Conclusion – Performance in the Royal Courts
My own sense of the reading of the events before Court 73 is that a series of elements of social performance appeared to provide resonant insights into the collision of facts and representations in this case. In a few days attendance at the Inquest I would place in this category the mis-reading of Witty’s laugh; the revelation of a bathetic series of issues in the life of James Andanson, the paparazzi photographer held by conspiracy theorists to be the owner of the white Fiat said to have collided with the Mercedes in which the victims were travelling, which seemed to knock that particular conspiracy theory firmly on the head; the strange mixture of formality and joviality in the interplay between QCs; the inscrutability of a certain class of British judicial representative; the self-presentation in the case of French witnesses called to give evidence by video, as if bemused by this glimpse into overdressed British legal process; the particularity of the employed personalities surrounding Al-Fayed; the banality of British security service internal procedures and the extraordinary and tragic emptiness of the images of the crashed vehicle, underlit as they largely were, capturing a stationary car with its doors closed, traffic still passing in the next lane, then surrounded by men whose approach seems neither urgent nor connected, as though looking at a vehicle which is about to be towed away, not – and it took me some time to register this – a vehicle in which people were dead or dying. All of these elements registered a particularly affective power and seemed to me to be revelatory of aspects of the case which are, as meanings and significances, worthy of analysis and comment alongside formal reportage. These elements suggest that the meanings of an Inquest held on the grounds which the Coroner originally outlined – to allay public fears and suspicions – resides in part in the preparedness of members of the public exactly to read its significances in their own paranoid, delusional or conspiratorial way – and that, in evaluating social performance for themselves, such figures may be contributing to the building of a body of meaning from the events in the Courtroom which is as revelatory of instances of ‘truth’ as the supposedly informed, authoritative journalistic perspectives offered by commentators. Performance in the legal environment creates a supplementary text to that with which law is apparently interested, one which is mined and examined both at the moment of its enactment and in the subsequent ascription of meaning to it by commentary and media reportage. Beyond the Coroner’s verdict, perhaps the most resonant element of the Diana and Dodi Inquest, was the reading of Al-Fayed’s own appearance in the witness box, during a day of cross-examination in which the significance of this figure in relation to the British Establishment was thoroughly explored, examined and judged. Journalistic coverage of this stage of the event looked closely at the absurdity of the claims advanced, rendering, with a tone of reserved sympathy for this grieving father, the collapse of theories of conspiracy in the scattershot impossibility of the variety of guilty figures which Al-Fayed claimed were involved. In doing so it positioned Al-Fayed as one of the dramatis personae who was in an equivalent space to Loughrey or Howsam, trapped by monomania into a lack of sufficient self-knowledge and insight to allow him to break free of his delusional state and to objectively assess the nature of the obsessions gripping him. Such media commentary asserted that this whole process was an unnecessary mis-reading of the facts behind the deaths of these figures, that a combination of accidental factors had created the circumstance and that the proliferation of narratives in its aftermath was a performative smokescreen. In this analysis, to penetrate that screen required merely a commonsensical calling to account of those parties foolish enough to have allowed it to rise, whether these were the authorities who were complicit in its ascent, or the lawyers, always the fat-cat focus of scepticism and condemnation, who had let it mushroom. Social performance – including Al-Fayed’s loss of control as he swore at a reporter outside the court [Gregory ii, 2008] [McClatchey], became an index of the Inquest’s many truths and, strangely perhaps, an unpredicted confirmation both of the importance of its costly and lengthy process and of the significance of the proliferation in social performance of the readings, perspectives and interpretations which surround the establishing of a judicial grand narrative.