Room 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice, with its magnolia paint and Nasa technology, is not normally to be mistaken for a liposuction seminar. Nor is its distinguished current incumbent, Scott Baker, a subscriber to the Simon Cowell school of jurisdiction. Yet the first week of his impeccably run inquiry into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi al-Fayed has veered into details too intimate and plots too wild for lesser reality programmes to countenance.
Diana was on the pill, the inquest heard. The Queen had been about to abdicate, and Prince Charles may have hoped to marry his children's nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke. Or so Diana had told her lawyer, the late Lord Mishcon. Queen Tiggy, though, seemed hardly more bizarre than the conspiracy theories advanced by Mohamed al-Fayed in his 10-year campaign to prove a plot to kill Diana and Dodi.
In his assertion, the princess was about to become engaged to his son and bear his child. Her body was embalmed to hide her pregnancy. The driver of the car in which she died, Henri Paul, was sober, the blood tests fixed and the route from the Paris Ritz altered; all by M16. In a statement read out by the coroner, Fayed claimed: 'My son and Princess Diana were murdered by the British Security Services on the orders of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.'
The coroner, who has already appeared sceptical over some of these allegations, seems poised in a limbo between Tudor England, when agents of the state could dispose of unwanted royal spouses with impunity, and Tomb Raider. Part computer game, part film noir, this is the strangest inquest of modern times. In Court 73, heat magazine and jurisprudence collide. [..]
But this is also the toughest of assignments for the fourth coroner appointed since Diana's death. The price of his hearing is estimated at £10m, for legal fees, simultaneous transcription, a silicon valley of technology and a website. Tomorrow's French trip, with photo-opportunities built in, will be the first time a jury has left British soil since a visit to Belarus during the trial of Anthony Sawoniuk, the only man to be convicted here of Nazi war crimes. [..]
Today's system [of coroner's investigations] is barely changed since 1836, when the rise of epidemics demanded better investigation into how many people were dying, and why. Loopholes, such as the one that allowed Harold Shipman to kill unnoticed by filling in his patients' death certificates, prompted a major shake-up.
The result, the Coroners' Bill of 2006, is expected to become law in this parliamentary session. That makes the Diana inquest not only the biggest showcase inquest of all time, but the last of its kind. In the existing system - the most dilapidated branch of justice - Diana gets an eminent former judge to investigate, at mad expense, conspiracy theories widely believed to exist only in the feverish fantasies of Mohamed al-Fayed.
Meanwhile, other families whose loved ones genuinely fell foul of the state wait for answers. The relatives of Jean Charles de Menezes, killed by police marksmen, have had to settle for a health and safety court case, being conducted quietly across London [..]. Some obscure victims of truly murky deaths may get a good coroner; others make do with a poorly-trained official of limited competence. [..]
Eric Metcalfe, director of human rights policy at the all-party parliamentary legal group Justice, says the cost of the Diana inquest is 'approaching absurdity, if not already there'. Deborah Coles, of Inquest, points out that families of children who die in custody have to wait, sometimes for years, for pitifully funded inquests. 'The rooms are shabby, and there is no private space for families huddled in with those who may be responsible for the relatives' deaths. Some coroners don't have computers or even photocopiers.'
Even Lord Falconer and Harriet Harman, the ministers responsible for the reform bill, admitted last year that the inquest system is 'fragmented, non-accountable, variable in its processes and its quality, ineffective in part [and] archaic in its statutory basis'. [..]
On the second day of the Diana hearing, an inquest opened in Yorkshire on Stephen Hart, aged 18, a schizophrenic patient who removed his clothes and stepped into the path of a car after walking out of a psychiatric ward. According to Inquest, he spent the many hours before his death wandering penniless in unfamiliar countryside, lonely, lost and trying vainly to find his way home.
His demise provoked no global outcry, no conspiracy theories, no whisperings about dark forces. But nor, disturbingly, is there any wave of public anxiety about those deaths where the state is clearly implicated. The plotlines that will unfold, over the next six months, in Court 73 do matter, less for any light they can shed on Diana's end than for what they say about the way we treat the deaths of others. [..]
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