Was it Ecstasy in the coffee?
Oh dear. The Independent has misplaced its marbles. It is very difficult not to choke with laughter.
No one likes to be labelled a conspiracy theorist. The term is generally associated with the sort of people who believe the world is run by aliens disguised as humans, or who think the moon landing was a hoax. But it is very important that we do not allow our desire to avoid pejorative labels blunt our critical faculties. Scepticism can be a healthy instinct.
Um…yes, it can indeed; but scepticism about what, exactly? Critical faculties in relation to what, were you thinking?
It is unfortunate that most vocal critics of the standard narrative regarding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed – which was outlined again by Lord Stevens’s report yesterday – have not been impartial or, in some cases, credible.
Ah. Scepticism about the standard narrative; I see. Yes, it is unfortunate about the non-credible witnesses; makes whoever wrote this leader look monster raving loony. Well you see that’s why scepticism and sharp critical faculties come in handy in more than one direction. For instance there’s the lurking idea that a ‘standard narrative’ is suspect because it’s a ‘standard narrative’ – it can get you into deep water with amazing speed, that one. Sometimes that is the case, of course, but quite often the ‘standard narrative’ is just the boring old truth. Quite often – nearly always in fact – the obvious is none the less right for being obvious. Sad but true.
This has added to the impression that anyone who believes there are unanswered questions regarding the deaths is foolish, opportunist or both. But this impression is unfair.
Aw. That’s a shame. Are people laughing at you? That is unfair.
Despite the detailed nature of the 832-page report by the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, a good deal remains unclear. Lord Stevens admits himself that “there are some matters about which we may never find a definitive answer”.
Well…I’m sorry to have to break this to you, but that’s how these things are. Things happen with nobody watching, and the result is that there generally are some matters about which we may never find a definitive answer. That’s not an unusual situation, much less one so unusual that only a highly elaborate and inherently ridiculously implausible conspiracy can explain it. It’s just not. When someone drives a car at 90 mph into a concrete pillar, there will be some details of what happened that are just lost to history.
And there remains enough doubt for rational people to feel uncomfortable. According to a recent poll, a third of the British public believe what happened to Diana was not an accident. This cannot be written off as a fringe belief.
Oh well then. If a third of the British public believe it, then it must be true or at least reasonable. A third of the public can never be just, you know, silly.
The question of whether anyone had the motive to murder the couple remains unresolved.
[shouting] Well it would, wouldn’t it! [more quietly] It’s not the kind of thing that can be resolved, you chump. Before you talk about scepticism and critical faculties, maybe you ought to get some. Of course no one can say definitively that no one had ‘the motive to murder the couple.’ But just saying someone had ‘the motive’ is not the same thing as saying the couple were murdered. When a couple of absent-minded rich people get in the back of a Mercedes whose drunk driver races off at high speed and bumps into a pillar – that is a car crash. It has the fingerprints of the laws of physics all over it.
Many have dismissed the activities of Mohamed al-Fayed over the past decade…No doubt the bereaved father is still grieving. But that does not make him deluded. And we should remember that without his campaigning, this inquiry would probably never have been established.
And that would be regrettable because…?
Whatever. The question now becomes, who had the motive to put whatever substance it was into the coffee of the author of that leader? Thirty percent of the British public think it was no accident.
Well said – just because a third of the “british public” believe something, does not make it true, or even reasonable ……
And M. Al-Fayed isn’t out of his mind with grief, either – he has an aganda and a acampaign.
And he has “form” for the veracity (NOT) of his stories.
I here quote from the DTI report on Al-Fayed’s purchase of Harrods, of 7 March 1990:
….
“As month after month of our investigation went by we uncovered more cases where the Fayeds were plainly telling us lies. These discoveries culminated in a two-day questioning session in March 1988 when it became more obvious to us, from the manner and demeanour of both Mohamed and Ali Fayed, that they were witnesses who were only prepared to assist our inquiry when they believed it suited them to do so. In consequence of watching them give evidence we became reluctant to believe anything they told us unless it was reliably corroborated by independent evidence of a dependable nature. “
I think, therfore, one can safely say that no-one should believe anything he says…..
OB, you frequently do Ecstasy a thorough disservice.
Re the quote G. Tingey gives from the 1990 DTI report: a Guardian Leader today has the following about Mohamed Fayed:
“It is the campaign of a man who thinks he can say anything about anyone with impunity. The truth about the death of Diana and Dodi is exactly as it seemed to most people in the first 24 hours… The rest of it is malicious fantasy.”
