KEY POINTS:
Reading reports of Mohamed al-Fayed's testimony to the Diana inquest this week called to mind the strangest case I covered in an Auckland court.
You may have missed the full sweep of Mr al-Fayed's suspicions. He believes Diana and his son were murdered on the brink of marriage in a plot hatched by the Duke of Edinburgh, assisted by Prince Charles, with the knowledge of Tony Blair. It was a joint operation by MI6 and the French secret services with communications support from the CIA. The French ambulance service was also in on it because they delayed Diana's arrival at hospital until she was beyond treatment. So was the British ambassador who ordered the body embalmed supposedly to hide the princess' pregnancy.
The subsequent cover-up, he is convinced, implicates the judge in a French inquiry, two former Scotland Yard commissioners, Diana's sister and her lawyer whom he accuses of suppressing a letter that would confirm she feared the royals would kill her.
All this to ensure the mother of the next monarch would not introduce al-Fayed's blood to the family.
The Independent's report described the conspiracy unfolding in the Royal Courts of Justice as, "by turns confrontational, at times bemusing, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny but at its core deeply, deeply sad".
I know what the reporter means. The year I was covering the High Court at Auckland, an intriguing case came to trial that involved a private prosecution brought by an elderly man over a traffic offence.
The case notice caught our attention because it was brought against the Attorney-General, Jim McLay, and the subpoena list included politicians from both sides of the house, high-ranking public servants and others of note at the time.
The elderly gentleman - I forget his name - arrived at the court laden with files and proceeded to spread them confidently across the front barristers' table just as lawyers do.
He seemed a sunny-natured fellow in a grey suit and glasses. He might have been a retired clerk, active in Grey Power. He beamed to see several of us in the press bench and seemed not at all perturbed at the bevy of wigged and gowned defence counsel at the table behind him.
When the judge appeared, it was one of Auckland's finest, Sir Graham Speight, who possessed a fine sense of the absurd but from the outset he treated the lay litigant with nothing less than respect and gently helped his prosecution when he needed it.
The man had contested a traffic offence notice. I forget what it was for and the Herald's dusty files have been no help. But the offence was trivial compared to the treatment he claimed to have suffered at every turn when he contested it at ever higher levels.
You know where this story is heading, and the judge and lawyers must have had a fair idea too, but for several days the man's case seemed plausible.
He was no fool. He had complete command of the factual and legal intricacies of his case. He called to the stand some of the best minds in the country's public life at the time and led them through a line of questioning that left them looking negligent in some instances, obstructive in others.
He was given all the time he needed to bring to justice every official or public figure who had received letters or personal approaches from him.
As the days passed, I found it increasingly absorbing. It was a classic David and Goliath story and I could not see how David could fail to win. In my head, I was already writing a headline triumph for all the little guys who get shafted by bureaucracy.
Then came the day for the defence to open its case. The first witness was a psychologist. In tedious professional language, he began to describe the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.
It was a mental disease that could occur, he said, in people who seemed and, in fact, were otherwise perfectly sane. Typically, the afflicted were capable of vivid and precise recall of a train of events that had their own internal logic but were linked by an unlikely and unreasonable conspiracy that was as real to them as any experience could be.
Since they were otherwise sane people, they could present the subject of their paranoia in a plausible way.
As he went on to explain the symptoms in more detail, it occurred to everyone in the courtroom that he was describing our dear old man. And the saddest thing was, the man himself was the only one unaware of it.
As the psychologist delivered his diagnosis, the man sat smiling, with the forbearance of one who has heard this before.
