After Prime Minister David Cameron had telephoned the Queen to inform her that the Scottish people had voted by a comfortable majority to remain part of the United Kingdom, he told former Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg that the Queen ‘purred down the line’. Cameron’s conversation was accidentally picked up by Sky News microphones as they walked through an office in the businessman’s media empire. This was a serious breach of the convention that the prime minister never discloses anything that is said in conversation between himself and the Queen. Cameron was duly mortified when it was made public.

For all that the recent years have lacked the upsets of the 1990s, this wasn’t the only difficult or embarrassing moment in recent years. The subject of Princess Diana would not fade away. Early in the morning of 18 February 2008, an unusually large queue formed for tickets to the public gallery in Court Room 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice, because the inquest into the death of Diana was due to hear from its most eagerly anticipated witness. So great was the demand from both the public and the world’s press for access to the court that an annexe was set up in a marquee in the courtyard to house the overflow.

On this day, there was not a spare seat in any section of the court because it was the day that Mohamed Al-Fayed, the billionaire owner of Harrods in Knightsbridge and Fulham Football Club, was due to give his evidence at the inquest into the cause of the deaths of his son, Dodi Fayed, and Diana some ten years earlier in Paris. By then the inquest had been running for some five months before the Coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker.

For years after the accident, Al-Fayed had publicly stated his belief that the deaths had been orchestrated by a group of which Prince Philip was the chief conspirator. Because of his criticism of the royal family, Harrods department store had been stripped of its coveted Royal Warrants as purveyors of goods to the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales.

While Al-Fayed’s testimony was expected to be controversial, it had not been anticipated that his evidence would be some of the most sensational ever heard in the long history of the law courts. For his day in court, Al-Fayed arrived with four hefty security guards who were required to wait outside the courtroom. He was dressed in a checked suit and a blue-and-green checked silk open-necked shirt; this outlandish attire was in sharp contrast to the dark suit, white shirt and smart tie he habitually wore when going about the business of Harrods.