Pretty clear – here is a man who indulges in malicious fantasy about anyone whom he perceives as an enemy (a long list, I might add):
Now here is the then Guardian editor Peter Preston on 10 October 1994 reporting an interview with Fayed:
“I have known him, on and off, for fifteen months…One thing over a series of discussions. I’d read the DTI report and the cuttings… But the story as it emerged was rather the reverse of the expected. Not “Wily Levantine gulls British pinstripes”; more the tale of an Egyptian businessman who came to Britain to do business the British way, and was haplessly tutored by a cast of characters straight out of Ben Jonson.
“Even then, last summer, Al Fayed was anxious to get as much as he knew into print. He didn’t seem bitter. He had high hopes of European justice. The word was disillusion…[…] Why has he changed?…He feels betrayed and traduced, and not, as he tells it, without reason.”
There follows an increasingly stomach-turning account of how, “as a lad in Alexandria”, etc, etc – basically the story of his earlier life that the 1990 DTI Inspectors report had dismissed as a pack of lies. Four years earlier The Guardian had repeatedly completely endorsed the documented DTI Inspectors report that damned the Fayed brothers over and over again: “we became reluctant to believe anything they told us unless it was reliably corroborated by independent evidence of a dependable nature”; “we found their submission to be both sad and ludicrous”, etc, etc.
Preston conclude his 1994 article thus: “you can’t fail to be struck, in conversation, by Al Fayed’s passionate disgust for what he’s gone through…[and re the DTI enquiry] Is there a case here that at least deserves a second hearing?”
This hypocritical garbage from Preston, I remind you, is about someone of whom the DTI Inspectors wrote that they were reluctant to believe *anything* he told them “unless it was reliably corroborated by independent evidence of a dependable nature.”
So why was the Guardian now embracing the poor, misused Mohamed Fayed, the honest businessman who had become *so* disillusioned with British ways? Could it just be that they had been colluding with Fayed to splash his ever-changing story about Neil Hamilton? (The story changed virtually every time he told it, a sure sign of falsehoods: the amounts of money, who he gave it to, the way it was given, first no witnesses, then when the Guardian legal team became desperate immediately prior to the libel trial Hamilton vs The Guardian, three of his employees miraculously ‘came forward’, and so on).
C. P. Scott would have been turning in his grave if he had read that cringe-making, despicable 1994 article by Preston.
This silly editorial comes just after Mary Dejevsky’s similar commentary a few days ago:
http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/mary_dejevsky/article2067629.ece
What’s next? Will the Independent start running a “tell us the truth about Diana” campaign a la Daily Mail/Express? Are they really so desperate for readers or have MI6 added something to their water cooler? I think the British people deserve to be told!
Slow news time. Conspiracy types are generally deluding themselves, but the crap filter in the news media dilates precisely to allow this stuff in so they can sell inches and minutes with tittilation and other peoples’ blood.
Slow news time?
Dominic Lawson in the Indy, 15 December:
Mohamed al-Fayed emerges with his reputation intact from Lord Stevens’s 871 page investigation of his allegations that his son Dodi and Diana Princess of Wales were murdered on the orders of the Duke of Edinburgh. Before the former Metropolitan Commissioner published his findings yesterday, the owner of Harrods was known to be a liar and a fantasist. Lord Stevens’s report has done nothing to alter that impression.
I’m still thoroughly confused as to why anybody who doesn’t know her actually cares about Diana. I remember saying “oh, that must be pretty sad for her family” when I saw the news on the telly back in August 1997.
If only the ink that has been shed on this accident had been spent on something useful.
When it comes to me giving a toss, the 400,000 people in Darfur who have died as a result of conflict concern me far more than what happened to a princess in a tunnel in Paris almost a decade ago.
Breaking news: 86 percent of Daily Express readers who responded to their question in yesterday’s issue believe there was a conspiracy to murder Diana. As that Indy Leader writer would have said had he/she been writing today, this should give food for thought. Could all those people *really* be so wrong?
And Ophelia: In the blurb for the Independent article you wrote “The black swan did it.” Please tell us more. Did an eyewitness come forward to report that a flying missile (possibly directed electronically from a nearby telephone booth by an MI6 agent) looking like a black swan flew across the path of the Mercedes seconds before the crash? This could be the smoking gun that the Indy Leader writer was looking for.
Mary Dejevsky, author of the daft 12 December Independent article in which she wrote that “Too many people have tried too hard to convince us for us to accept it was an accident”, was most likely also the author of the Leader on 15 December:
“Mary Dejevsky is a columnist and chief editorial writer for The Independent.”
