Diana's Death: Pointless Padding For Pointless Papers

The Daily Mail reports on the Diana Inquest’s Tour of France with a curious mix of tedious, pointless reporting and sickening melodrama.

Their description of the spot where the late Princess died sums up the tone for the whole article:

"This was the exact spot where the darkness had closed in on Princess Diana's life and now, ten years later, a sea of sombre faces stared towards it in the flickering neon light of the underpass."

Let’s rewrite that without the melodrama: This was the place where Diana died ten years ago. The jurors concentrated on what they were seeing. See, that’s called reporting. Not stoking up hysterical emotion.

"There were no prayers or acts of remembrance, because yesterday wasn't the time or place."

Quite right – of course there were no acts of remembrance. This was a fucking inquest. And frankly, there have been more than enough prayers and acts of remembrance over the past decade. We’ve moved passed the point of overkill – now any further acts of remembrance are insulting both to the dead and to those living people who have to endure the endless platitudes and prayers at each bastard remembrance service.

"Legal restrictions forbid any identification of the jury, but it is safe enough to report that this was as ordinary a bunch of people as you might find on any station platform."

What precisely was The Daily Mail expecting? A group of clowns? A bunch of dribbling morons? The family from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

"They stopped off at sites not normally on the tourist map, but crucial to the framework of the hearing."

Oddly enough, yeah, they visited sites that were relevant to the enquiry. Not tourist locations. This sentence is The Daily Mail assuming that their readers are so fucking thick that they can’t work out that this wasn’t a holiday, but rather a process of law.

"And then, the socalled tunnel of death."

Or just "tunnel", if you want to report on fact rather than milking this fucking story for every Christing bit of melodrama that you could possibly find.

"Later, after a break of several hours, the jurors did the whole journey again in darkness. To be fair, it wasn't quite an exact mirror of that day in 1997."

Of course it wasn’t the exact mirror of that day in 1997. It was over ten fucking years later!

"Final stage of the trip was to the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital, where surgeons battled to save Princess Diana's life. She had made the same journey in an ambulance."

How else would a critically ill woman make the trip to hospital? By horse? By space shuttle? Endless padding out of a story that serves no other purpose than to pad out a newspaper in the first place.

"In an interview four months ago, Diana's sons William and Harry admitted they would never stop wondering what happened that night. Prince Harry said he didn't think anyone would ever really know."

Well, let me tell everyone what happened. Prince Harry, Prince William, Mohamed Al-Fayed, The Daily fucking Mail, everyone. Diana got into a car being driven by a drunk driver. Said driver drove the car really fast into a concrete fucking pillar. The impact destroyed the car and 75% of the occupants. It was a car accident. Nothing more, nothing less.

So, for the love of Christ, let the woman rest in peace. If only so the rest of us don’t have to endure this endless twaddle about the dead Princess for the rest of fucking time.