There's NOTHING coming out of the official inquest.
Having started out with a "full disclosure" policy, the Stevens/Paget report has been removed from the site, and this week the hard man has given us this.
1. The experts instructed on behalf of the Coroner in the fields of toxicology and pathology shall confer with the experts instructed by Interested Persons in the same fields.
2. Those experts shall produce a joint report setting out:
1. the views of the experts instructed by Interested Persons;
2. any matters raised by the experts instructed on behalf of the Coroner which do not appear in their reports;
3. areas of agreement between the experts;
4. areas of disagreement between the experts.
3. That report shall be prepared by the experts themselves and signed by them. It shall be provided to the Coroner by 4pm on 26th July 2007.
4. Further pre-inquest hearings are set for the following dates:
1. 27th July 2007 at 10.00 am;
2. a date to be fixed in the first week of September 2007.
That's it. Toxicology/pathology for dummies.
And ambiguous, to boot.
He intends to fix the "Henri Paul drunk" conclusion into the investigation process.
It's very noteworthy that this meme was inserted into the public consciousness right at the beginning, in the same way that the "Bin Laden/19 Arab hijackers" meme was inserted into the 9/11 story for public consumption.
It is accorded the status quo ante, the default position, from which any variance must be justified with hard evidence. The burden of proof is on those who say otherwise.
No real effort is made to get to the truth.
The whole thing becomes hopelessly confused, nobody can agree on or prove anything. And the status quo ante stands.
That's the strategy.
Assert drunk driver, and no further analysis required, so we can save the taxpayer's money.
So I'll sniff the zeitgeist instead.
And the zeitgeist is all about the tenth anniversary.
This surprising piece was in the papers yesterday
Prince William ends rift by asking Fayed sisters to Diana memorial service
Last updated at 18:29pm on 20th July 2007
Comments (5)
Princes William and Harry have By Royal Correspondent invited Mohamed Al Fayed's daughter to a service marking the tenth anniversary of their mother's death.
Camilla Fayed, 21, will attend the tribute to Diana at the Guards' Chapel, Wellington Barracks, on August 31.
The princes' decision to ask Miss Fayed to join them and other senior members of the Royal Family at a highly-public event was made in spite of her father's persistent claims that Diana was murdered.
The Harrods owner, whose son Dodi died with the princess in the Paris car crash, has accused the Duke of Edinburgh of ordering security services to engineer the smash because he could not bear the idea of her having a relationship with a Muslim.
He has also claimed that the princesswas pregnant with Dodi's baby and that the couple planned to marry and move to America.
Although the allegations have deeply upset Diana's close family and friends, sources close to the princes said they thought it was "appropriate" for Miss Fayed, who was Dodi's half-sister, to be invited.
They lost a mother in very tragic circumstances but Camilla also lost a much-loved brother," said one.
"Obviously it would have been impossible to invite Mohamed but they thought it appropriate that someone from his family was invited and, as they have met Camilla in the past, the invitation was extended to her. They are delighted that she has accepted.
"I wouldn't go so far as to say that the past is gone and forgotten but William and Harry want to acknowledge their shared grief."
Both Prince Philip and the Queen will attend the service, as will the Prince of Wales, Duchess of Cornwall and members of Diana's family.
Mr Al Fayed's lawyers recently called for the Queen to be a potent witness and for the Duke of Edinburgh to answer inquiries for the inquest into the princess's death, which is due to begin on October 2, but coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker rejected the requests.
The next pre-inquest hearing will be held on July 27.
Clarence House declined to discuss the guest list yesterday while a spokesman for Mr Al Fayed said he would not comment on such a private matter.
I don't know what, but something is going on.
William "knows" Camilla al Fayed.
William knows Paul Burrell.
Paul Burrell was a replacement father for William. He dealt with the most sensitive personal issues for an adolescent.
Paul Burrell was called "My rock" by the woman they are "remembering".
ALL the other men let her down.
Do you think William will invite Paul Burrell?
No. Nor do I.(bolded part added on edit)
This is the broader context, what this is really all about.
Camilla's annus horribilis - why the shadow of Diana is making her sick with worry
by GEOFFREY LEVY and RICHARD KAY - More by this author »
Last updated at 12:28pm on 8th July 2007
Comments (9)
The first fitting at Madame Tussaud's has already taken place, and the Duchess of Cornwall is said to be "quite excited" that her figure will soon be standing alongside Prince Charles in the famous London waxworks, together with his sons, William and Harry. She is very involved and will soon be choosing the clothes.
