Reaction to the verdicts | The remaining questions | The paparazzi | What now for Al Fayed? | What we learnt | The key moments

There are two Tom Bakers of note. One has spent the past six months as a time traveller in a parallel universe revisiting the Paris of a decade ago. The other is a tubby actor who played Dr Who in a long woolly scarf.

Sir Thomas Scott Gillespie Baker, Lord Justice of Appeal, allowed the marathon inquests of the Princess and Dodi to wander down endless byways and dead ends that sometimes took the action a long way from the Alma Tunnel by the Seine. There were times when he was moved to ask Michael Mansfield and his colleagues on the Al Fayed legal team exactly where their cross-examinations were supposed to be going.

In the end he instructed the jury to ignore all thoughts of a conspiracy theory to murder the couple, as not one of 252 witnesses had offered a shred of evidence to support it. Even Mr Mansfield, hired by Mohamed Al Fayed to stand up the farfetched notion, gave up believing it in the end.

The Diana inquests: top 20 moments

Classic episodes from the six-month inquests into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed

• Diana, Princess of Wales, unlawfully killed - but not by MI6 assassins

• Diana verdict: Mohamed Al Fayed team has almost run out of viable legal alternatives

• Paparazzi questioned after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales

Multimedia

• The Diana inquests in pictures and video

• Pictures: Diana inquest

• Pictures: CCTV of Diana at the Ritz

BACKGROUND

• Coroner blasts Burrell lies and gold-digging

• Diana death 'conspiracy' thrown out by coroner

• Al Fayed: murder, racism, cover-up

Related Links

• Diana verdict: she was unlawfully killed

• What we learnt from the Diana inquest

• Paparazzi questioned after the death of a Princess

Conspiracy theories are a popular pastime and generate hundreds of websites. Despite the coroner’s comprehensive dismissal, the death of the Princess will continue to generate conspiracy theories for as long as people remember her and beyond.

Lord Justice Scott Baker allowed the inquests to roam far and wide in the hope that, after a full French inquiry and an exhaustive report by Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, the retired Metropolitan Police Commissioner, the British inquests would provide the definitive closing of the book.

Yet several questions still hang in the air, and the answers to these may never be known.

What exactly caused Henri Paul to lose control of the Mercedes has never been made clear, although the likeliest theory is the swarm of paparazzi buzzing around the car like wasps at a jam-pot. The white Fiat Uno, of which much was made but which has never been found, may or may not have been a factor, and it is still unclear whether there was another vehicle which got in Paul’s way and then sped off.

The only survivor of the crash, Trevor Rees, the bodyguard, suffered severe injuries in the front passenger seat and, as a result, his memory of events is seriously impaired.

Why Dodi chose to have the car driven by Henri Paul, who was the acting head of security at the Ritz and not a professional driver, when fully qualified chauffeurs were available, has never been satisfactorily explained.

Major doubts still cloud the question of how much Paul had had to drink, as much of his evening remains unaccounted for. With suspicious speed, the French authorities rushed out a statement that he had been three times over the French drink-driving limit.

The possibility remains that the blood samples from the postmortem examination were switched, whether by accident or design. Professor Robert Forrest, an expert toxicologist from the University of Sheffield, told the jury that the French routines for safeguarding samples and sending them for analysis were slack by British standards.

Would the Princess have survived if medical procedures had been different? Whereas the normal British practice at serious road accidents is to whisk the victims to hospital with the utmost dispatch, the French prefer to try to treat them – or at least stabilise them - at the scene.

The Princess was in a deeply serious condition: her heart stopped as rescuers removed her from the car and had to be massaged back to life. She suffered another cardiac arrest in the ambulance on her way to hospital, and from crash to operating theatre took nearly two hours. It was an hour before they even managed to get her out of the car. With Dodi killed instantly there is no one left to say what his true intentions were towards the Princess, despite the best efforts of the warped Fayed publicity machine to paint them as a couple on the verge of engagement with every intention of marriage. One of the great red herrings of the inquests – and there were many – was a ring that Dodi had bought the previous afternoon.

Even Michael Cole, Mr Al Fayed’s spokesman, had to admit soon after the accident that no one would ever know what the ring meant. He was quickly contradicted by Mr Al Fayed, who then spent the next ten years peddling the pregnancy and engagement line.

The final question, about the one thing that could have influenced the outcome, is why neither backseat passenger was wearing a seat belt. Witnesses testified that the Princess was normally punctilious about buckling up. Had she clunk-clicked that fateful night, she would probably still be with us today. And the only Tom Baker we would have heard of is the one who used to travel by Tardis.

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