[diana] just when you thought it was safe to return ...

I think … I hope … this is my last post on this. Hallelujah!

Testimony does not depend on which publication it is reported in. It's either on the record or it's not and though I plan to go through the last Diana piece and redo the links [probably on Sunday], the primary purpose was just to collate testimony this time round, particularly that of eyewitnesses. I was too tired at the end to do much more.

The secondary purpose was not so much to convince the reader, who has his or her own prejudices but to provide a dossier of the known and reported data, in order to answer false claims, should another whitewash be organized.

For Elizabeth Butler-Sloss to investigate herself, at taxpayer's expense, then to claim she'd 'never seen evidence' is exactly like the French police claiming that despite the CCTV and radar cameras all along the Voie Georges Pompidou, none of the outside CCTV cameras on any of the buildings along the route showed anything relevant to the crash probe.

A further example is when a colleague said: "Oh, the driver was drunk, wasn't he?" Well no, it certainly doesn't look like he was. Even a cursory reading of the evidence on this point would show that. And yet that view persists among the public, on the strength of a flawed autopsy report which three separate medical teams who reviewed it found to be simply unsound and upon an unwillingness to view the actual evidence.

This is the sort of thing I find intensely annoying - making claims without evidence and parroting the official line, especially when the official line has been shown to be erroneous and the authorities themselves have retracted the more outrageous of the distributed assessments.

So all right. For what it's worth, having viewed this material, certain things seems clear. There's little doubt that the Mercedes was being harassed by two cars and a few motorbikes and this lays the blame squarely at the feet of the paparazzi, who have much to answer for.

But for one of the bikes to swing only metres in front of a Mercedes descending into a tunnel at 120kph and for the pillion passenger to swing round and shoot a blinding flash into the driver's eyes, whilst at the same time a Fiat collides with the front corner of the big car and a third car knocks the Mercedes on the side, this seems a trifle more than paparazzi harassment.

At a minimum, this is tantamount to manslaughter. The alternative is that the Mercedes was being shepherded into the pillar. And that's a whole new ball game.