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.

In what is sure to cause a few harumphs of indignation, ITV — Britain’s premier commercial TV channel — is to broadcast a thinly-veiled drama depicting the lives of an allegedly ficticious Royal family.

The Palace will go out next year in six one-hour episodes, and will focus on the lives of two young, tequila-swigging Princes. Naturally.

Veteran actress Jane Asher will play the Queen, who is described as the “beautiful, but emotionally-scarred mother” of the two boys. Now I wonder who that could be?

The story follows the premature death of the Princes’ father, the King. Clearly some gender bending going on here.

We’re told that one Prince is bogged down ruling the country. What, no Prime Minister?

The other Prince simply leads a decadent lifestyle — the producers claim he is “only loosely” based on Prince Harry. Of course he is!

More bizarrely still, the set for Buckingham Palace has been built in a dilapidated old Soviet cigarette factory in Lithuania. You really couldn’t make it up.

Buckingham Palace is refusing to comment.

Another date for your diary. Hmmm.

Helen Mirren, who recently won an Oscar for her portrayal of the Queen, doesn’t see Kate Middleton as the “new Diana”, as some do. No, it’s quite obviously Paris Hilton, she claims.

Paris Hilton, left, Princess Diana, right

The Dame believes that the hotel heiress has what it takes to reach the same heights as Diana. “I don’t applaud Paris Hilton, but I think she’s pretty cool,” Helen says. “She’s developed, like Princess Diana, that deliberate foolishness, which is disarming.”

Dear oh dear, when actors reveal their real thoughts, they kind of diminish, don’t they? No Oscar for punditry for you, Dame Helen.

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.