the King whose favourite woman was a common whore who he had given a title so she could attend court which was full of the aristocratic nobles of France who led the high life at the expense of their people. Antoinette's mother and the King of France were quiet explicit about her role. She was to breed a son, preferably several and daughters who could further the incestuous hold of the Monarchy over the people's of Europe. The marriage was not consummated for seven and a half years, until after her husband had become King and she Queen of France. One has every sympathy for the couple. After the husband left her bed, the women of the bed chamber arrived, the Queen was stripped naked and dressed by those present in their order of seniority. Dressed and hair style attended, the couple had their breakfast in full view of the court and were expected to spend their day with courtiers and then be accompanied to the bed chamber where the following morning there would be a state report whether marriage had been consummated.
France and Austria had been enemies and the fifteen year old was expected to help build long standing good relations. The new King was then encouraged to help the Americans in their independence revolution against the British and there are those who argue that it was the cost of the war which resulted in the people France starving through shortages of bread. Marie Antoinette never said Let them eat cake but it was the kind of spin doctoring which the French revolutionaries were much better at than the arrogant and self confident Aristocracy.
So how did Ms Marie cope with all this, well basically as anyone would do at her age with a good credit card. She shopped, shopped and shopped, she eat the finest foods and watched the best of entertainments and she liked to gamble and play lots of games. Because the marriage was not consummated she was initially riddled with doubts about her sexuality but when that was overcome she realised the full sexual potential and personal power. There are those who argue that it was her subsequent decadence which led to the downfall of the monarchy. If it was then she paid the full price as at least her husband was given the opportunity to prepare his case before his trial and execution. Marie who had been regarded many as a foreign spy was a useful scapegoat for those on their way to take power from those who had power and then continue to exploit the people, taxing them to fund their personal extravagances and sending them into battle from which only a minor percentages would survive unharmed in body and spirit.
The closest I have been to witnessing revolution in my homeland was not at Suez crisis, or over acceptance of the nuclear deterrent, or even over the War on Terror, but in the days following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The next part of the Judicial summing up concentrated on the allegations of a conspiracy for her unlawful killing.
"Letters from Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh to Diana are said to be of importance because of what the Duke said. If they were nasty letters, it is said that they evidenced the Duke's attitude towards Diana and thus point to a wish on his part or others on his behalf to get rid of her. They were part of the so-called evidential planks on which Mohamed Al Fayed sought to implicate the Duke in a conspiracy to murder Diana and on which it is said others may conceivably have acted on his behalf, believing it to be his wish to get rid of her. It was also suggested that because there were no letters from the Duke found amongst the possessions of Diana, that they could have been destroyed because of their inflammatory content. Let us examine the state of the evidence about the letters. Copies of some letters came to light when Rosa Monckton read about the inquests and realised that what she had might be of potential significance. Rosa Monckton, you will remember, met Diana through Lucia Flecha de Lima and got to know her from about February 1992. She says Mohamed Al Fayed's suggestion that she befriended Diana in order to pass on information to MI6 is absolute fantasy, although it is accepted that someone close to her is connected to the Secret Intelligence Service. She says she does not think Diana knew of this. If you accept Rosa Monckton's evidence and that of others who knew them, she and Diana became close friends. In the spring and summer of 1992, the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana had hit very difficult times. Fortunately you do not have to explore the rights and wrongs of why it broke down, but you may think that the breakdown put Diana in a particularly difficult position, having previously been within the cocoon of the Royal Family but thereafter being on her own. Because of who she was, she was unable to break out and start a new life in the way she may have wanted. Maggie Rae, her solicitor, said that she thought Diana lived in a very odd environment and was lonely. She felt like she was up against a big machine; she had a small staff When the first letter arrived from the Duke in June 1992, Diana got in touch with Rosa Monckton and sought her help in drafting a reply. Rosa Monckton explained that she drafted replies to a number of letters from the Duke over that summer. She could see how people might have got the wrong impression about the content of the letters because Diana's first reaction on receipt of a letter was generally to be upset, but they
were in fact very supportive and trying to help, she said. Diana had faxed a number of letters to Rosa Monckton and she, in turn, provided me with copies of those faxes. She also provided copies of drafts she had compiled for Diana to use in answer and these she produced before you. Following receipt of what Rosa Monckton had in her of possession, inquiries of the Palace revealed that the Duke of Edinburgh had copies of the letters he had written to Diana and also the original responses from Diana. So we have had what Sir Miles Hunt-Davis (the Duke's private secretary) tells us, on the strength of what the Duke has told him, is the complete correspondence between the Duke and Diana It lasted between 18th June and 4th October 1992. My office asked for a complete set of correspondence and Hunt-Davis in turn asked the Duke. Copies of the letters from the Duke to Diana and the originals from Diana to the Duke were provided to me. Because of the personal nature of the letters and the fact that they are irrelevant to the issues that you have to decide, most of the contents have been redacted and you have just seen the beginnings and the ends of the letters, together with a few intermediate extracts. I say that the rest of the content was irrelevant because it provided no support whatsoever for the suggestion that the correspondence was nasty, vituperative or unpleasant. It is common ground that these were not nasty letters. Commander Jephson saw some of them and thought they were well intended. Paul Burrell saw them also. He described them as "At times blunt, frank and quite cutting, but they were nevertheless quite supportive". He emphasised that the Duke was not a nasty man. The question is whether there were any other letters that were nasty and disparaging of Diana. Rosa says she was not shown any other letters, and if there had been any, she is sure that she would have been. And if, for example, there had been one after the Martin Bashir Panorama interview, Diana would have wanted her help to answer it. Burrell explained to you that correspondence between the two covered a short period. We have seen six letters from the Duke and five from Diana, and Burrell's recollection was of a exchange of that order, all taking place in 1992. You will remember also that he was asked about a quotation from one of them found in his book, which was identical with a section that you had seen. The suggestion that the Duke had written nasty letters to the Princess has surfaced from time to time in the press. Hunt-Davis explained that the normal approach of the Duke of Edinburgh to inaccurate or defamatory press material is to ignore it. That, you may think, is a sensible approach for members of the Royal Family to adopt. They might otherwise be very busy endlessly putting out denials and corrections. But, uniquely, the Duke decided to put out a press statement on 23rd November 2002, which I think we can put up on the screen [INQ0058969]. He put this out because of the untrue and indeed hurtful and scurrilous allegations that were circulating In that press statement, the Duke located the correspondence to 1992 (as have others who saw it) and denied any suggestion that its tone was unpleasant. but that has happened to the originals of those letters from the Duke? Rosa Monckton said she did not know where Diana kept this very important correspondence, but she believed that Diana did keep it because she wanted history to know that she had tried to save her marriage. The striking reference, as you will recall, by the Duke, to his not being a marriage guidance counsellor gives the flavour of what the correspondence was about. There is some evidence of what happened to the original letters from Prince Philip and indeed one from the Queen towards the end of 1992, saying there was now a need for Diana to get divorced. That letter from the Queen followed Diana's interview with Martin Bashir shown on Panorama. Diana gave the correspondence to Mishcon, who in turn gave it to Maggie Rae, who put the letters in her safe at home. Maggie Rae read the letters and recollects nothing unpleasant about them. They were more in sorrow than in anger. Diana asked for and was given the letters back in 1997, not long before she died. Thereafter we pick up the story with the wooden box, to which I shall come shortly, but that shortly will be after our break. So we will resume again at 5 past 3. (2.50 pm) (A short break) (3.07 pm) (Jury present)
LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Members of the jury, a correction. I think I said the Queen's letter was in 1992. It was after the Bashir interview. It was in 1995, not 1992 Just before I come to the wooden box, what about other letters? Mr Mansfield says that it is astonishing that there is this small clip; there must have been others. Where are they? What evidence is there that there were any other letters anyway? You may think very little. The only person who claims to have seen any is Simone Simmons. You will have to decide whether Simone Simmons is an honest witness and, if she is, whether her evidence is reliable. You may think that Simone Simmons believed what she was telling you. Not everything she said supported a conspiracy theory, but you may think that some of what she described was rather weird or eccentric. Her evidence is important from the viewpoint of conspiracy theories and I shall deal with it in some detail in due course. But as to the letters, she told us that at the end of 1995, he and Diana were analysing handwriting with the aid of a book on graphology. Diana had quite a few letters from the Duke. She drew Simone Simmons' attention to two that upset her. She said hat one was dated 1994 and the other, probably, 1995. One was handwritten, one was typed. One was on larger paper. Diana read out one of them, mimicking Prince Philip's voice as she did so. Simone read the other one. The Duke, she said, made cruel and disparaging comments about the propriety of Diana's conduct. you did not hear the precise nature of the comments because that was not relevant and might cause distress. What is relevant is that if Simone Simmons' evidence is correct, the observations were exceedingly inflammatory and derogatory, cruel and disparaging, but there is no suggestion that they contained a threat of any kind Indeed, she went out of her way to emphasise to you that the Royal Family would have done nothing to hurt Diana. Simone does not know what happened to the letters thereafter. She says Diana told her she gave the originals to Bashir. It took a while to get them back, if she ever did. She handed them over Simone Simmons explained, when her car was parked next to Bashir's Land Rover in a car park somewhere in the West End of London. We have not heard from Bashir in person, but his comments have been read to you. He has a vague recollection of seeing some letters from the Duke of Edinburgh. If there had been any strong language in them, it is likely he would have referred to them in his interview, he said, but he did not. He does not possess and has not possessed any letters between current or former members of the Royal Family. Simone Simmons says she believes there was correspondence with the Duke before and after 1992, but that the derogatory letter was just one page The handwritten letter was the one Diana read out; it was the smaller one, on headed paper. But, she says, she was not really interested in the Duke's letters It was, she said, Prince Charles's letters that were fascinating. What interested the two of them was what could be deduced from the handwriting. Simone Simmons also gave evidence that the Duchess of York had received nasty letters from the Duke. Simone Simmons said she did not see any of the nasty letters that Michael Cole claims Prince Philip wrote to Sarah, Duchess of York, yet we heard uncontroversial evidence from the Duchess of York that she had never received any such letters. When Simone was cross-examined by Mr Horwell, it was pointed out that there were differences in the account that she had given to the Mail and what she had said in the witness box. Whether those differences help you to decide whether she is truthful and accurate is a matter for you. You may think it is significant that, even on her account, there was no threat to kill or harm Diana in these letters. This evidence is said to go to motive, but saying nasty or disparaging things against someone as, you may think, some distance removed from a threat to kill or injure. Taking her evidence at its highest, does it really take the murder theory any further? But perhaps, most critically, it seems clear enough that Diana showed the correspondence both to her solicitors and to Bashir in 1995. She clearly thought the correspondence important and, having seen it, I can well understand why. Had there been any anything of the nature suggested, surely she would have been very keen that her solicitors should be aware of it. After all, they acted for her in connection with the formal separation in 1992 and then