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/Mary_Dejevsky.jsp
Incidentally, why didn’t this leading article acknowledge that many of Dejevsky’s “doubts” were answered by Lord Stephen’s report (indeed, had already been answered elsewhere on numerous occasions)? Oh, that would have meant Ms Dejevsky acknowledging she’d been barking up the wrong tree. Can’t have that now, can we?
Meantime what was editor Peter Kelner doing? Doesn’t he exercise any authority when his journalists take leave of their critical faculties – especially when writing editorials?
The beauty of a conspiracy theory is that it leaves no question unanswered. A conspiracy theory worth its salt has every detail fitted into a slot of the right place and the right time, to allow the emergence of a seamless, smooth narrative, undisturbed by any aberrations. That’s why conspiracists like to fancy themselves as sceptics. If the story is messy and some questions remain illusive, then there is room to suspect a conspiracy.
Conspiracists must have great faith in the omnicient machinery of the state. If their theory is correct, that would involve massive intimidation of lots of people, from both sides of the English channel (at least), into silence in order to, first, collude in the murder, and second, keep the “truth” from seeping out. The theory assumes that regular civil servants, people who work for the royal family, policemen, newspaper correspondents, hotel employees, etc, were all willing or coerced, easily, into complicity in this murder. Somehow for conspiracists it is easier to believe that hundreds, if not thousands of people, can be kept silent than to accept the event as it happened and for the reasons it did.
Noga: too right.
The first conspiracy theory that I encountered was the medical type of conspiracy theories, which generally goes like this – doctors know that disease ‘x’ isn’t actually cured through method ‘y’, and are covering up the effectiveness of Alternative method ‘z’.
Sorry, but if that is the case, there’s a hell of a lot of people to keep quiet – all the doctors everywhere where treatment ‘y’ is used, all their assistants and nurses.
All of these doctors have different political and religious ideologies. The bigger a conspiracy gets, the more likely it is to be cracked open and for the truth to flow out. You can’t lie to all the people all the time. Conspiracy theorists do tend to have a way of coming up with theories plainly contradict reality.
In fact, conspiracy theorists and literary and cultural theorists aren’t so far apart. Both synthesise utter bollocks that attempts to explain the facts as they see them using a process that can at best be described as “pseudo-academic”. I’m guessing it won’t be long until, oh, departments of sociology are giving conspiracy theorists a place at the university table. They do bring an interesting “perspective” after all – and it is perspectives which matter, not truth.
“When a couple of absent-minded rich people get in the back of a Mercedes whose drunk driver races off at high speed and bumps into a pillar – that is a car crash…“
That sums it up.
ChrisPer writes:
Conspiracy types are generally deluding themselves, but the crap filter in the news media dilates precisely to allow this stuff in…
But there are news media and news media. The Independent is supposed to be ‘quality’ as opposed to ‘gutter’ press.
What still baffles me is not the conspiracy theory as such, but the fact that the editors of The Indie even thought about thinking about thinking of publishing the garbage. What baffles me even more is that there haven’t already been several hundred postings to B&W in response to Allen Esterson’s initial ‘news flash’.
Or do thinking people in Britain now just take it for granted that no more is to be expected from their ‘quality’ dailies? Am I right or wrong in still imagining that I must be imagining things?
“The Independent is supposed to be ‘quality’ as opposed to ‘gutter’ press.”
I wonder if it published the thing partly by way of fighting the good fight against ‘elitism’ or some such? By way of interrogating or transgressing against the binary opposition of quality and gutter? Is that possible?
After all, we’ve just been hearing (for the ten thousandth time) that ‘notion that no one view, theory or understanding should be privileged over another (or that no discourse should be silenced) is a tenet of postmodernist critique and analysis’ – so surely no conspiracy theory should be silenced by being not published in the Indy. Unless of course the Indy is anti-postmodernism, but then that would (according to Prospect anyway) mean it must be ‘liberal neocon,’ and it wouldn’t want that.
I love a good conspiracy theory. But they have to involve at least:
1) High explosives
2) Aliens/The Occult
3) Weird cult dating back to some French Templar knight in 13something
4) Secret codes, based on preferably some obscure medieval manuscript (Voynich text etc.) and a healthy dose of crackpot linguistics
5) Something bringing it all very close to home, like invisible aliens walking through walls in my kitchen area.
I don’t see any of that with this particular one. It all seems terribly *mundane* to me.
You forgot the Illuminati. Poor Illuminati, everyone always forgets them.
And it never hurts to throw in the Masons and the Rosicrucians.
