To all appearances it was an expensive gold-plated ballpoint with obsidian on the clip. By depressing the clip and turning the nib cover you switched the point from a real pen to a hypodermic with a lethal transfer agent. It would paralyze the victim in fifteen to twenty seconds and kill in three minutes. Succinylcholine is a synthetic form of curare that shuts down all the muscles…including the diaphragm. The victim can’t breath, speak or move.

The onset of symptoms is about sixty seconds with the full effects after a minute and a half when the victim collapses and breathing stops completely. The heart is starved of oxygen as it tries to beat but fails to deliver any oxygen to the body or to itself. Death is extremely painful. The brain has three minutes’ worth of oxygen in it so unconsciousness takes place at three-minutes unless the victim has been exercising beforehand. Five minutes after being struck the victim loses consciousness with complete brain death after seven minutes. It is a miserable death as the victim is fully awake but can’t breathe as his heart rapidly goes into anoxia…a massive induced heart attack.

For spooks the beauty of all this is that only a really sharp pathologist will pick up the cause of death on a toxicology scan…and then only if prepped to look for it. The only hard part is to get the victim in the buttocks. Bodies are lain out on their backs in most morgues and are hardly ever turned over. Not even drug addicts inject themselves in the buttocks. The cause of death will normally be recorded as an unexplained heart attack.

I learnt this from Tom Clancy’s 2004 novel The Teeth of the Tiger about a Black Ops Assassination Unit set up Jesuit-fashion outside the normal US Government’s Pentagon-CIA chain of command…with full pre-authorised Presidential Pardons for the assassins. Tom Clancy has a distinguished record of inventing the Real World.

Today Lord Stevens’ produced a report assuring us that although the Queen’s husband did not approve of his ex-daughter-in-law he had not instructed MI6 to murder her. When the head of RCA Records was told that Elvis Presley had been found dead at Gracelands he is said to have remarked: ‘Great career move.’ That is rather how I felt after recovering from the shock of waking up to the news that Princess Diana had died in a car crash in Paris.

At the time of her death Diana was living an ‘evanescent existence in the company of a coke-snorting Arab playboy and his Eurotrash acolytes’ in the words of Richard Littlejohn in today’s Daily Mail. The pedestal upon which she had planted her designer standard in her glory days had long since crumbled. After her divorce from Prince Charles Diana announced that she intended to remain an ‘independent member of the Royal Family’ which is rather like Yoko Ono claiming to be an independent member of The Beatles. To the Royal House Diana was Breeding Stock with just one job…to produce an ‘heir and a spare’. Job well done. Off to St Tropez and the Paris Ritz with her.

So when her drunken chauffeur ploughed into a wall pursued by foreign paparazzi it seemed a fitting end. This was Diana's James Dean moment, her Jim Morrison overdose, her Buddy Holly plane crash. The legend was assured. And so it would have remained if the nation had not been dragged into a spiral of madness as Alastair Campbell manipulated the nation’s tabloid-induced mood with his trademark cynicism. Remember the trembling lip and watery eye of our new Prime Minister as he hijacked the return of the body? ‘She was the People's Princess.’ Vote for me. For a few days it was Euro 96 with flowers. She's coming home, she's coming home, she's coming home.

Anyone who dissented from the ruthlessly-enforced mourning was treated like a heretic. One man was beaten up for not showing enough ‘respect’. His crime was to clean his car on the morning of the funeral. The Royal Family was pilloried for not grieving in public. There was an air of real menace. England seemed to be teetering on the brink of our Bastille moment. Diana would have loved every second. But the moment passed. Once the withered floral tributes were swept away the vicarious grief subsided as quickly as it had erupted. A year later there was an attempt to recreate the mood with a Lady Diana Memorial Walk setting off from Hyde Park. Millions were expected but fewer than a couple of hundred turned up. The nation had ‘moved on’…to use President Blair’s phrase.

From his grassy knoll in Knightsbridge Mohammed Al Fayed has led the accusations that Diana had been murdered, that Prince Philip was an M15 agent and that Mossad did it. He even bought the Daily Express to further his campaign. The French Investigation had already knocked this on the head so the Phoney Pharaoh sought to mastermind his own conspiracy to persuade the Celebrity World that his son was about to marry the mother of the future King of England. This is where Lord Steven’s Report is at its most persuasive. He talked to Diana’s friends.

From the Establishment’s point of view the main advantage of bringing in Lord Stevens and charging him with carrying out the definitive inquiry was to shut the door on the Conspiracy Theorists. Of course this is never possible…and we have an inquest to come in the New Year…but nonetheless the Stevens Report has shifted the balance of probability significantly by assuring us that there was no conspiracy, Diana wasn't pregnant, she wasn't about to get engaged to a Moslem…and she wasn't murdered. Perhaps he got it right? Who knows? Evenin’ all!