Smash hit

Other conspiracists believe she faked her death in the hope of getting a bit of peace and quiet; yet more insist she was killed by MI5 on the orders of the Duke of Edinburgh.

Such ideas are no mere internet lunacy; even serious publishers jump on the bandwagon. A book published earlier this year, Diana: Death of a Goddess, linked her death to a mysterious cult called the Order of the Solar Temple. The author, David Cohen, says it was also involved in the death — by car accident — of Princess Grace of Monaco. The Solar Temple? Yup, it’s linked to those Knights Templar again. Unfortunately there appears to be no evidence — as yet — that Leonardo had any hand in Diana’s death.

The events of September 11, 2001 have also proved to be a rich source of conspiracy theories. Barely six months after the attacks, a French author produced a book claiming the Pentagon was bombed not by Al-Qaeda but by the American government, which was looking for an excuse to attack Afghanistan.

“The damage to the Pentagon was not done by a Boeing 757,” writes Thierry Meyssan, author of L’Effroyable Imposture (The Horrifying Fraud). “It could only have been done by a cruise missile because there is a sort of piercing of the walls.” Barmy though the theory was, it was at one point selling 100,000 copies a week.

Then there are the conflicting theories about Osama Bin Laden. Is he being held in Pakistan so the government there can continue milking the Americans for cash? Or is he being held by the Americans so President George W Bush can produce him on the eve of the election? No self-respecting conspiracy theorist can seriously believe that he’s just hiding in a cave.

The trouble is that the very people who suffer from such popular delusions — the authorities — have fuelled the fashion for believing in them. As Lionel Fanthorpe, an Anglican priest and president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena, says: “We are far less trusting than we were. There is disappointment in church leaders, politicians and scientists.”

It does not seem to matter that the conspiracy theorists are just as unreliable as politicians who make wayward claims about, say, weapons of mass destruction. In 1997, for example, Michael Drosnin, a Wall Street Journal reporter, published a book, The Bible Code. It claimed that the scriptures contain a hidden code predicting future events. It was an instant bestseller.

EXPERTS soon showed that the “code” was no more than the sort of patterns that could be found in any large volume of words. But that code still has its adherents and it is one of a number of phenomena to be studied in a four-part series, Conspiracies, starting next month on Sky One. It will also cast an eye over the Illuminati, a secret sect founded in the 18th century that some people claim is now running the world. That theory is clearly nonsense, of course; everybody knows that the world is run by the lizard Queen, funded by a drug-running operation controlled by MI6.

If you are looking to make your own fortune from a conspiracy theory, it’s essential to have two key ingredients: a historic event or character, plus an outlandish but faintly believable alternative to the accepted wisdom.

Take the sinking of the Titanic, which hit an iceberg in 1912. Except that it didn’t, according to the book Titanic: The Ship That Never Sank? It claims that the sinking was a complex insurance fraud and that the wreck on the ocean floor is actually the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic.

What would Leonardo have made of all this fuss? Well it’s not easy to tell because, of course, he wasn’t beyond a prank himself, according to a recent theory. It suggests that his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, is actually a portrait of himself.

This idea was recently put forward by an American computer artist, Lillian Schwartz, who compared the Mona Lisa with a Leonardo self-portrait. Even the name, as Dan Brown notes in The Da Vinci Code, suggests Leonardo was in touch with both his male and female sides. Mona Lisa is an anagram of Amon, the Egyptian god of masculine fertility, and L’isa, another name for the goddess Isis.

Surely, the conspiracy theorists will insist, this is no coincidence. Rubbish: Mona Lisa, as anyone can see, is also an anagram for “Lo (short for Leonardo) is a man”. Obvious when you see it, isn’t it?

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