Conspiracy theory - THE DEATH OF DIANA

The first Diana conspiracy site appeared on the Internet in Australia only hours after her death on August 31st, 1997. Since then an estimated 36.000 Diana conspiracy websites have been set up - breathtaking by anyone's standards. Hypotheses range from pure James Bond ('it was all an MI6 plot to protect the monarchy') to farce ('it was a fiendish murderplot thought up by the world's florists to sell lots of flowers'). And most popular of all, Diana, Princess of Wales, isn't dead after all - that terrible car crash in Paris eas an elaborate hoax to enable the Princess and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, to fake their own deaths so that they could live in blissful isolation for the rest of their lives. Subscribers to this theory say that Diana was fed up with the intrusions into her private life and used the walth and resources of the Fayed family to fake her death, and now she and Dodi are living on a small tropical island, communicating with her sons by satelite video conferencing. Think about it, they say, we never actually saw her body, did we?

You don't buy into any of these theories? Don't worry. There are plenty ore to choose from. For example, Paul Burrell, Diana's former butler, claims that the Princess predicted her own death in a car crash. Apparently, she was so frightened taht ten months before her death she wrote to Burrell saying that a plot was being hatched by a member of the royal family and taht her car's brakes would be tampered with and she would suffer serious head injuries. And all this so that the Prince of Wales could marry again.

These theory miltiply because it is so hard for us to believe that a princess, with all her wealth and bodyguards, could be killed by something as arbitrary and mundane as a traffic accident. Psychologically, we need conspiracy theories to make the tragedies of life more bearable. And the Internet helps feed the global paranoia.