the divorce proceedings which were completed in the summer of 1996. Similarly, when planning the Panorama interview with Bashir, had there been any dynamite in the correspondence from the Duke, would she not have shown it to him? Although you may have difficulty with much of the evidence from Burrell, if the Duke had addressed nasty correspondence to Diana, is it not likely that she would have shown it to him? I turn next to the wooden box. Burrell says Diana showed him Prince Philip's letters and her replies. They were kept in a wooden box in her sitting room. If that is true, she must have kept copies of her replies. Prince Philip's letters were received, he said, over four to five months in 1992, but he says he saw them in 1993. They appear to have been typed on distinctive paper with an old-fashioned typewriter. They were signed "Pa" and were not nasty or disparaging although, as I have said, they contained what he described as constructive criticism
He was right that they were signed "Pa", and as have indicated, there is an extract quoted in his book which is the same as a passage that you have seen. Significantly, you may think that he was quite clear that the whole of the correspondence was completed in 1992 and was emphatic that, had there been more, he would have seen it. He said that in the final years of her life, he saw all Diana's correspondence. Had there been anything of the sort described by Simone Simmons, he would have seen it and he did not He also gave evidence that Diana herself had put out a press statement as to the absence of nastiness from Prince Philip. The statement said that the suggestion that the Queen and the Duke had been anything other than sympathetic and supportive was untrue. Burrell says that he did not keep copies of the Duke's correspondence or Diana's replies and does not have the originals. Diana kept letters from the Royal Family in a mahogany box. Burrell said he had not seen the letters from the Duke since Diana's death. Burrell gave evidence to you that he laboriously copied out letters from the Duke and other members of the Royal Family during his years of service with the Princess and that is why he was able to quote from such material in his book. you may remember that one of the quotations (not from a letter from the Duke) even contained an error which had apparently been faithfully copied by him. He denied taking the letters or photocopying them. He did tell you that he had burned what he had after he had completed the book. Additionally, Mr Faux told you that Burrell had burned correspondence from Buckingham Palace not long after the collapse of his trial. His apparent recollection, so many years after
the event, of the typeface and crest on some of the letters is, you may think, fanciful, especially as he accepted that the thought was planted by Benson and Macnamara when they saw him before passing on his details to my office. It might be thought, however, that after that trial Burrell was keen to get rid of anything that others might think he should not have.Whether it included the originals of the Duke's correspondence, perhaps we will never know for sure, but you may well find the suggestion of staying up late to copy out what were after all, long letters rather hard to swallow Burrell was at Kensington Palace with Lady Sarah McCorquodale when the box was discovered. They found the key in a tennis racket cover and opened the box Detective Inspector Milburn's note suggests Prince Philip's letters were in the box. This contradicted by Lady Sarah, but she cannot account for why Milburn recorded their existence in his note if she did not tell him they were there. Burrell and Lady Sarah put the box in the small service lift and he last saw it when Diana's belongings were packed up and sent to Althorp. Whilst Mrs Shand Kydd apparently shredded a lot of documents, it is said that she would not have destroyed anything of historical significance, like the Duke's letters. Any unshredded correspondence went to Althorp, the Spencer family home. This did not include any letters from the Duke of Edinburgh. Lady Sarah has recently been through all the papers held at Althorp and, apart from a letter of condolence to Diana on
the death of their father, there is nothing from Prince Philip. Milburn was involved in the Burrell prosecution. On 20th November 2000, he went to Lincolnshire to see Lady Sarah because he wanted to establish ownership of a dhow believed to have been stolen. The police had information that Burrell had been seen at 3.00 am removing items from Kensington Palace, including, you will recall, a wooden box. Lady Sarah showed Milburn the box, but he did not look inside it. On Lady Sarah's account it was empty. He was looking for a dhow, not letters. Lady Sarah's evidence was that she had asked Burrell to look after the contents of the box for safe-keeping the day they opened it. She expected him to take the contents to his home, which was at that time only 200 yards away. the opening of the box would have been in March 1998 at the earliest. She never saw the contents of the box again, although she asked Burrell for their return on two or three occasions later in
1998. He told her they were in packing boxes in Cheshire and he would get them to her, but he never did. when Milburn was in Lincolnshire in October 2000, he made a list of what Lady Sarah told him were the contents of the box and they included "Letters Prince Philip" and "Correspondence in box taken by Christmas". Lady Sarah said that she was 100 per cent confident that there were no letters in the box when it was opened and she did not tell Milburn there were letters from Prince Philip in it. She asked Milburn to ask Burrell for the contents of the box. Lady Sarah explained that she took the empty box home when the apartments were being cleared. It was in the service lift and appeared to have been forgotten. It was a tiny lift and there was nothing except the box in it. Burrell told Milburn he did not know where the documents were and Lady Sarah had not asked for them back. So the question remains unsolved. What happened to the originals of Prince Philip's letters? It is odd that Milburn should have referred to them if they were never in the box, but Lady Sarah is adamant that they were not there. You may think the most likely destination for those letters is Burrell or perhaps they were shredded by Diana's mother. Be that as it may, and wherever you think they went, it is difficult to see that they contain any expression of feeling on the part of the Duke that advances the conspiracy argument. There have been other suggestions that are said to support the Duke's antipathy to Diana and to the Al Fayeds. You will remember that some time was spent in evidence with both Hunt-Davis and Lord Fellowes on something called the "Way Ahead Group" and especially its meeting on 20th July 1997. A newspaper report had suggested that Diana was top of the agenda and that a file on the Al Fayeds was produced by the security services. It is true that Hunt-Davis thought it quite likely that there was some discussion at the meeting of the perceived damage to the Royal Family. I have seen both the agenda for that meeting and the minutes. They were produced through Fellowes. I have decided not to disclose their contents because they were irrelevant; that is to say they provided no support for the allegations contained in the newspaper report. Diana was not on the agenda, neither were the Al Fayeds. You heard through intelligence witnesses that there was no such file produced on the Al Fayeds. The minutes said nothing about either; and for good measure the next meeting was not scheduled for September (as suggested in the newspaper article) but months later. The Way Ahead material thus provided no support for the suggestion of the Duke or any other member of the Royal Family being hostile towards Diana or the Al Fayeds. Then it was suggested that there may be some significance in Diana ceasing to be styled "Her Royal Highness" on her divorce in the summer of 1996. Quite how that concerned the Duke of Edinburgh as opposed to all other senior members of the Royal Family has never been clear. Fears and the Mishcon note. It is said that Diana feared for her life and that this has relevance to the collision. There is evidence of her fears and it is necessary to examine this evidence in a little detail. Perhaps as good a starting point as any is the evidence of Roberto Devorik, the Argentinian with whom she was good friends. He lived in London for 30 years until 1995 and met Diana in 1981. Their contact was once or twice a month. Like others, he fell out of favour with Diana from time to time. You may think he was someone who had considerable insight into Diana's character and who has absolutely no axe to grind. He said Diana went through highs and lows and at times felt very alone. She had a quicksilver temperament and could easily manipulate people, but without malice. She had many unhappy periods in her life and a lot of pressures. It was only when she was down that she spoke about her preoccupation with death. On 18th February 1992, he was at a film premiere. The film involved marital infidelity. Diana said to him, "My in-laws think I am mad and my husband agrees with them and wants me in a home". On another occasion, she told him she wanted to "leave the cage". Sometimes she said things like "They want to kill me" and it was very difficult to know if she was speaking seriously. He said he may have said to her, "Who, the Prince of Wales," knowing she would say "no" because she loved him. Another time, at a party, she said she was sure that Prince Philip was involved with the security services; "After this, they are going to get rid of me". Devorik said that was her point of view. They went downstairs and the party continued. It was difficult to tell with her if her remarks were in jest. On another occasion, she said she would end up like Mary Queen of Scots and be chopped. Devorik said he travelled with her a lot but never feared any irregularity, as he put it, or anything to make him feel uncomfortable. Once, when travelling to Italy, they were in the VIP lounge at the airport where there was a picture of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Diana looked at he picture of the Duke and said, "He really hates me and would like to see me disappear". But Devorik added that the Duke came in and out of her favour quite often. In the plane, she talked about being blown up and said that they were slowly taking her kids -- letting her know when she could have them. She said "They only need me for official functions; then they drop me in the darkness". He advised her to get legal advice. He said that once she mentioned a conspiracy to harm her to make way for Charles to marry Tiggy Legge-Bourke, but Devorik said that the description of these incidents did not in themselves give a fair reflection of his relationship with Diana and how she was. You may think that Devorik was an honest witness who knew Diana as well as most outside the family. You must ask yourselves if his is an accurate account of events. There is no obvious reason why they are not. You will have to ask yourselves whether these statements of Diana or some of them are a true account of the way she really felt, but you will also bear