With the Diana Inquest reaching a gripping conclusion and the imminent presence of Mohamed al Fayed expected on the stand, a dizzying array of witnesses are falling like ninepins.

Fayed’s head of security, John Macnamara, has admitted he lied over Henri Paul’s drinking on the night. He now confesses that he had two Ricards in the hotel and possibly much more when he went off duty for three hours.

Michael Cole, former Royal Correspondent of the BBC, now with Al Fayed, was completely tripped up by Lord Justice Scott Baker, the Coroner, when his testimony didn’t match what he had said in the days after the crash.

Lord Stevens, author of the British police report on the crash, has demanded an apology from the Al Fayed team for accusing him of “not doing his job”, and for having been “got at” by sinister forces.

A former spy, Richard Tomlinson, said the death was similar to one cooked up at MI6 for the former Communist leader of Serbia. Tomlinson later revealed that God had told him he was the “second coming of Jesus”.

No wonder the Coroner is getting increasingly irritated by the quality of testimony at the inquest.

Both bodyguards on the night have questioned the Fayed version of events, and Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, was found to have made claims over evidence that were not true.

It seems Burrell has now been forced to shut down his website following his humiliating appearance at the inquest. He attracted so much “hate mail” that he decided to batten down the hatches.

A friend is reported as saying, “So many people have sent messages to the site criticising Paul that he’s had to take it down. It’s shocked him.”

Burrell admitted to copying Diana’s personal correspondence to preserve it for its “historical importance”. He subsequently used extracts for his best-selling books about life with the Princess.

With friends like these, no wonder Diana was all at sea in the last few months of her life.

Enough of the monkeys, we now await the organ grinder with barely suppressed anticipation.

It’s being reported in a number of Sunday newspapers that a blackmail attempt against a member of the Royal Family, involving a sex video and an envelope containing cocaine, has been foiled by Scotland Yard.

Clarence House

The attempt was allegedly made in August by two men, one 30 and another 40, who demanded payment of £50,000 ($102,500) in return for the video. That the sum was relatively small in the circumstances suggests this was carried out by amateurs rather than professional criminals.

The description of the contents of the video, which involves the participation of a Royal aide, has echoes of previous allegations, so may not involve younger members of the family. We won’t know, however, as a court hearing was held in camera and reporting restrictions are in place. Unless something pops up on the internet, we may never know the name of the alleged victim.

Update : Former Palace spokesman Dickie Arbiter has told the BBC, “It’s a vast family, there are nearly 40 members. Is it somewhere near the top? Is it in the middle, or is it down at the bottom? So they would have to determine that.

“We don’t know, we won’t know, until the case comes to trial at the Old Bailey in December, and we might not even know then, which member of the Royal Family [may be involved].

“It’s taken six weeks for it to come to light, so how serious is the allegation? It’s interesting too, that it’s come out in the Sunday Times and not one of the usual tabloid scoops. So it’s going to take the due process of the law to determine was this true or was this just another fake sting?”

Update 2 : The BBC is reporting that the alleged person involved is not a senior member of the Royal Family, and has a “low public profile”.

We’re hearing that the coach carrying Lord Justice Scott Baker and the jury for the Diana Inquest has just crashed outside the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

The Ritz Hotel in Paris

The coach was apparently trying to avoid a large group of paparazzi when it took a circuitous route into the hotel. It crashed into a hoarding or billboard trapping the occupants inside.

At time of writing, it’s not known if there are any injuries.

The eerie echoes of the events of August 31, 1997, in which Princess Diana died, are striking.

It’s only a few days since Prince William and Kate Middleton were chased by photographers on motorbikes. When will the authorities in both London and Paris do something to stop these dangerous practices?

There’s an intriguing passage in an article by Richard Kay and Geoffrey Levy in today’s Daily Mail. #

In careful language that has probably been crawled over by the paper’s lawyers, the writers seem to suggest that Diana’s belief that Prince Charles was planning to kill her may have been planted in her mind by journalist Martin Bashir in an attempt to spook her into doing an interview with him on the BBC’s Panorama.

He later succeeded, of course, and it finished Diana with the Royal Family and led directly to her divorce. Bashir is also known for befriending Michael Jackson to establish trust and then attacking him in the subsequent film.

Here’s the passage in the Mail’s article :

Other toxic whisperers were at work deliberately stoking up her suspicions against Prince Charles, especially in relation to Tiggy, who, the voices said, had transplanted Camilla in the Prince’s affections. They also fed her the possibility that, since she no longer had police protection and often drove alone, Charles might solve his problems by having her killed — hence her letter claiming that the Prince would arrange for her to meet her death in her car.

These whisperers have never been identified. But one person who coincidentally benefited is the television journalist Martin Bashir. For, at around this time, he was trying to persuade Diana to give him an interview on BBC television’s Panorama. When, after several months, the deeply emotional and distressed Princess finally agreed, it gave Bashir one of the biggest television scoops of all time.

Powerful stuff. If true, it exonerates Prince Charles from all the nastiness he’s been accused of since then.

Royal Anecdotes has never believed either he, or Prince Philip, went beyond private disapproval of Diana, especially when everything was spiralling out of control in the run up to her death.