Diana: the paps, the pictures and a father's obsession

Ten years after the death of the Princess of Wales, new pictures have opened old wounds as the inquest hears, and sees, fresh evidence. By Susie Mesure

The 11 Britons with the power to decree whether Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed were bumped off in a plot masterminded by "the Establishment" will tonight be packing their bags, for tomorrow they are off to the French capital. Theirs will be a Parisian break with a difference, however. They will head not for the city's traditional sights but for some of its newer landmarks, those that whip up memories of that fateful night in August 1997 when the future British king lost his mother and the Harrods owner, Mohamed al-Fayed, his son.

For two days, the six women and five men who have been thrust into the heart of a drama that has gripped the nation for the past decade will relive, in situ, the doomed duo's final hours. They know what to expect after spending three days last week being shown previously unseen image after previously unseen image of Diana and Dodi's last hours: she flashing a smile to the CCTV camera that filmed them squeezing into a tiny lift to ascend to the hotel's Imperial Suite; he caressing her hand as the pair waited to be smuggled out of the Ritz's back entrance; she peering anxiously out of the back window of the Mercedes Benz at the paparazzi pursuing them in the depths of the Pont d'Alma tunnel...

Under the same heavy police protection that is now a feature of their lives, the 11 will travel by private jet to Paris, with their own entourage of jury bailiffs, court officials and the coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker. As well as The Ritz hotel, which is owned by Mr Fayed, their itinerary will include the crash scene – the 13th pillar of the ill-fated tunnel – and the route the ambulance carrying the princess drove to the hospital where she died. That it took one hour and 40 minutes before Diana reached the hospital, just four miles away, is one of the 20 issues the inquest will spend the next six months pouring over at an estimated cost of £10m to the taxpayer.

What Mr Fayed wants is for the inquest jury, plucked at random from the west London electoral register, to back his theory that the crash was not an accident but a conspiratorial murder dreamt up by the Duke of Edinburgh, MI5 and MI6. Although an inquest jury cannot apportion blame, it can decide how a British subject who dies away from British soil, met their end. (They also determine who died, when and where, but in this instance those details are already clear cut.)

Just four days in and already the revelations are coming thick and fast. For those whose appetite for prurient details about Diana were not satisfied while she was alive, then last week's preliminary probe into the story behind that bump, as displayed in a leopard-print swimming costume in July 1997 while she was holidaying with Dodi and his father, was dynamite stuff. Lord Justice Baker told the inquest jury, who will try and determine whether she was or was not pregnant with Dodi's child, as Mr Fayed claims, the bump was more likely to be just a 36-year-old woman struggling to keep her youthful figure. "I am unaware of any suggestion that she and Dodi were close before the holiday," he said. Later came the headline-grabbing news that she was taking the contraceptive pill: the BBC gave the discovery the third slot on its lunchtime headlines bulletin.

Then there were those loving glances she shot at Dodi, as captured on the Ritz hotel's CCTV. Proof perhaps that the Harrods heir was indeed intending to whisk her off to his father's flat to pop the question? Dodi certainly found time to nip out to the Repossi jewellery store.

The tangled web of Prince Charles's love life had an early airing, with the coroner disclosing that Diana had confided to her lawyer, Lord Mishcon, that she thought there was a conspiracy for both her and Camilla Parker Bowles to be "put aside" for Charles to marry William and Harry's nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke. The princess's conversation with her lawyer, who died last year aged 90, also included her belief that the Queen planned to abdicate to make way for Charles. But as the coroner, referring to Lord Mishcon's note of the meeting, pointed out: "Events showed her so-called reliable sources hardly proved right about the abdication and the future of Mrs Parker Bowles."

More salient, perhaps, was the disclosure that CCTV footage appears to suggest that Henri Paul, the Ritz hotel's acting head of security and doomed chauffeur that night, tipped off paparazzi about Diana's movements shortly before the pair left the hotel around midnight. When it comes to a protagonist for the drama of 31 August 1997, then forget Dodi; Mr Paul is your man. Already fingered by the French police investigation for causing the crash due to his blood alcohol levels being at least twice the British drink-drive limit, Mr Paul is the obvious lynchpin in the sorry tale of Diana's death. Mr Fayed's contention, being aired by his barrister, Michael Mansfield QC, is that the chauffeur was working for MI6 and played a crucial role in the alleged murder of Diana and his son. The mystery of Mr Paul's surplus cash at the time of his death, he had Fr12,565 (£1,200) in loose change in his pocket and a further £170,000 tucked away in various bank accounts despite only earning £1,500 a month at The Ritz, has only added to the mystery of it all. (Mr Paul's mother claims that Ritz guests were simply good tippers.)

Conspiracy theorists will seize on last week's images that show Mr Paul signalling to two French photographers only minutes before he leads Diana and Dodi out of the back entrance of The Ritz and into a waiting vehicle. Those pictures, which also show the hotel security chief left the building no fewer than five times to go into the square where the paparazzi were gathered, followed an unexplained three-hour gap in his whereabouts between 7pm and 10pm.

What he was doing, and more pertinently, perhaps, what he was drinking, during that time remains a mystery – when Mr Paul finished work for the day at 7pm he was not expecting to be needed back at the hotel again. Those same theorists will have also enjoyed the revelation that MI6 officers were operating in Paris that August weekend – but maybe not that the officers had "bigger fish to fry" than tracking Diana's movements.

Another outstanding mystery about the inquest last week is the case of the missing public. For a British population that has long been deemed desperate to know every last nuance about the princess, members of the public were strangely absent. In the marquee erected in the courtyard of the Royal Courts of Justice, on the Strand, to cater for the overflow from Courtroom 73, it is the members of the fourth estate who piled in to watch Lord Justice Baker's every pronouncement, not the public. Less the "people's princess" and more the "media's princess", perhaps?

Further browsing: The inquest can be followed online in its entirety at scottbaker-inquests@gov.uk