in mind Devorik's evidence that he never felt she was going to be killed. He never felt any sense that there was something wrong. Things were often said in a light hearted way. He repeated three times in his evidence that he had never felt any danger at all. He also said that one of the things that really made Diana angry was that she felt the divorce decision was finally made by virtually everyone except herself: the Queen, Prince Charles,the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury, for example. turn next to what Mohamed Al Fayed had to say on this subject. One might have thought that if Diana had really feared for her life, she would have mentioned it to Mohamed Al Fayed at the time of the conversation with him shortly before the crash, when he said she told him she was pregnant and engaged. Further, this, above all, would have been the time when, if Mohamed Al Fayed's contention is correct, Diana's security should have been stepped up. Yet you may recollect that Mohamed Al Fayed said in evidence that, when he told Klein, soon after the deaths, "they've killed him", he said that that conclusion was based entirely on what Diana had told him that summer. His evidence was that Diana had expressed fears to during the summer. Those fears related to that the two of them, in Balmoral, organised an assassination in Paris using MI6. It was, he said Prince Philip who ruled the country behind the scenes. No doubt Diana did talk to Mohamed Al Fayed during the time she was on holiday and you may think it is a fair inference that she said something about her relationship with the Royal Family. However, you have only got Mohamed Al Fayed's word that she expressed fears about Prince Philip and Prince Charles and it is for you to decide on the reliability of Mohamed Al Fayed's evidence. If he thought there was anything in the fears, why were there only two bodyguards provided by him? What did Burrell have to say about this topic? He claims to have been very close to Diana. He says not everyone knew everything, but he was pretty well informed. You will probably want to take with a pinch of salt many things that he said in evidence because of the inconsistencies and, you may think, lies in what he told you, but that does not mean that nothing that he said can be of any value. He said Diana and Prince Philip had a mutual understanding at the end of her life. She and Prince Charles were on very cordial terms at that stage too We have documentary evidence of Diana's fears in the form of the Burrell note. Burrell has given different accounts of how it came into his possession and there may be some doubt about its date, the document itself being undated, but the wording of the note is there for you to see. Burrell said he had conversations with Diana in which she expressed similar sentiments, although there were no other similar notes or letters. Burrell told you he had no knowledge of the Mishcon note. Diana told Burrell she was a problem and the Royal Family did not know what to do with her. Again you may think there is some truth in that. It was put to Burrell and he agreed -- and you may think there is a good deal of force in this too -- that if he had handed the Burrell note over to Buckingham Palace, the Princess's fears would never have been made public, not least because the Mishcon note would probably have never seen the light of day. But you do have evidence that Diana expressed fears to various people, and it is up to you to decide what to make of them.Finally, Burrell said that if he had taken Diana's note seriously, he would have taken steps to urge her to protect herself Michael Gibbins, Diana's comptroller or private secretary, said that Diana never discussed private matters with him. Colin Tebbutt, her security driver, said he had never heard her express fears for her life. Rita Rogers, you may remember, say she passed on information and predictions she had received from the spirit world. It was suggested that she was responsible for putting ideas into Diana's head. indeed, Rita said she was confident of the accuracy of the information she was passing on. It was she who raised the subject of Diana's brakes having been tampered with and she who was worried about the Audi. However, she said the subject of abdication, Tiggy and Camilla, mentioned in the Mishcon note, did not come from her and nor did the information in the Burrell note. Simone Simmons said Diana told her on many occasions that she was going to be bumped off. Once her brakes failed in the rush hour and she was sure they had been tampered with. After that, she sent Simone Simmons a note saying, "If anything happens, MI5/MI6 will have done it". Her brakes were tested and, according to Simone Simmons, the problem was heavy wear. Simone Simmons destroyed the note. Simone also referred to a phone call Diana received at Kensington Palace. She, Simone, put her head against the receiver and listened for two or three minutes. Diana was being criticised for involvement in the landmine campaign. The caller said, "Accidents can happen" and Diana just said, "I am going". Diana said the caller was Nicholas Soames MP and she would sort it out in her own way. Soames denies any such conversation. Was Simone describing a threat or a criticism? Did such a conversation take place at all? At any rate, there was no mention of the conversation in her first book. There are some weird features about Simone's evidence. She specialises in energy healing and says she cleaned Diana's flat of bad energy. She had many long telephone conversations with Diana -- one lasting for ten hours. Simone Simmons said she was still communicating with Diana. She had given her a lot of information, but it was difficult to talk about it. In November 1996, Simone had a premonition about a crash in a Mercedes. It was, she said, an accident that was not an accident. The Mercedes was dark blue and there were four people in it. She had a vision of a small explosion at the rear. She used to telephone Diana saying something was going to happen. However, there was no contact between them after June 1997 as they were not speaking. Fears were never discussed with Rodney Turner, the director of Jack Barclays and a friend of Diana. He said the Burrell note came as a bombshell to him. Diana did, however, jokingly say to him, in 1996, "It is not the IRA after me, it is my husband". Steve Davis was Diana's personal chauffeur until March or April 1997. She never expressed any fears to him about cars being tampered with. He did the normal checks anyway. He never heard of a brake failure nor was he asked to check the brakes
Colin Trimming, who was one of Diana's protection officers, said she never spoke to him about fears, nor was he aware of any specific threat. On the other side of the coin, she wanted her protection removed, something that happened gradually with time and was strongly resisted by the Metropolitan Police. Ken Wharfe never saw any correspondence with the Duke of Edinburgh. Diana never made derogatory remarks about him and, indeed, thought he was quite a good father-in-law. She freely said he was surprisingly supportive of her. Wharfe said he thought Diana was viewed by the Palace as a serious and escalating problem. She outshone the rest of the Royal Family and irritated Prince Charles. Wharfe was sceptical of Diana seeing therapists. He thought this might be where she had got the idea of being killed on the road. The Mishcon note, which we will now put up and is anyway in your bundle, has been a central feature in the evidence. It arose out of a meeting at Kensington Palace on 30th October 1995. Mishcon is no longer alive and cannot throw any light on the issues that have arisen surrounding it, but you have heard from others. Present at the meeting, apart from Mishcon and Diana, were Maggie Rae, Sandra Davis and Patrick Jephson. You have the note and may like to look at it again at your leisure. Maggie Rae saw Diana subsequently. She had a pervasive belief that "they" wanted to put her aside, but she would not say who "they" were. She also said several times that the Crown should skip a generation. Maggie Rae saw Diana on a number of occasions in connection with the divorce, and it is pretty obvious that, in the autumn of 1995, Diana's feelings were running high. Maggie took the same view as Lord Mishcon. There was no evidence and she did not see that what was worrying Diana was possible While Diana was serious about her fears, they were something she would mention rather than a dominating theme of her conversation. Maggie Rae never asked Diana who she thought was going to kill her. Whilst she accepted that it was a possibility that there had been vitriolic letters from Prince Philip which Diana had not wanted to show her, Maggie thought Diana believed what she said, but that it was unrealistic. It was at a particularly low point in her life Sandra Davis also attended the meeting on 30th October 1995. The purpose of the meeting was to introduce Maggie Rae and Sandra Davis to Diana for continuity. She too said this was not the only occasion on which Diana spoke of Prince Charles not inheriting the throne and Diana being got rid of. She did not say who was trying to get rid of her. Sandra was of the opinion that Diana was, as she put it, deadly
serious about her fears, but she nevertheless never mentioned the source of her fears. Jephson was Diana's private secretary from 1990 until 1996. He said that Diana consulted astrologers and sometimes put faith in their predictions. It was an astrologer who had predicted that Charles would never be king and who also predicted a helicopter crash. He said that she saw plots everywhere and was also preoccupied with Tiggy Legge-Bourke whom she believed was pregnant. There is a conflict between Jephson's evidence and that of Davis. Jephson says that when Diana believed that her brakes had been tampered with, he got Davis to check them but nothing was found Jephson could not remember the meeting giving rise to the Mishcon note, but he did not dispute the note. He did remember a private word with Mishcon afterwards. He agreed he may have said that he half-believed Diana. He said he was more concerned with the fact that these
things were being said than about their content. He wished to know why she was saying them. By saying what she was, she was playing into the hands of the Royal Establishment, who were suggesting that she was mentally fragile and a liability to the Royal Family. An open expression of disbelief on his part might have prevented her sharing future concerns with him. He could not find any reliable evidence of her fears and was confident that her reactions were not those of someone who truly feared for her life. She gave no indication what her reliable sources were. She was a complex individual in a unique and difficult situation and he did not really know what was making her say these things. Lady Sarah McCorquodale says that Diana did not speak to her of her fears or of an accident or of Tiggy Legge-Bourke. Her true mood was not conveyed in the Mishcon note. You will remember that Lady Sarah drew our attention to a photograph from around the time of the note showing the three sisters sitting happily in the back of a car and laughing. Unlike Patrick Jephson she did not even half-believe what Diana said. She pointed out that Diana had huge mood swings. Finally, on this topic, Fellowes said that he never saw any animosity on the part of the Duke of Edinburgh towards Diana. you will have to consider whether Diana did truly fear for her life, if she did, whether such fears were justified and, if they were justified, whether they amount to any evidence from which you can draw the inference that somebody may have wanted to kill or harm her Bugging and surveillance. is argued that the issue of bugging and surveillance is linked to Diana's fears about her physical security. There is no doubt that Diana believed her communications were being monitored, nor was she alone in this belief. Let's look at the evidence. Going back to 1989, it is established that a phone call between James Gilbey and Diana, who was at Sandringham, was intercepted. This has become known as "Squidgygate". Who were responsible remains, to this day, unclear. We spent some time looking at the evidence. You heard in particular from Fellowes and Sir John Adye, the head of GCHQ at the time. Various documents were produced, including records of what was said by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons. You may think that all of the evidence that you have heard and read indicates that whoever it was that listened to the phone call, it was not the security services. there was a lot of time spent in our considering whether there was an investigation into this and, if not, why not. Although the call took place in 1989, it did not become public until the latter half of 1992 and the documents we looked at