Yet they clung to their takes on him like drowning men to their lifebelts.Their information had, of course, come from the media The clippings I perused were the same. A back-seat tyrant.Which is exactly how Robin Wright, chairman of WCRS Advertising Agency, characterises children today. "I coined the term `tyrant child', not because this child is badly behaved ... In Victorian times children were seen and not heard; nowadays, with what I call `youthism', adults are looking at the younger part of life as being the decision area Younger members are consulted We used to look up to our elders and betters. Now we look down to our youngers and betters."Like it or not, pester power goes beyond a packet of Frazzles and a Pingu sponge cake, and advertisers are working out just how to reach this lucrative "three markets in one": purchases, influencers and the future Lose Mum, for a start. That is the best thing to do with daft conspiracy theories: expose them to truth.There is an analogy with the hysterical overreaction to the sale of "tacky" memorabilia associated with Diana-worship.
This has brought forth calls for "regulation", and indeed now a system of "licensing" by the Diana memorial fund. The publishing of conspiracy theories about Diana's death taps the same rich vein of popular credulity. While there is a moral responsibility on publishers, be they of books, newspapers, television programmes or Internet pages, to check facts and to apply the elementary test of scepticism, there can be no law against presenting barmy suppositions as historical fact.There are limits on free speech, but loopiness is no grounds for its curtailment. The book "explores the possibility" that the Princess was pregnant - a possibility convincingly contradicted by her friend Rosa Monckton yesterday. There are limits of defamation, copyright, taste and privacy.
(Despite Mr Blair's insistence that there will be no privacy law, privacy is already protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, and will be more so when this is actionable in British courts.) But none of these have been infringed by Mr Fayed, or by the journalists who have written a book about the Princess's death partly based on his testimony. The linking by one Sunday newspaper of Mr Blair's comments with Mr Fayed's outstanding application for British citizenship smacked of a breach of due process.More generally, though, Mr Blair's warning raises the important question of whose right it is to decide what is tacky and what is not. On these pages, for example, we have recently condemned the infection of historical publishing by all manner of trashy made-up theories, from pyramids built by extra-terrestrial visitors to lost cities of Atlantis. "This seems to have been pretty quickly forgotten," the Prime Minister's spokesman observed.How true. But the trouble with this observation is the implication that the Government is minded to do something about it, when Mr Blair's same spokesman only the other day went to considerable lengths to deny that there is any intention to bring in a privacy law either "by the back door or the front door".Nor, we hope, does the Government intend to do anything about Mr Fayed. Of course, the privacy of her sons - and of her other family and friends - should be respected.
