Letters to my sons.

Dear Son,

an Italian magazine has published a photograph of Diana Princess of Wales unconscious in the back of the car that crashed in an underpass in Paris.

The driver of the car, Henri Paul, had drunk alcohol and taken anti-depressant tablets as well. He was in no fit state to drive and was speeding when the car crashed. Diana’s body guard, Trevor Rees-Jones survived the crash – he was the only one wearing a seat belt.

Diana’s car was being chased by press photographers because certain people in this world liked looking at pictures of her. When it was announced that she had died and the circumstances of that death, people physically attached journalists and newspaper photographers because they blamed these people for her death.

The last thing I remember on the TV before I went to bed the night she died was an advert for the Sunday Mirror. They were advertising the “Diana-Dodi Love Album”, an exclusive set of long lens pictures of Diana with Dodi Fayed frolicking in the Med.

The Sunday Mirror and all the other newspapers that printed pictures of Diana only did so because it helped them sell more copies. The market for Diana pictures was created by the very people attacked the photographers and the journalists in the first place. Because their appetite for Diana photographs could not be satisfied she was hounded to her death.

The very people who provided the financing (papers would sell an extra 100,000 copies by putting a picture of Diana on the front) for the paparazzi then complain when the beast they created acts in a way that they didn’t approve. The mock outrage that many of the British papers are expressing today is just plain and simple rubbish. If they thought they could shift a few more copies of their newspaper by including this photo they would do.

Not long before she died, Diana gave an interview in which she said she wanted to be known as the “Queen of Hearts”. She was derided by the press for this right up until the moment she died when suddenly this became her new name along with almost sainthood. The filthy press were quick to malign the women when it suited them and canonise her when it suited them more.

The press though only prints the stories that the public will accept, by and large. There are exceptions but they are few and far between.

BBC NEWS | UK | Boycott ‘vile’ Diana photo call