related to the first months of 1993. There was also the interception, also in late 1989, of a call between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, which became public at the end of 1992 or early 1993. You have heard about the various meetings that took place to consider what should be done. Mr Mansfield's point was that criminal offences had been committed and there should have been a criminal investigation at the very least, if not a criminal prosecution. But it had happened some years before and was it really in anyone's interests to go down that road? It was pointed out that the four participants in the telephone calls no doubt preferred that what had happened in the past should be allowed to rest and what was important was that something similar should not recur. That certainly was the way Fellowes saw it. You will remember Prince Charles's reservations and the decision of the Home Secretary that there should be no criminal investigation. You may think that a detailed investigation now of what happened in 1989 and 1992 is of little assistance in assessing who was responsible for a crash in 1997. Among those witnesses who told us Diana believed her phones were bugged was Lady Sarah, whom she told that she had had her apartment swept twice. Grahame Harding was told by the Duchess of York that Diana thought she was being watched. Harding was asked for his assistance and he met Diana at Kensington Palace in 1994 and did, he said, four sweeps, which he described as four limited sweeps in four months. He was never asked again. His equipment detected an electronic signal indicating a possible bugging device behind the wall in Diana's bedroom. However, there was no disturbance in the wall and he did not know what was behind the wall. The wall divided Diana's room from a room occupied by Prince Charles. It could have been perfectly innocent, but he believed at the time that it was a device. A day or so later the signal had gone. Ken Wharfe was, for a time, Diana's bodyguard, and he told us that in May 1993 Kensington Palace was checked for bugs. Four people came to Kensington Palace under the guise of carpet cleaners for the purpose of debugging the premises. This had, he said, been arranged by the butler on the recommendation of the Duchess of York. The four men were arrested when they asked to see the mainframe computer of the communications network. Wharfe said that Diana told him on several occasions that she felt that she and others in the Royal Family were being monitored but he did not see the subject as a really serious issue. The carpet sweepers found nothing. Wharfe assumed there would have been in investigation into Squidgygate. Indeed, Diana told him that the Queen had asked for investigation. He thought there was a possibility, but it was only his surmise, that GCHQ were involved in Squidgygate. Another possibility was the media, but he favoured the former. Wharfe was on the look-out for evidence to support allegations of bugging but he did not find any. He thought GCHQ would be monitoring members of the Royal Family because of heightened IRA activity. Well, members of the jury, again, assumption and belief is one thing: evidence is another. He said his information about conversations being routinely recorded came from Diana and he assumed it to be correct. Then there was Jephson. He said he was "quite aware" Diana's communications might be monitored by the security services and shared Wharfe's belief that members of the Royal Family might be routinely monitored, but he had no specific evidence. It seemed, he said, quite sensible to advise her that her calls might be monitored by the security services among others. It was his assumption that they would be interested from the point of view of her protection. He did not believe there was any sinister plot with Squidgygate but thought her communications might be being monitored by the security services. He advised her that her calls might be overheard and you will remember the evidence that she changed her mobile telephones regularly. Friends who were out of favour did not get the new number. Jephson was aware of her premises being swept, but was not officially notified. He learned about it unofficially. He said that Diana saw plots everywhere. She believed her brake lines were cut and also was preoccupied with Tiggy Legge-Bourke. She told him in December 1995 that she believed Tiggy was pregnant. At the conclusion of his evidence, Jephson summed the position up, saying that in advising Diana to be careful about what she said on the phone, he was thinking as much of casual eavesdroppers as of any organised monitoring scheme. Then there was Burrell. Diana believed she was being bugged and he believed it too. He thought it highly likely that people were watching her and listening to her. Mr Benson, Mohamed Al Fayed's general counsel and legal adviser, said that he had no doubt whatsoever that Diana's movements and telephone calls would have been constantly monitored. This information, he said, came from persons in or connected with the security services. You will remember that he as cross-examined about that. Raine Spencer said that Diana felt her phones were being bugged and, likewise, her home. She always seemed very conscious that she was being watched. On 18th October 1994, one of a series of meetings was held with Deputy Assistant Commissioner Meynell, the head of the Royalty Protection Group at the time. We have a note of the meeting. You may think it is very difficult to be confident of recollections about what happened over 13 years ago, but the note, which was counter-signed by Condon, having subsequently discussed the meeting with Meynell, records that Diana knew her phones were being tapped and she was certain the same applied to her vehicle. She had proof of tapping because she had set traps said, on four occasions and got what she described as "the necessary evidence". But the problem was that she would not let them have the evidence or agree to anything being done. There was a suggestion that this was a tease on the police and that her bluff was being called. It is pretty clear that she was something of an ongoing problem to the police, who wanted her to keep her protection whilst Diana wanted the freedom to be without it. There is a note of a meeting with Meynell back on 13th September 1993, when she wanted the removal immediately of four protection officers. There was another meeting on 1st February 1994, the record of which says she valued her freedom and could not be persuaded to change her mind. Condon said that it was his wish that she had protection, and if she had had it in Paris, three lives would not have been tragically lost. It suited her not to have protection, but she was not prepared to give specific reasons. In 1994/1995 and in 1996, when the IRA ceasefire broke down, the police very stridently suggested that it was a good time to reintroduce her security. Condon suspected that she thought the police were not on her side. In late 1993 and early in 1994, Lord Condon and Fellowes were in almost daily touch about it You may have detected some ongoing tension between Diana and the police. Meynell had a clear recollection, and he was quite adamant about it, that he instructed Polsa team, from the Palace of Westminster, to do a search at Kensington Palace. However, there is no surviving document to corroborate this and nor is there any real clarity when such a search may have been carried out. All this, you may think -- but it is a matter for you -- is hardly surprising bearing in mind the years that have passed, and anyway, where does it take you? After the October 1994 meeting, Condon briefed the Home Secretary, having talked the position through with Meynell. The position was clear, that Diana was not prepared to assist. The police could only help, Condon said, if she was prepared to let them. Finally, the Metropolitan Police were not authorised, nor did Condon seek such an authorisation, to intrude into Diana's life. Hasnat Khan said in his statement to the Metropolitan Police that he did not believe his calls were being bugged and that he had no evidence that the authorities had any interest in him. He seems to have been the one person who did not jump to conclusions and make assumptions. Members of the jury, I think that is enough for today. Giving you some kind of progress report, I am very nearly halfway through what I have to say to you in summing-up, although there are parts of what we are going to go through tomorrow that will have to be taken rather more slowly because of the particular detail in them. That includes some of the toxicology evidence and also evidence with regard to the collision. I think I shall have finished, if my present estimate is accurate, pretty early on Wednesday morning and you will then be retiring to consider your verdicts. Would you please now retire? You can go home, obviously, but please bear in mind the warning that I have given you. Be particularly careful not to talk to anybody about the case and bear in mind the warning that I have given to you about talking to each other in small numbers, other than the jury as a whole. We will continue tomorrow morning at 10 'clock.(4.00m) (The hearing was adjourned until 10.00 am 14 on Tuesday, 1st April 2008) INDEX (Crown copywrite with reproduction of whole sections general authorisation)
A man in the house is worth two in the street
(Belle of the Nineties).
Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.
Between two evils I always pick the one I've never tried before
(Klondike Annie) .
Don't marry a man to reform him, that is what Reform schools are for.
Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.
He is the kind of man who picks his friends- to pieces.
He is the kind of man and woman would have to marry to get rid of.
His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.
I don't know much about politics but I recognise a good party man when I see one.
I never loved another person the way I love myself.
I used to be Snow White and then I drifted.
I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.
Love conquers all except poverty and toothache.
Marriage is a great institution but I am not ready for an institution.
Men like women with a past because they hope history will repeat itself.
Its better to be looked over than overlooked.
It is not the men in my life I count, but the life in my men.
It is not what I do but the way I do it, it is not what I say but the way I say it.
She's the kind of woman who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.
There are no good girls gone wrong, just bad girls found out.
Too err is human but it feels divine.
To much of a good things is wonderful.
When I am good, I'm very very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better
(No Angel).
When women go wring, men go right after them.
Women are as old as they feel-and men are old when they lose their feelings.
Why don't you come upstairs sometime and see me?
(She does him wrong)
You are never too old to become younger.
May West was born in 1893 and died at the age of 87 in 1980. She was the most notorious of the Hollywood screen ladies employed to shock with their blatant sexuality as the great depression spread across the known world. Marlena Dietrich was one, Jean Harlow a second and Barbara Stanwyck a third The father of Mae West was a prize fighter, policeman and detective. Her mother was a corset and fashion model. One grandmother and other relatives were Roman Catholic. He mother was Jewish a Bavarian Jewish Immigrant and the family became Protestant. She went on the stage at 5 and performed professionally in Vaudeville at 12 as the Baby Vamp. She was encouraged by her mother who thought everything she did was fantastic. In her early twenties she commenced to write direct, produce and star in her own plays. And in 1927 she was prosecuted by city officials on the grounds the work was obscene and sentenced to ten days in jail. She was taken to dinner each evening by the Prison Warden, gaining two days off for good behaviour and media attention enhanced her career.
She then wrote a play about Homosexuality was performed in New Jersey but banned from Broadway. Her view was that talking about sex and sexuality was a human rights issue and her work poked fun at social strictures. Her works were always controversial but the publicity packed houses. He most successful work was Diamond Lil produced in 1928. She was 38 when she was offered a motion picture contract so the men of Hollywood knew what she had to offer and which could be exploited. Although her first part in a film with George Raft was small she was allowed to rewrite her scenes. In her first scene a Hatcheck girl exclaims Goodness what lovely diamonds to which Mae replied, Goodness has got nothing to do with it. Raft commented she stole everything but the cameras and did not work with her again.
