Media Coverage
The presence of this community was also quickly noticed by journalists and commentators and, as the much anticipated Inquest began to drag on with relatively little sensation and increasingly strained efforts to pursue conspiracy theories by some of the legal representatives, a significant degree of attention started to be paid to the social environment of the court. Repeatedly, commentary picked up on the architecture of the site, on the layout of the courtroom and its meanings, on the demeanour of witnesses, of family and friends, of jury and press and, frequently, of the public who attended. Writing in the Daily Mail, Jane Fryer gave a detailed account of the space and the participants, including an atmospheric description of the “slightly musty smell of too many people cooped up in one room for too long” [Fryer], and made a series of comments on the “small band of Diana devotees” and their actions in the Courtroom. For Stephen Bates, writing in The Guardian, the demeanour of those in court was read as a significant index of attitudes to the Inquest; “The legal teams have been beadily watched most days from a few feet away by Fayed himself, surrounded by his smirking phalanx of acolytes and employees” [Bates]. In The Spectator, Martin Gregory’s account of being called a “bastard” and flicked a V-sign outside the courtroom by Al-Fayed was followed by a further description of witness interaction which drew attention to the behaviours around the court (as did sections of his Sky News documentary which followed the conclusion of the Inquest). Commenting on evidence given by a witness who had made accusations concerning another, Gregory wrote; “On oath, MacNamara withdrew his claim, but claimed that he had not been able to apologise to Rees-Jones, as he had not seen him since he made it. I was surprised by this, as I had witnessed the two men acknowledge each other in the High Court on 29th January, while Rees-Jones prepared to give his evidence” [Martyn].
As the Inquest proceeded, reportage increasingly began to focus on the significance of the empty 150 seats of the courtroom Annexe, reading them as a signifier of the failings of the hearings as an exercise in public openness [Verkiak]. Such reports poured scorn on the proceedings and their cost, or on the suggestibility of authorities prepared to bow to the Al-Fayed camp’s legal team’s persistence. Some articles interviewed those present in the annexe, ranging across the attendants who stood desultory guard, the students, day-trippers and legally interested parties who dropped in, and seeking comments on public apathy [Winterman]. Others, throughout the Inquest, fixed on those particular individuals – the nine or so “dishevelled” [Bates, 2008i] people who occupied the public gallery virtually throughout and could be overheard discussing the performance of various witnesses and counsel during the breaks; “a small band of Diana devotees – neat, tidy, grey-haired and armed with noisy carrier bags and clingfilmed sandwiches – [who] mutter, rustle, exchange knowing glances and take important-looking notes” [Fryer].
The BBC spoke to three such regulars during the final week of the Inquest. These were John Howsam, a convinced conspiracy theorist who regularly forsook a seat in the gallery to brandish a placard outside the court; Annabelle Drummond-Reece, a retired doctor who, the BBC article implies, attended partly to escape the awkwardness of her own immersion in a court case; and John Loughrey, a figure who is central to the narrative of absurdity which surrounds the audience to the Inquest. Loughrey, the man in the gallery with the writing on his face, is a chef who gave up his job and rented out his flat – moving in with his sister – in order to attend the Inquest. He was variously described in a range of publications as a Diana fan, a devotee, at times as an obsessive [[1]].A variety of blogs comment on Loughrey’s obsessive behaviour, and generally with a more abusive tone than mainstream press commentary. [Lady Di Blogs]
His behaviour was registered, in all cases, as at the very least delusional, with the BBC’s headline –“I’m going down in history for this”– suggesting that this was a figure who had lost all sense of proportion. That at the end of the Inquest the Coroner made reference to Loughrey in the courtroom as the only person outside of the Jury to have heard every minute of the evidence, further supported this characterisation, and my own brief encounters with Loughrey – who pounced on me with a “not seen you here before” on my second day in court – made it apparent that he was a figure who had found some form of self-definition through participation in the event. This flamboyant courting of minor celebrity was registered through some ostentatious elements of performance – the facepaint, the daily early arrivals to queue for tickets, the round of media interviews and photographs in which he presented himself as a committed Royalist. In each case media commentary drew him into the circulation of meanings surrounding the Inquest in which they began to serve a variety of semiotic functions, operating as indexes of the wider British population’s engagement with the Diana myth. Here, John Loughrey represented the perfect summation of the wilder shores of public Diana grief, with Ros Wynne-Jones commenting in The Guardian that “John is as much a part of proceedings inside Court 73 as anyone, representing as he does the more troubling aspects of the public’s relationship with Diana” [Fryer]. Figures such as John Howsam provided indexical accounts of another form of distortion, seemingly in contradiction with the above. Howsam appeared as a conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, an individual who had stepped too far into the hall of mirrors which was the ‘conspiracy’ and who operated as a tragi-comic avatar for the wider tragi-comedy of Al-Fayed’s own theorising. Press suggestions that the misguided nature of Al-Fayed’s accusations was proven by his own legal team’s unwillingness to pursue any but a handful of them in court were provided with an official stamp of authenticity by the Coroner’s final conclusion that there was “not a shred of evidence” [Baker] to suggest a conspiracy on the part of any group or individual. In such a context, Howsam’s self-presentation was read as being as clearly delusional as Loughrey’s and, by implication, Al-Fayed’s. Loughrey, Howsam and their fellow gallery-hangers became encoded as indexes of those national attitudes – from emotive immersion to distanced scorn – which have characterised the reading of Diana and her many meanings, but their presence also opened a set of questions about the purpose of the Inquest, with the self-conscious playing of their participation being read as an indication of the degree to which this event had become a wasteful circus [Wynne-Jones]. They also stood in for a wider body of conspiracy theorists, those for whom the full bookshelves of the Coroner’s opening remarks were stocked. And these conspiracy theorists become themselves part of a conspiracy – a conspiracy by the irrationally involved to maintain a critique of the authorities beyond the bounds of any plausible justification [Rifkind].
Outside of these narratives of audience identity and engagement, media coverage tended to focus on those elements of evidence which seemed significant in providing substance to either side of the case – perhaps in bringing forth the weakness of the most extreme conspiracy theories – or which themselves foregrounded elements of revelatory social performance, representing some form of hostile, sensational or salacious airing of private or secret relationships and behaviours. As well as the evidence which went to the central mystery of the case – what caused the crash in the tunnel – revelations of the private relationship between Diana, her lover, Dodi and her father-in-law, Prince Philip became the leading news items, along with insights into the management of her life and affairs through the negotiation of private space by her staff, friends and public figures who had come to know her. Unexpected glimpses of the relationships between the public and the establishment were relished in the left-liberal press, such as the tense exchanges between Michael Mansfield and former defence minister Nicholas Soames who was accused in court of attempting to intimidate Diana over her pursuit of a campaign against landmines which ran contrary to government policy [Bates]. Insights into the relationships between various areas of the security services, their agents and minders – most vividly captured in the day’s evidence given by Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, the British government’s overseas security and espionage agency – were also prominent. Given that evidence from exchanges such as this latter often proved to be of relatively little consequence in the case, it is perhaps unsurprising that press accounts often seemed to focus on the performative elements of the courtroom exchanges concerning these matters rather than on the material such exchanges provided to either or any of the legally interested parties. In these accounts, the chief spook was read as an individual with a persona which seems to embody all of the perceived clichés surrounding such figures. For example, the Ex-MI6 Chief admits agents do have a licence to kill but denies executing Diana [English, R].