I feel sorry for Mohamed al Fayed. I really do. No grief compares with that of a bereaved parent, and denial is a tricksy and difficult emotion.
So often the stuff churned out by conspiracy theorists boils down to the fact that they cannot believe that stuff happens. Diana was our collective golden girl (apparently) and so the conspiracy theorists cannot believe that stuff could happen to her.
Now the two things I know about life, if I know anything at all, are
1) Stuff happens
and
2) There, but for the grace of a god I don’t believe in, go any of us
So in my cynical and unromantic world, JFK was shot by a lonely and disfunctional man with a taste for glory. Marilyn killed herself by accident, taking the lethal dose of pills because she was grogged up by her usual nighttime dose. Diana was killed because the Feyed’s chauffeur was drunk. NASA did put men on the moon. Oh and, yes, America the rest of the world really does hate you enough for 19 men to want to fly planes into landmarks.
Whenever one feels denial, one feels conflict. At some level or another one knows that one is believing something that probably isn’t true, no matter how much one wants it to be true. The conspiracy theorists don’t want to believe that chance can be that much of a bitch. And this is one of the reasons I feel very sorry for Mohamed al Fayed; he is clearly a tortured and conflicted man.
The thing snapped me out of denial in the mid 1990s was the phrase “denial is always there for an ego reason”. And this surely is the nub of al Feyed’s response to his son’s death and the Stevens Report. If he had not employed a drug-taking drunk as a chauffeur, then his son and Diana would not have been killed. To lose a child must be unimaginably devestating. To know that you have a degree of responsibility for their death must make that pain unbearable. For al Fayed it is not to be borne, and so he persists in his conspiracy theories. The Daily Express are just being self-indulgent, manipulative and stupid with their outbreaks of conspiracist tourretttes, but Mohamed al Fayed deserves our compassion.
I wonder if he has ever met Princes William and Harry.