Such was her success in Night after Night that she was able to bring Diamond Lil to the screen as She done him wrong in1933 and the film should also been seen for Cary Grant's first young role. The picture was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. So was her second film with Mr Grant, I'm no Angel and the two films saved Paramount from bankruptcy and she became the highest paid woman in the US second only to William Randolph Hirst. However her frank approach to sex and human relations outraged traditional moralists and in 1934 having failed to make alcohol prohibition work, attention was turned on the cinema and her films became heavily edited with the consequence that she increased the number of double entendres which also became more subtle. Her film It aint no sin was retitled Belle of New York. Her film Going to Town 1935 was also a great financial hit revealing the hypocrisy of the privileged rich class. Klondike Annie 1936 attacked religious hypocrisy She worked with Randolph Scott and then W C Fields in My Little Chickadee (1940) and although she is to have disliked the script she made the film to keep the producer from bankruptcy.
In 1937 she appeared in a radio play and a line " I remember our first date and the splinters to prove it" created panic among the radio censors but what caused the most furore was when she appeared in a Garden of Eden Sketch and she told Don Ameche on live radio, Get me a big one I feel like doing a Big Apple. She was banned from NBC and it was a decade before she was allowed on radio again. In what are described as her middle years she made occasional public performances of different kinds such as the Oscars in 1958 singing Baby its cold outside with Rock Hudson. Her autobiography was a success but it was not until 1970 when aged 77 that she appeared in her first film for a quarter of a century Myra Breckinridge that new generations took an interest in her work and it became the thing to do to invite her social events and private parties. She was described as the eighth wonder of the world. In her last decade she was answering fan mail and listed her [home number so fans could call her up and see her sometime.
10.00 Sunday The life of Mae West and Marie Antoinette could not have been more different although there are more similarities might usually be considered. First the facts. Marie was one of fifteen children of the Royal House of Austria who was engaged for aristocratic and political reasons to her second cousin when she was twelve and he fourteen. Three years later when she was 15 years old she was married by proxy in Austria on April 19th 1770 with her brother standing in as her bride groom. She was then handed over to the French on an Island in Rhine on May 7th and literally stripped of everything, Austrian, clothes, her pet dog and her friends and on May 16th she was married to the boy prince and future King of France who was more interested in hunting than girls. Not so the King whose favourite woman was a common whore who he had given a title so she could attend court which was full of the aristocratic nobles of France who led the high life at the expense of their people. Antoinette's mother and the King of France were quiet explicit about her role. She was to breed a son, preferably several and daughters who could further the incestuous hold of the Monarchy over the people's of Europe. The marriage was not consummated for seven and a half years, until after her husband had become King and she Queen of France. One has every sympathy for the couple. After the husband left her bed, the women of the bed chamber arrived, the Queen was stripped naked and dressed by those present in their order of seniority. Dressed and hair style attended, the couple had their breakfast in full view of the court and were expected to spend their day with courtiers and then be accompanied to the bed chamber where the following morning there would be a state report whether marriage had been consummated.
France and Austria had been enemies and the fifteen year old was expected to help build long standing good relations. The new King was then encouraged to help the Americans in their independence revolution against the British and there are those who argue that it was the cost of the war which resulted in the people France starving through shortages of bread. Marie Antoinette never said Let them eat cake but it was the kind of spin doctoring which the French revolutionaries were much better at than the arrogant and self confident Aristocracy.
So how did Ms Marie cope with all this, well basically as anyone would do at her age with a good credit card. She shopped, shopped and shopped, she eat the finest foods and watched the best of entertainments and she liked to gamble and play lots of games. Because the marriage was not consummated she was initially riddled with doubts about her sexuality but when that was overcome she realised the full sexual potential and personal power. There are those who argue that it was her subsequent decadence which led to the downfall of the monarchy. If it was then she paid the full price as at least her husband was given the opportunity to prepare his case before his trial and execution. Marie who had been regarded many as a foreign spy was a useful scapegoat for those on their way to take power from those who had power and then continue to exploit the people, taxing them to fund their personal extravagances and sending them into battle from which only a minor percentages would survive unharmed in body and spirit.
The closest I have been to witnessing revolution in my homeland was not at Suez crisis, or over acceptance of the nuclear deterrent, or even over the War on Terror, but in the days following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The next part of the Judicial summing up concentrated on the allegations of a conspiracy for her unlawful killing.
"Letters from Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh to Diana are said to be of importance because of what the Duke said. If they were nasty letters, it is said that they evidenced the Duke's attitude towards Diana and thus point to a wish on his part or others on his behalf to get rid of her. They were part of the so-called evidential planks on which Mohamed Al Fayed sought to implicate the Duke in a conspiracy to murder Diana and on which it is said others may conceivably have acted on his behalf, believing it to be his wish to get rid of her. It was also suggested that because there were no letters from the Duke found amongst the possessions of Diana, that they could have been destroyed because of their inflammatory content. Let us examine the state of the evidence about the letters. Copies of some letters came to light when Rosa Monckton read about the inquests and realised that what she had might be of potential significance. Rosa Monckton, you will remember, met Diana through Lucia Flecha de Lima and got to know her from about February 1992. She says Mohamed Al Fayed's suggestion that she befriended Diana in order to pass on information to MI6 is absolute fantasy, although it is accepted that someone close to her is connected to the Secret Intelligence Service. She says she does not think Diana knew of this. If you accept Rosa Monckton's evidence and that of others who knew them, she and Diana became close friends. In the spring and summer of 1992, the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana had hit very difficult times. Fortunately you do not have to explore the rights and wrongs of why it broke down, but you may think that the breakdown put Diana in a particularly difficult position, having previously been within the cocoon of the Royal Family but thereafter being on her own. Because of who she was, she was unable to break out and start a new life in the way she may have wanted. Maggie Rae, her solicitor, said that she thought Diana lived in a very odd environment and was lonely. She felt like she was up against a big machine; she had a small staff When the first letter arrived from the Duke in June 1992, Diana got in touch with Rosa Monckton and sought her help in drafting a reply. Rosa Monckton explained that she drafted replies to a number of letters from the Duke over that summer. She could see how people might have got the wrong impression about the content of the letters because Diana's first reaction on receipt of a letter was generally to be upset, but they
were in fact very supportive and trying to help, she said. Diana had faxed a number of letters to Rosa Monckton and she, in turn, provided me with copies of those faxes. She also provided copies of drafts she had compiled for Diana to use in answer and these she produced before you. Following receipt of what Rosa Monckton had in her of possession, inquiries of the Palace revealed that the Duke of Edinburgh had copies of the letters he had written to Diana and also the original responses from Diana. So we have had what Sir Miles Hunt-Davis (the Duke's private secretary) tells us, on the strength of what the Duke has told him, is the complete correspondence between the Duke and Diana It lasted between 18th June and 4th October 1992. My office asked for a complete set of correspondence and Hunt-Davis in turn asked the Duke. Copies of the letters from the Duke to Diana and the originals from Diana to the Duke were provided to me. Because of the personal nature of the letters and the fact that they are irrelevant to the issues that you have to decide, most of the contents have been redacted and you have just seen the beginnings and the ends of the letters, together with a few intermediate extracts. I say that the rest of the content was irrelevant because it provided no support whatsoever for the suggestion that the correspondence was nasty, vituperative or unpleasant. It is common ground that these were not nasty letters. Commander Jephson saw some of them and thought they were well intended. Paul Burrell saw them also. He described them as "At times blunt, frank and quite cutting, but they were nevertheless quite supportive". He emphasised that the Duke was not a nasty man. The question is whether there were any other letters that were nasty and disparaging of Diana. Rosa says she was not shown any other letters, and if there had been any, she is sure that she would have been. And if, for example, there had been one after the Martin Bashir Panorama interview, Diana would have wanted her help to answer it. Burrell explained to you that correspondence between the two covered a short period. We have seen six letters from the Duke and five from Diana, and Burrell's recollection was of a exchange of that order, all taking place in 1992. You will remember also that he was asked about a quotation from one of them found in his book, which was identical with a section that you had seen. The suggestion that the Duke had written nasty letters to the Princess has surfaced from time to time in the press. Hunt-Davis explained that the normal approach of the Duke of Edinburgh to inaccurate or defamatory press material is to ignore it. That, you may think, is a sensible approach for members of the Royal Family to adopt. They might otherwise be very busy endlessly putting out denials and corrections. But, uniquely, the Duke decided to put out a press statement on 23rd November 2002, which I think we can put up on the screen [INQ0058969]. He put this out because of the untrue and indeed hurtful and scurrilous allegations that were circulating In that press statement, the Duke located the correspondence to 1992 (as have others who saw it) and denied any suggestion that its tone was unpleasant. but that has happened to the originals of those letters from the Duke? Rosa Monckton said she did not know where Diana kept this very important correspondence, but she believed that Diana did keep it because she wanted history to know that she had tried to save her marriage. The striking reference, as you will recall, by the Duke, to his not being a marriage guidance counsellor gives the flavour of what the correspondence was about. There is some evidence of what happened to the original letters from Prince Philip and indeed one from the Queen towards the end of 1992, saying there was now a need for Diana to get divorced. That letter from the Queen followed Diana's interview with Martin Bashir shown on Panorama. Diana gave the correspondence to Mishcon, who in turn gave it to Maggie Rae, who put the letters in her safe at home. Maggie Rae read the letters and recollects nothing unpleasant about them. They were more in sorrow than in anger. Diana asked for and was given the letters back in 1997, not long before she died. Thereafter we pick up the story with the wooden box, to which I shall come shortly, but that shortly will be after our break. So we will resume again at 5 past 3. (2.50 pm) (A short break) (3.07 pm) (Jury present)
LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Members of the jury, a correction. I think I said the Queen's letter was in 1992. It was after the Bashir interview. It was in 1995, not 1992 Just before I come to the wooden box, what about other letters? Mr Mansfield says that it is astonishing that there is this small clip; there must have been others. Where are they? What evidence is there that there were any other letters anyway? You may think very little. The only person who claims to have seen any is Simone Simmons. You will have to decide whether Simone Simmons is an honest witness and, if she is, whether her evidence is reliable. You may think that Simone Simmons believed what she was telling you. Not everything she said supported a conspiracy theory, but you may think that some of what she described was rather weird or eccentric. Her evidence is important from the viewpoint of conspiracy theories and I shall deal with it in some detail in due course. But as to the letters, she told us that at the end of 1995, he and Diana were analysing handwriting with the aid of a book on graphology. Diana had quite a few letters from the Duke. She drew Simone Simmons' attention to two that upset her. She said hat one was dated 1994 and the other, probably, 1995. One was handwritten, one was typed. One was on larger paper. Diana read out one of them, mimicking Prince Philip's voice as she did so. Simone read the other one. The Duke, she said, made cruel and disparaging comments about the propriety of Diana's conduct. you did not hear the precise nature of the comments because that was not relevant and might cause distress. What is relevant is that if Simone Simmons' evidence is correct, the observations were exceedingly inflammatory and derogatory, cruel and disparaging, but there is no suggestion that they contained a threat of any kind Indeed, she went out of her way to emphasise to you that the Royal Family would have done nothing to hurt Diana. Simone does not know what happened to the letters thereafter. She says Diana told her she gave the originals to Bashir. It took a while to get them back, if she ever did. She handed them over Simone Simmons explained, when her car was parked next to Bashir's Land Rover in a car park somewhere in the West End of London. We have not heard from Bashir in person, but his comments have been read to you. He has a vague recollection of seeing some letters from the Duke of Edinburgh. If there had been any strong language in them, it is likely he would have referred to them in his interview, he said, but he did not. He does not possess and has not possessed any letters between current or former members of the Royal Family. Simone Simmons says she believes there was correspondence with the Duke before and after 1992, but that the derogatory letter was just one page The handwritten letter was the one Diana read out; it was the smaller one, on headed paper. But, she says, she was not really interested in the Duke's letters It was, she said, Prince Charles's letters that were fascinating. What interested the two of them was what could be deduced from the handwriting. Simone Simmons also gave evidence that the Duchess of York had received nasty letters from the Duke. Simone Simmons said she did not see any of the nasty letters that Michael Cole claims Prince Philip wrote to Sarah, Duchess of York, yet we heard uncontroversial evidence from the Duchess of York that she had never received any such letters. When Simone was cross-examined by Mr Horwell, it was pointed out that there were differences in the account that she had given to the Mail and what she had said in the witness box. Whether those differences help you to decide whether she is truthful and accurate is a matter for you. You may think it is significant that, even on her account, there was no threat to kill or harm Diana in these letters. This evidence is said to go to motive, but saying nasty or disparaging things against someone as, you may think, some distance removed from a threat to kill or injure. Taking her evidence at its highest, does it really take the murder theory any further? But perhaps, most critically, it seems clear enough that Diana showed the correspondence both to her solicitors and to Bashir in 1995. She clearly thought the correspondence important and, having seen it, I can well understand why. Had there been any anything of the nature suggested, surely she would have been very keen that her solicitors should be aware of it. After all, they acted for her in connection with the formal separation in 1992 and then
the divorce proceedings which were completed in the summer of 1996. Similarly, when planning the Panorama interview with Bashir, had there been any dynamite in the correspondence from the Duke, would she not have shown it to him? Although you may have difficulty with much of the evidence from Burrell, if the Duke had addressed nasty correspondence to Diana, is it not likely that she would have shown it to him? I turn next to the wooden box. Burrell says Diana showed him Prince Philip's letters and her replies. They were kept in a wooden box in her sitting room. If that is true, she must have kept copies of her replies. Prince Philip's letters were received, he said, over four to five months in 1992, but he says he saw them in 1993. They appear to have been typed on distinctive paper with an old-fashioned typewriter. They were signed "Pa" and were not nasty or disparaging although, as I have said, they contained what he described as constructive criticism
He was right that they were signed "Pa", and as have indicated, there is an extract quoted in his book which is the same as a passage that you have seen. Significantly, you may think that he was quite clear that the whole of the correspondence was completed in 1992 and was emphatic that, had there been more, he would have seen it. He said that in the final years of her life, he saw all Diana's correspondence. Had there been anything of the sort described by Simone Simmons, he would have seen it and he did not He also gave evidence that Diana herself had put out a press statement as to the absence of nastiness from Prince Philip. The statement said that the suggestion that the Queen and the Duke had been anything other than sympathetic and supportive was untrue. Burrell says that he did not keep copies of the Duke's correspondence or Diana's replies and does not have the originals. Diana kept letters from the Royal Family in a mahogany box. Burrell said he had not seen the letters from the Duke since Diana's death. Burrell gave evidence to you that he laboriously copied out letters from the Duke and other members of the Royal Family during his years of service with the Princess and that is why he was able to quote from such material in his book. you may remember that one of the quotations (not from a letter from the Duke) even contained an error which had apparently been faithfully copied by him. He denied taking the letters or photocopying them. He did tell you that he had burned what he had after he had completed the book. Additionally, Mr Faux told you that Burrell had burned correspondence from Buckingham Palace not long after the collapse of his trial. His apparent recollection, so many years after
the event, of the typeface and crest on some of the letters is, you may think, fanciful, especially as he accepted that the thought was planted by Benson and Macnamara when they saw him before passing on his details to my office. It might be thought, however, that after that trial Burrell was keen to get rid of anything that others might think he should not have.Whether it included the originals of the Duke's correspondence, perhaps we will never know for sure, but you may well find the suggestion of staying up late to copy out what were after all, long letters rather hard to swallow Burrell was at Kensington Palace with Lady Sarah McCorquodale when the box was discovered. They found the key in a tennis racket cover and opened the box Detective Inspector Milburn's note suggests Prince Philip's letters were in the box. This contradicted by Lady Sarah, but she cannot account for why Milburn recorded their existence in his note if she did not tell him they were there. Burrell and Lady Sarah put the box in the small service lift and he last saw it when Diana's belongings were packed up and sent to Althorp. Whilst Mrs Shand Kydd apparently shredded a lot of documents, it is said that she would not have destroyed anything of historical significance, like the Duke's letters. Any unshredded correspondence went to Althorp, the Spencer family home. This did not include any letters from the Duke of Edinburgh. Lady Sarah has recently been through all the papers held at Althorp and, apart from a letter of condolence to Diana on
the death of their father, there is nothing from Prince Philip. Milburn was involved in the Burrell prosecution. On 20th November 2000, he went to Lincolnshire to see Lady Sarah because he wanted to establish ownership of a dhow believed to have been stolen. The police had information that Burrell had been seen at 3.00 am removing items from Kensington Palace, including, you will recall, a wooden box. Lady Sarah showed Milburn the box, but he did not look inside it. On Lady Sarah's account it was empty. He was looking for a dhow, not letters. Lady Sarah's evidence was that she had asked Burrell to look after the contents of the box for safe-keeping the day they opened it. She expected him to take the contents to his home, which was at that time only 200 yards away. the opening of the box would have been in March 1998 at the earliest. She never saw the contents of the box again, although she asked Burrell for their return on two or three occasions later in
1998. He told her they were in packing boxes in Cheshire and he would get them to her, but he never did. when Milburn was in Lincolnshire in October 2000, he made a list of what Lady Sarah told him were the contents of the box and they included "Letters Prince Philip" and "Correspondence in box taken by Christmas". Lady Sarah said that she was 100 per cent confident that there were no letters in the box when it was opened and she did not tell Milburn there were letters from Prince Philip in it. She asked Milburn to ask Burrell for the contents of the box. Lady Sarah explained that she took the empty box home when the apartments were being cleared. It was in the service lift and appeared to have been forgotten. It was a tiny lift and there was nothing except the box in it. Burrell told Milburn he did not know where the documents were and Lady Sarah had not asked for them back. So the question remains unsolved. What happened to the originals of Prince Philip's letters? It is odd that Milburn should have referred to them if they were never in the box, but Lady Sarah is adamant that they were not there. You may think the most likely destination for those letters is Burrell or perhaps they were shredded by Diana's mother. Be that as it may, and wherever you think they went, it is difficult to see that they contain any expression of feeling on the part of the Duke that advances the conspiracy argument. There have been other suggestions that are said to support the Duke's antipathy to Diana and to the Al Fayeds. You will remember that some time was spent in evidence with both Hunt-Davis and Lord Fellowes on something called the "Way Ahead Group" and especially its meeting on 20th July 1997. A newspaper report had suggested that Diana was top of the agenda and that a file on the Al Fayeds was produced by the security services. It is true that Hunt-Davis thought it quite likely that there was some discussion at the meeting of the perceived damage to the Royal Family. I have seen both the agenda for that meeting and the minutes. They were produced through Fellowes. I have decided not to disclose their contents because they were irrelevant; that is to say they provided no support for the allegations contained in the newspaper report. Diana was not on the agenda, neither were the Al Fayeds. You heard through intelligence witnesses that there was no such file produced on the Al Fayeds. The minutes said nothing about either; and for good measure the next meeting was not scheduled for September (as suggested in the newspaper article) but months later. The Way Ahead material thus provided no support for the suggestion of the Duke or any other member of the Royal Family being hostile towards Diana or the Al Fayeds. Then it was suggested that there may be some significance in Diana ceasing to be styled "Her Royal Highness" on her divorce in the summer of 1996. Quite how that concerned the Duke of Edinburgh as