What more satisfying birthday present could there possibly be for the former Mrs Parker Bowles when she reaches 60 in ten days' time, though her model won't, in fact, be ready to go on show for some weeks.
Still, she's an inordinately patient woman. Wasn't that how she got to marry the Prince of Wales some 33 years after first meeting him?
Princess Diana's figure has graced Madame Tussaud's for years, of course, not next to her former husband but, as the waxworks discreetly puts it, "nearby".
There are no plans to move her after Camilla's arrival - she is a huge draw.
And why change a royal tableau in which she and the older woman who displaced her can be compared in a piquant setting that is bound to bring the tourists flooding in?
But isn't it odd, bizarre almost, that the two women are being brought together as finely-clothed waxen images not only as Camilla reaches her 60th birthday on July 17 but as Diana at her most dazzling is reawakened by the tenth anniversary of her death.
Barely a moment ago, Camilla's waxworks image in the place where the famous finally come to rest was being seen by her friends as a triumph of final public acceptance.
But one event has suddenly changed the landscape - that Wembley concert last weekend. The fact that upwards of 15 million people watched it on television in this country alone - and heaven knows how many millions more round the world - and saw the emotional re-runs of Diana's most endearing moments comforting the sick and the disadvantaged, has turned the summer of Camilla's birthday into a period during which, according to friends, "she is sick with worry".
"This is becoming Diana's summer," the Duchess has confided to friends. "How will I get through it?"
The Wembley concert was merely the overture to her discomfort. Ahead of Camilla lies a day that she is said to be "dreading" - the memorial service for Diana at the Guards Chapel just across the road from Buckingham Palace, on August 31, the tenth anniversary of the princess's death at the age of 36.
Clarence House has made all the arrangements. The congregation will consist of some 700 of the great and the good, a selection of Diana's old friends, her family, her children, and the usual smattering of pop stars and entertainers without whom, it is always assumed, no Diana occasion would be complete.
And there, sitting in the front row of the very chapel where in 1973 she married the then Captain Andrew Parker Bowles of the Blues and Royals, will be HRH the Duchess of Cornwall.
Camilla's presence at Diana's memorial service - let alone sitting with the Prince of Wales in the most prominent pew - is in danger of turning the historic military chapel hung with battlehonoured regimental standards into a cauldron of suppressed public anger.
Already it is reviving painful memories of the royal wedding day in 1981 when Lady Diana walked down the aisle of StPaul's Cathedral on her father Earl Spencer's rather frail arm, her eyes anxiously roving the congregation for sight of the woman she knew was her love rival - and spotting her, wearing a grey pill-box hat, sitting with small son Tom in the sixth row.
Even among Camilla's friends, there is a growing fear that for her to be present in the chapel next month will be a mistake. Among Diana's friends, the phrase they use is "a mockery".
They blame Prince Charles.
"I'm sure Camilla would rather not be there but the prince is insisting she accompanies him," says one of her circle.
"Camilla's not a fool - she knows it would be better for her to stay well away because she realises she will be absolutely out of place. It's a wretched situation and she's right to be nervy.
"Even as her friend, I have to concede that she was his mistress, blatantly and without shame, and she helped to make Diana very unhappy.
"Camilla got what she wanted and now to sit with the prince in pride of place as Diana is remembered would be gross hypocrisy and plain wrong. The prince should let her stay away - a sudden bad back on the day would be very useful."
Charles's stubborn insistence on any matter, as his friends and staff know only too well, is not something to be easily balanced against common sense.
In this instance, he believes that as the wife of the heir to the throne, it is Camilla's right - indeed, her duty - to be at his side for this important national service.
He feels that because the occasion will receive worldwide television and news coverage, for the Duchess to be absent would be interpreted as a shadowy admission of guilt and result in even more negative comment than if she was there.
He is also convinced that Camilla's absence could be interpreted as a pusillanimous retreat from his relentless campaign to make her his Queen one day.
On the other hand, Diana's friends simply cannot conceive how either the Prince of Wales or Camilla can see any benefit in her being present at this sensitive and emotional tribute to the late Princess.
To be fair to the Duchess of Cornwall, she is trapped in a classic 'Catch 22' situation - damned if she attends the service, and damned if she stays away.
Meanwhile, as that significant birthday approaches, she is said to have been carrying out a little tidying up here and there around Clarence House.
The word emanating from there is that a number of wedding presents to Charles and Diana which were put out on show when he moved in after the Queen Mother's death are no longer to be seen. They are understood to have been removed to Windsor Castle and placed in the storage vaults. So another link with the past is cut.
