Successful spooks don’t need a licence to kill, they need a licence to file. And when the going gets tough it’s not the Walther PPK they reach for; it’s the bottle of Tippex.

The inquest into Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed heard yesterday that life in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) is not so much about confronting Blofeld as about the progress of paper at MI6 headquarters. You have to know the difference between a card and a file, a pink memo, a white minute and a formal document.

A real-life Miss Moneypenny, known only as Miss X, took the witness box. Press and public were banished to an annex where they could hear her evidence by audio link but not see her. All we can say for certainty is that she has worked for MI6 for 25 years, starting as a PA and now in middle management, and that for the purposes of these inquests was briefly granted “God’s access”.

The hearings have taken a left-hand turn into a long and winding cul-de-sac as lawyers for Mohamed Al Fayed attempt to prove his contention that the Princess and Dodi were murdered by MI6 in a plot masterminded by the Duke of Edinburgh.

Miss X was a key witness because the deified status briefly accorded her allowed her to search all the SIS files, a privilege usually confined to the top three officers in the service, so that she could assist the Metropolitan Police team of Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelping-ton investigating the deaths.

SIS is entirely staffed by initials. If A dreamed up a plot to assassinate Y, had it typed by F, forwarded it to E, why didn’t H see it? Miss X said that if anyone had set eyes on the aforesaid document, which ran against the grain of MI6 ethos, they would all go “Cripes!”.

Interest in the progress of MI6 paperwork centres on a document allegedly seen by Richard Tomlinson, a renegade SIS officer who claimed to know of a proposal to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader, by shining a blinding light at his car in a tunnel. An earlier witness claimed to have seen a similar flash in the Alma Tunnel in Paris on the fateful night in 1997.

According to Miss X, the “Milosevic minute” was destroyed as soon as its author’s line managers saw it and disapproved of it; its subject was Tippexed out and its reference number was reassigned to a different topic.

Ah, but was it a minute or a memo? Minutes are supposed to be recorded, even if they are destroyed. Memos are more informal and need not be logged. The Milosevic proposal, which appears to have been nothing of the kind, was seemingly written on A4 white minute paper with the instruction “Treat as A5 pink memo” written across the top. It was enough to drive any agent in the field to a stiff dry Martini.

Miss X said that God’s access yielded her no cards or files on any of the alleged conspirators: nothing relevant on the Duke of Edinburgh, Henri Paul or close bodyguards on the early morning of August 31, 1997. And nothing of note on the Princess or Dodi, in whom MI6 claimed not to be in the least interested.

Indeed, the only member of the cast on whom MI6 had been keeping a watch was Mohamed Al Fayed himself. They had first marked his card in the 1980s, when in his purchase of Harrods he had locked horns with his fellow business buccaneer, Tiny Row-land. But there was nothing much in the records on the Knightsbridge department store, apart from several references to gift hampers.

Miss X summed up her work, which recently included reading 887 telegrams from the MI6 Paris station in the summer of 1997 and 11,674 pages of telegram traffic between London and the French capital: “It can sometimes be very boring and very bureaucratic, but we have to follow the rules.”

What we would really like to have been confronted with yesterday was Miss X, who sounded like a rather jolly lady, probably in her fifties. Unfortunately, we shall never know whether she was, in the immortal words of the Connery Bond, a shight for shore eyesh.

The hearings continue.

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