opposed to all other senior members of the Royal Family has never been clear. Fears and the Mishcon note. It is said that Diana feared for her life and that this has relevance to the collision. There is evidence of her fears and it is necessary to examine this evidence in a little detail. Perhaps as good a starting point as any is the evidence of Roberto Devorik, the Argentinian with whom she was good friends. He lived in London for 30 years until 1995 and met Diana in 1981. Their contact was once or twice a month. Like others, he fell out of favour with Diana from time to time. You may think he was someone who had considerable insight into Diana's character and who has absolutely no axe to grind. He said Diana went through highs and lows and at times felt very alone. She had a quicksilver temperament and could easily manipulate people, but without malice. She had many unhappy periods in her life and a lot of pressures. It was only when she was down that she spoke about her preoccupation with death. On 18th February 1992, he was at a film premiere. The film involved marital infidelity. Diana said to him, "My in-laws think I am mad and my husband agrees with them and wants me in a home". On another occasion, she told him she wanted to "leave the cage". Sometimes she said things like "They want to kill me" and it was very difficult to know if she was speaking seriously. He said he may have said to her, "Who, the Prince of Wales," knowing she would say "no" because she loved him. Another time, at a party, she said she was sure that Prince Philip was involved with the security services; "After this, they are going to get rid of me". Devorik said that was her point of view. They went downstairs and the party continued. It was difficult to tell with her if her remarks were in jest. On another occasion, she said she would end up like Mary Queen of Scots and be chopped. Devorik said he travelled with her a lot but never feared any irregularity, as he put it, or anything to make him feel uncomfortable. Once, when travelling to Italy, they were in the VIP lounge at the airport where there was a picture of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Diana looked at he picture of the Duke and said, "He really hates me and would like to see me disappear". But Devorik added that the Duke came in and out of her favour quite often. In the plane, she talked about being blown up and said that they were slowly taking her kids -- letting her know when she could have them. She said "They only need me for official functions; then they drop me in the darkness". He advised her to get legal advice. He said that once she mentioned a conspiracy to harm her to make way for Charles to marry Tiggy Legge-Bourke, but Devorik said that the description of these incidents did not in themselves give a fair reflection of his relationship with Diana and how she was. You may think that Devorik was an honest witness who knew Diana as well as most outside the family. You must ask yourselves if his is an accurate account of events. There is no obvious reason why they are not. You will have to ask yourselves whether these statements of Diana or some of them are a true account of the way she really felt, but you will also bear in mind Devorik's evidence that he never felt she was going to be killed. He never felt any sense that there was something wrong. Things were often said in a light hearted way. He repeated three times in his evidence that he had never felt any danger at all. He also said that one of the things that really made Diana angry was that she felt the divorce decision was finally made by virtually everyone except herself: the Queen, Prince Charles,the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury, for example. turn next to what Mohamed Al Fayed had to say on this subject. One might have thought that if Diana had really feared for her life, she would have mentioned it to Mohamed Al Fayed at the time of the conversation with him shortly before the crash, when he said she told him she was pregnant and engaged. Further, this, above all, would have been the time when, if Mohamed Al Fayed's contention is correct, Diana's security should have been stepped up. Yet you may recollect that Mohamed Al Fayed said in evidence that, when he told Klein, soon after the deaths, "they've killed him", he said that that conclusion was based entirely on what Diana had told him that summer. His evidence was that Diana had expressed fears to during the summer. Those fears related to that the two of them, in Balmoral, organised an assassination in Paris using MI6. It was, he said Prince Philip who ruled the country behind the scenes. No doubt Diana did talk to Mohamed Al Fayed during the time she was on holiday and you may think it is a fair inference that she said something about her relationship with the Royal Family. However, you have only got Mohamed Al Fayed's word that she expressed fears about Prince Philip and Prince Charles and it is for you to decide on the reliability of Mohamed Al Fayed's evidence. If he thought there was anything in the fears, why were there only two bodyguards provided by him? What did Burrell have to say about this topic? He claims to have been very close to Diana. He says not everyone knew everything, but he was pretty well informed. You will probably want to take with a pinch of salt many things that he said in evidence because of the inconsistencies and, you may think, lies in what he told you, but that does not mean that nothing that he said can be of any value. He said Diana and Prince Philip had a mutual understanding at the end of her life. She and Prince Charles were on very cordial terms at that stage too We have documentary evidence of Diana's fears in the form of the Burrell note. Burrell has given different accounts of how it came into his possession and there may be some doubt about its date, the document itself being undated, but the wording of the note is there for you to see. Burrell said he had conversations with Diana in which she expressed similar sentiments, although there were no other similar notes or letters. Burrell told you he had no knowledge of the Mishcon note. Diana told Burrell she was a problem and the Royal Family did not know what to do with her. Again you may think there is some truth in that. It was put to Burrell and he agreed -- and you may think there is a good deal of force in this too -- that if he had handed the Burrell note over to Buckingham Palace, the Princess's fears would never have been made public, not least because the Mishcon note would probably have never seen the light of day. But you do have evidence that Diana expressed fears to various people, and it is up to you to decide what to make of them.Finally, Burrell said that if he had taken Diana's note seriously, he would have taken steps to urge her to protect herself Michael Gibbins, Diana's comptroller or private secretary, said that Diana never discussed private matters with him. Colin Tebbutt, her security driver, said he had never heard her express fears for her life. Rita Rogers, you may remember, say she passed on information and predictions she had received from the spirit world. It was suggested that she was responsible for putting ideas into Diana's head. indeed, Rita said she was confident of the accuracy of the information she was passing on. It was she who raised the subject of Diana's brakes having been tampered with and she who was worried about the Audi. However, she said the subject of abdication, Tiggy and Camilla, mentioned in the Mishcon note, did not come from her and nor did the information in the Burrell note. Simone Simmons said Diana told her on many occasions that she was going to be bumped off. Once her brakes failed in the rush hour and she was sure they had been tampered with. After that, she sent Simone Simmons a note saying, "If anything happens, MI5/MI6 will have done it". Her brakes were tested and, according to Simone Simmons, the problem was heavy wear. Simone Simmons destroyed the note. Simone also referred to a phone call Diana received at Kensington Palace. She, Simone, put her head against the receiver and listened for two or three minutes. Diana was being criticised for involvement in the landmine campaign. The caller said, "Accidents can happen" and Diana just said, "I am going". Diana said the caller was Nicholas Soames MP and she would sort it out in her own way. Soames denies any such conversation. Was Simone describing a threat or a criticism? Did such a conversation take place at all? At any rate, there was no mention of the conversation in her first book. There are some weird features about Simone's evidence. She specialises in energy healing and says she cleaned Diana's flat of bad energy. She had many long telephone conversations with Diana -- one lasting for ten hours. Simone Simmons said she was still communicating with Diana. She had given her a lot of information, but it was difficult to talk about it. In November 1996, Simone had a premonition about a crash in a Mercedes. It was, she said, an accident that was not an accident. The Mercedes was dark blue and there were four people in it. She had a vision of a small explosion at the rear. She used to telephone Diana saying something was going to happen. However, there was no contact between them after June 1997 as they were not speaking. Fears were never discussed with Rodney Turner, the director of Jack Barclays and a friend of Diana. He said the Burrell note came as a bombshell to him. Diana did, however, jokingly say to him, in 1996, "It is not the IRA after me, it is my husband". Steve Davis was Diana's personal chauffeur until March or April 1997. She never expressed any fears to him about cars being tampered with. He did the normal checks anyway. He never heard of a brake failure nor was he asked to check the brakes
Colin Trimming, who was one of Diana's protection officers, said she never spoke to him about fears, nor was he aware of any specific threat. On the other side of the coin, she wanted her protection removed, something that happened gradually with time and was strongly resisted by the Metropolitan Police. Ken Wharfe never saw any correspondence with the Duke of Edinburgh. Diana never made derogatory remarks about him and, indeed, thought he was quite a good father-in-law. She freely said he was surprisingly supportive of her. Wharfe said he thought Diana was viewed by the Palace as a serious and escalating problem. She outshone the rest of the Royal Family and irritated Prince Charles. Wharfe was sceptical of Diana seeing therapists. He thought this might be where she had got the idea of being killed on the road. The Mishcon note, which we will now put up and is anyway in your bundle, has been a central feature in the evidence. It arose out of a meeting at Kensington Palace on 30th October 1995. Mishcon is no longer alive and cannot throw any light on the issues that have arisen surrounding it, but you have heard from others. Present at the meeting, apart from Mishcon and Diana, were Maggie Rae, Sandra Davis and Patrick Jephson. You have the note and may like to look at it again at your leisure. Maggie Rae saw Diana subsequently. She had a pervasive belief that "they" wanted to put her aside, but she would not say who "they" were. She also said several times that the Crown should skip a generation. Maggie Rae saw Diana on a number of occasions in connection with the divorce, and it is pretty obvious that, in the autumn of 1995, Diana's feelings were running high. Maggie took the same view as Lord Mishcon. There was no evidence and she did not see that what was worrying Diana was possible While Diana was serious about her fears, they were something she would mention rather than a dominating theme of her conversation. Maggie Rae never asked Diana who she thought was going to kill her. Whilst she accepted that it was a possibility that there had been vitriolic letters from Prince Philip which Diana had not wanted to show her, Maggie thought Diana believed what she said, but that it was unrealistic. It was at a particularly low point in her life Sandra Davis also attended the meeting on 30th October 1995. The purpose of the meeting was to introduce Maggie Rae and Sandra Davis to Diana for continuity. She too said this was not the only occasion on which Diana spoke of Prince Charles not inheriting the throne and Diana being got rid of. She did not say who was trying to get rid of her. Sandra was of the opinion that Diana was, as she put it, deadly