But how quickly things can change.
Just a few months ago, Camilla was apparently doing really well rehabilitating herself with the British people. She was saying the right things, smiling at the right time, and, despite observations that she was still as lazy as she used to be, the public was definitely beginning to warm to her.
In particular, they liked her informal manner - a perfect foil for Charles's stiffness.
Things then began to go wrong at the very moment they should have taken a bound skywards, when the Duchess, who is 16 months older than Charles, went into hospital for a hysterectomy.
Public sympathy was tested when it emerged that she was not only taking her own mattress into the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers in London but departing even further from hospital rules by using her own personal bed linen.
She also rejected the private hospital's food - comparable to a five-star hotel and good enough for the Queen, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret.
Instead, everything she ate was prepared a mile away in the kitchens of Clarence House.
The tale of the princess and pea comes to mind, especially as the Duchess was in the £500-a-night Marylebone hospital for just three days undergoing the surgical procedure that affects 40,000 other women every year.
So could the Duchess of Cornwall, at 60, really be the very same Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles who, in the years before she became a royal duchess, was forever being talked up by supporters as a woman of earthy tastes and habits, possessor of but a single, and rather dated, evening dress, who loved nothing more than pottering round the garden in jeans and green wellies with a smudge of honest dirt on her cheek?
Camilla is, of course, married to an exceptionally fussy man who has a bad back and often takes his own orthopaedic bed on overseas trips.
Perhaps his influence is also to blame for her reluctance to fly on the scheduled airlines she always used when married to the relatively impecunious Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles.
Meanwhile, the Camilla of old, once welcomed into friends' homes with minimal fuss and positively no formality, appears to have been transformed, since marrying Charles in April 2005, into one of those Princess Margaret-style "guests from hell".
These days, her staff forward lists of likes and dislikes to hostesses - from what food to serve (must be organic, nothing spicy, no cream, plenty of salad, minimum vegetables) to the type of pillow she likes to sleep on.
Such advance instructions are not uncommon among the royals, but Camilla's friends recall with nostalgia the days when she would tuck into steak pie and never put on weight, though as one recalls, "she smoked like a chimney then". She has given up smoking for Charles.
Reaching 60 also finds her a royal Duchess who, one of her old circle observes, "is rather fonder of the bowing and scraping than is good for her - or us, her friends, for that matter.
"We know it's expected because she's the wife of the heir to the throne, but if only she could be the old Camilla and tell the fawners and forelock touchers to b****r off".
But how can she, when it is what Charles wants. They are a unit, she is his "Darling Camilla" - and beware the royal servant who doesn't treat her with exactly the same deference as they treat him.
Some say she is not being grand at all, merely 'guarded' while trying to behave as she knows the Prince wants her to behave, living up to his standards, as it were. All in all, a difficult balancing act.
She is finding that fulfilling the role of a royal Duchess is harder than she thought it would be. No wonder she continues to keep on Ray Mill House, in Wiltshire, which she bought after her divorce, and slips away there for a bit of solitary whenever she can.
Which brings us back to Diana. Television viewers watching the Wembley concert last Sunday heard how Diana refused to jump the queues at Thorpe Park in Surrey when she took the young William and Harry on the rides there.
By comparison, even before marrying Charles, Camilla was permitted to jump the queue at an opening night of a collection of tiaras exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum five years ago.
She was 55 then.
We are meant to become wiser as we grow older.
In ten days' time she will be 60. Old enough for a bus pass.
A good moment, perhaps, for a return of the earthy Camilla - and even her waxwork could be fitted with a pair of her old green wellies at Madame Tussaud's.
One thing is sure: it certainly wouldn't harm her chances of being Queen.
http://tinyurl.com/2ddsvj(Daily Mail)
To thrive as part of the royal family of Britain you must have face, and lots of it. You've got to be able and willing to smile into faces as you are sliding the stiletto into their ribs.
You've got to HATE people.
Remember that Klosters interview, when the mask slipped?
When BBC Royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell asked Prince Charles about his feelings in the run-up to his wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles on 8 April in Windsor, he was given a terse reply.
"I am very glad you have heard of it, anyway," the prince said.
He added quietly to Prince William and Harry: "These bloody people. I can't bear that man. I mean, he's so awful, he really is."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4396515.stm
That's what's going on here. Camilla is the fledgling scion of the Mafia Don. She's been given a knife and told to see off her rival.
And it's all going to be on teevee.
REAL history in the making.
By the way, as it will be on teevee, keep an eye out for those Muslims. Here they are, out of their burkhas.
