Mohamed al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods, has more than any other person pumped life into the victim theory of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, who died 10 years ago this Friday. His view is that she was killed by the British secret services because she was about to marry his son Dodi, with whom she was having an affair and who also died in the crash. In his mind the British establishment could not allow a princess to marry a Muslim and bear his children.

If his views are lunatic and in bad taste they are enlighteningly so: it is the opposite of what the ruling British establishment wanted. They see such inter-marriages as a sign that the multi-ethnic society, then developing fast under New Labour's permissive immigration policies, was working, at levels both high and low. Had the alliance happened - which Dodi's father spent large amounts of his prodigious fortune and energy to achieve - Diana would in early middle age have become a poster girl for multiculturalism, with her marriagewheeled out to show the Christian lying down with the Muslim.