serious about her fears, but she nevertheless never mentioned the source of her fears. Jephson was Diana's private secretary from 1990 until 1996. He said that Diana consulted astrologers and sometimes put faith in their predictions. It was an astrologer who had predicted that Charles would never be king and who also predicted a helicopter crash. He said that she saw plots everywhere and was also preoccupied with Tiggy Legge-Bourke whom she believed was pregnant. There is a conflict between Jephson's evidence and that of Davis. Jephson says that when Diana believed that her brakes had been tampered with, he got Davis to check them but nothing was found Jephson could not remember the meeting giving rise to the Mishcon note, but he did not dispute the note. He did remember a private word with Mishcon afterwards. He agreed he may have said that he half-believed Diana. He said he was more concerned with the fact that these
things were being said than about their content. He wished to know why she was saying them. By saying what she was, she was playing into the hands of the Royal Establishment, who were suggesting that she was mentally fragile and a liability to the Royal Family. An open expression of disbelief on his part might have prevented her sharing future concerns with him. He could not find any reliable evidence of her fears and was confident that her reactions were not those of someone who truly feared for her life. She gave no indication what her reliable sources were. She was a complex individual in a unique and difficult situation and he did not really know what was making her say these things. Lady Sarah McCorquodale says that Diana did not speak to her of her fears or of an accident or of Tiggy Legge-Bourke. Her true mood was not conveyed in the Mishcon note. You will remember that Lady Sarah drew our attention to a photograph from around the time of the note showing the three sisters sitting happily in the back of a car and laughing. Unlike Patrick Jephson she did not even half-believe what Diana said. She pointed out that Diana had huge mood swings. Finally, on this topic, Fellowes said that he never saw any animosity on the part of the Duke of Edinburgh towards Diana. you will have to consider whether Diana did truly fear for her life, if she did, whether such fears were justified and, if they were justified, whether they amount to any evidence from which you can draw the inference that somebody may have wanted to kill or harm her Bugging and surveillance. is argued that the issue of bugging and surveillance is linked to Diana's fears about her physical security. There is no doubt that Diana believed her communications were being monitored, nor was she alone in this belief. Let's look at the evidence. Going back to 1989, it is established that a phone call between James Gilbey and Diana, who was at Sandringham, was intercepted. This has become known as "Squidgygate". Who were responsible remains, to this day, unclear. We spent some time looking at the evidence. You heard in particular from Fellowes and Sir John Adye, the head of GCHQ at the time. Various documents were produced, including records of what was said by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons. You may think that all of the evidence that you have heard and read indicates that whoever it was that listened to the phone call, it was not the security services. there was a lot of time spent in our considering whether there was an investigation into this and, if not, why not. Although the call took place in 1989, it did not become public until the latter half of 1992 and the documents we looked at related to the first months of 1993. There was also the interception, also in late 1989, of a call between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, which became public at the end of 1992 or early 1993. You have heard about the various meetings that took place to consider what should be done. Mr Mansfield's point was that criminal offences had been committed and there should have been a criminal investigation at the very least, if not a criminal prosecution. But it had happened some years before and was it really in anyone's interests to go down that road? It was pointed out that the four participants in the telephone calls no doubt preferred that what had happened in the past should be allowed to rest and what was important was that something similar should not recur. That certainly was the way Fellowes saw it. You will remember Prince Charles's reservations and the decision of the Home Secretary that there should be no criminal investigation. You may think that a detailed investigation now of what happened in 1989 and 1992 is of little assistance in assessing who was responsible for a crash in 1997. Among those witnesses who told us Diana believed her phones were bugged was Lady Sarah, whom she told that she had had her apartment swept twice. Grahame Harding was told by the Duchess of York that Diana thought she was being watched. Harding was asked for his assistance and he met Diana at Kensington Palace in 1994 and did, he said, four sweeps, which he described as four limited sweeps in four months. He was never asked again. His equipment detected an electronic signal indicating a possible bugging device behind the wall in Diana's bedroom. However, there was no disturbance in the wall and he did not know what was behind the wall. The wall divided Diana's room from a room occupied by Prince Charles. It could have been perfectly innocent, but he believed at the time that it was a device. A day or so later the signal had gone. Ken Wharfe was, for a time, Diana's bodyguard, and he told us that in May 1993 Kensington Palace was checked for bugs. Four people came to Kensington Palace under the guise of carpet cleaners for the purpose of debugging the premises. This had, he said, been arranged by the butler on the recommendation of the Duchess of York. The four men were arrested when they asked to see the mainframe computer of the communications network. Wharfe said that Diana told him on several occasions that she felt that she and others in the Royal Family were being monitored but he did not see the subject as a really serious issue. The carpet sweepers found nothing. Wharfe assumed there would have been in investigation into Squidgygate. Indeed, Diana told him that the Queen had asked for investigation. He thought there was a possibility, but it was only his surmise, that GCHQ were involved in Squidgygate. Another possibility was the media, but he favoured the former. Wharfe was on the look-out for evidence to support allegations of bugging but he did not find any. He thought GCHQ would be monitoring members of the Royal Family because of heightened IRA activity. Well, members of the jury, again, assumption and belief is one thing: evidence is another. He said his information about conversations being routinely recorded came from Diana and he assumed it to be correct. Then there was Jephson. He said he was "quite aware" Diana's communications might be monitored by the security services and shared Wharfe's belief that members of the Royal Family might be routinely monitored, but he had no specific evidence. It seemed, he said, quite sensible to advise her that her calls might be monitored by the security services among others. It was his assumption that they would be interested from the point of view of her protection. He did not believe there was any sinister plot with Squidgygate but thought her communications might be being monitored by the security services. He advised her that her calls might be overheard and you will remember the evidence that she changed her mobile telephones regularly. Friends who were out of favour did not get the new number. Jephson was aware of her premises being swept, but was not officially notified. He learned about it unofficially. He said that Diana saw plots everywhere. She believed her brake lines were cut and also was preoccupied with Tiggy Legge-Bourke. She told him in December 1995 that she believed Tiggy was pregnant. At the conclusion of his evidence, Jephson summed the position up, saying that in advising Diana to be careful about what she said on the phone, he was thinking as much of casual eavesdroppers as of any organised monitoring scheme. Then there was Burrell. Diana believed she was being bugged and he believed it too. He thought it highly likely that people were watching her and listening to her. Mr Benson, Mohamed Al Fayed's general counsel and legal adviser, said that he had no doubt whatsoever that Diana's movements and telephone calls would have been constantly monitored. This information, he said, came from persons in or connected with the security services. You will remember that he as cross-examined about that. Raine Spencer said that Diana felt her phones were being bugged and, likewise, her home. She always seemed very conscious that she was being watched. On 18th October 1994, one of a series of meetings was held with Deputy Assistant Commissioner Meynell, the head of the Royalty Protection Group at the time. We have a note of the meeting. You may think it is very difficult to be confident of recollections about what happened over 13 years ago, but the note, which was counter-signed by Condon, having subsequently discussed the meeting with Meynell, records that Diana knew her phones were being tapped and she was certain the same applied to her vehicle. She had proof of tapping because she had set traps said, on four occasions and got what she described as "the necessary evidence". But the problem was that she would not let them have the evidence or agree to anything being done. There was a suggestion that this was a tease on the police and that her bluff was being called. It is pretty clear that she was something of an ongoing problem to the police, who wanted her to keep her protection whilst Diana wanted the freedom to be without it. There is a note of a meeting with Meynell back on 13th September 1993, when she wanted the removal immediately of four protection officers. There was another meeting on 1st February 1994, the record of which says she valued her freedom and could not be persuaded to change her mind. Condon said that it was his wish that she had protection, and if she had had it in Paris, three lives would not have been tragically lost. It suited her not to have protection, but she was not prepared to give specific reasons. In 1994/1995 and in 1996, when the IRA ceasefire broke down, the police very stridently suggested that it was a good time to reintroduce her security. Condon suspected that she thought the police were not on her side. In late 1993 and early in 1994, Lord Condon and Fellowes were in almost daily touch about it You may have detected some ongoing tension between Diana and the police. Meynell had a clear recollection, and he was quite adamant about it, that he instructed Polsa team, from the Palace of Westminster, to do a search at Kensington Palace. However, there is no surviving document to corroborate this and nor is there any real clarity when such a search may have been carried out. All this, you may think -- but it is a matter for you -- is hardly surprising bearing in mind the years that have passed, and anyway, where does it take you? After the October 1994 meeting, Condon briefed the Home Secretary, having talked the position through with Meynell. The position was clear, that Diana was not prepared to assist. The police could only help, Condon said, if she was prepared to let them. Finally, the Metropolitan Police were not authorised, nor did Condon seek such an authorisation, to intrude into Diana's life. Hasnat Khan said in his statement to the Metropolitan Police that he did not believe his calls were being bugged and that he had no evidence that the authorities had any interest in him. He seems to have been the one person who did not jump to conclusions and make assumptions. Members of the jury, I think that is enough for today. Giving you some kind of progress report, I am very nearly halfway through what I have to say to you in summing-up, although there are parts of what we are going to go through tomorrow that will have to be taken rather more slowly because of the particular detail in them. That includes some of the toxicology evidence and also evidence with regard to the collision. I think I shall have finished, if my present estimate is accurate, pretty early on Wednesday morning and you will then be retiring to consider your verdicts. Would you please now retire? You can go home, obviously, but please bear in mind the warning that I have given you. Be particularly careful not to talk to anybody about the case and bear in mind the warning that I have given to you about talking to each other in small numbers, other than the jury as a whole. We will continue tomorrow morning at 10 'clock.(4.00m) (The hearing was adjourned until 10.00 am 14 on Tuesday, 1st April 2008) INDEX (Crown copywrite with reproduction of whole sections general authorisation)
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