And then there’s Anastasia of course. Prince Phil again, you see? Ooooooooh…
All these false conspiracies are SMOKESCREENS intended to distract us from the REAL ELITE that runs our lives. We have lived in DARKNESS for too long, but now I can reveal the TRUTH. The Kennedy assassination, Diana’s death, the revival of Noel Edmonds, they are all due to the machinations of a SINISTER, ALL POWERFUL FORCE. The world is really run by…
Who’s that at my door?
All these false conspiracies are SMOKESCREENS intended to distract us from the REAL ELITE that runs our lives. We have lived in DARKNESS for too long, but now I can reveal the TRUTH. The Kennedy assassination, Diana’s death, the revival of Noel Edmonds, they are all due to the machinations of a SINISTER, ALL POWERFUL FORCE. The world is really run by…
Who’s that at my door?
All these false conspiracies are SMOKESCREENS intended to distract us from the REAL ELITE that runs our lives. We have lived in DARKNESS for too long, but now I can reveal the TRUTH. The Kennedy assassination, Diana’s death, the revival of Noel Edmonds, they are all due to the machinations of a SINISTER, ALL POWERFUL FORCE. The world is really run by…
Who’s that at my door?
Ophelia:
>The Independent is supposed to be ‘quality’ as opposed to ‘gutter’ press.”
>I wonder if it published the thing partly by way of fighting the good fight against ‘elitism’ or some such? By way of interrogating or transgressing against the binary opposition of quality and gutter? Is that possible?< I think Ophelia is making the mistake that there must be a rationale of that order for such an aberration. Leaving aside that there have been other occasions when the hysterical front page splashes of The Independent in recent times makes one wonder if the editorial staff has collectively taken leave of their senses, I suspect this is almost entirely down to the fact that Mary Dejevsky (author of the 12 December ‘conspiracy’ article) is also chief editorial writer. Having written the 12 December article, her mindset is obviously such that she wasn’t going to capitulate in the face of the Stephen’s report, so when writing the Leader she maintained her position on the issue. An interesting question is whether editor Peter Kelner should have used his editorial prerogative and said he wanted someone else (himself?) to write the Leader on the Stephen’s report. Or does Kelner go along with her stance? Cathal:
>Or do thinking people in Britain now just take it for granted that no more is to be expected from their ‘quality’ dailies? Am I right or wrong in still imagining that I must be imagining things?< Of course there are many dubious items in what used to be called the broadsheets, but I don’t think you can generalise on the basis of the idiosyncratic Independent. Or on how much response there is on a thread on B&W!
The despicable Fayed spokesman Michael Cole responds to Dominic Lawson in a letter to The Independent:
http://comment.independent.co.uk/letters/article2083871.ece
“My purpose was not to confirm nor deny any of the several rumours, including that of the Princess’s pregnancy, but to object formally to The Daily Telegraph dignifying hearsay by repetition so soon after the tragedy, while people of good will were working so hard to establish the facts.”
Pause while people either giggle or retch at that last clause. It was followed by a breath of fresh air:
Sir: For a newspaper that prides itself on its independence of thought and its critical deconstruction of dodgy dossiers, the Butler Report et al, your leader “The awkward questions that have not gone away” (15 December) shames you.
Neither Mr Fayed nor any newspaper, including your own, has ever produced any evidence supporting Mr Fayed’s allegations that would bear the sort of scrutiny your high minded newspaper would normally demand of such a controversial sequence of events.
As Dominic Lawson points out in the very same edition of your paper, Mr Fayed has proved himself to be a thoroughly untrustworthy witness. You however, in an act that surely goes beyond sympathy for a grieving father, would portray him as a courageous pursuer of some hidden truth.
MATTHEW COLLINS
LONDON NW6
Guys, surely this is a great blow at the tyranny that is Evidence-Based Journalism ?
The magazine Private Eye often mentions that Fayed got his money originally by swindling “Papa Doc” Duvalier of some of the Haitian dictator’s fortune. Hence the nickname they gave to Fayed, “the phoney Pharaoh”.
The Eye have been, sometimes hilariously, very unsympathetic towards Fayed since time began. A couple of years ago I asked a friend of mine in Cairo what they think of him “back home”. My friend asked if I meant “educated people, professionals; the Egyptian middle classes?” I said “Yes”. He said “We think he’s a c@*T !”.
Guys, surely this is a great blow at the tyranny that is Evidence-Based Journalism ?
[snorting coffee thru nose at Internet Cafe]
Brilliant. Best ever.
Must plagiarize this elsewhere.
Heh. I guess the “No chocolate, no compass, no matches” EBM piece started it… I just had images of crystal and spirit-catcher wielding lecturers descending on a local surgery and demanding “Evidence-Free Medicine”…