Having sworn in the name of Allah to tell the truth, Al-Fayed first read a prepared statement in which he alleged that Princess Diana had told him that Prince Philip and Prince Charles wanted to get rid of her. He also claimed that Diana told him she was pregnant and was about to announce her engagement to be married to Dodi. He said that Prince Philip and Prince Charles plotted to assassinate Diana so that Charles could marry Camilla Parker Bowles, whom he described as Prince Charles’s ‘crocodile wife’. He stated that Prince Philip would never accept that his son Dodi could have anything to do with Prince William, the future King of England.

Then Mr Ian Burnett QC, counsel for the coroner, asked: ‘All this stems from your belief that Prince Philip is not only a racist but a Nazi as well?’

Al-Fayed replied: ‘That’s right. It is time to send him back to Germany where he came from. If you want to know his original name, it ends with Frankenstein.’

He started waving about a photograph taken in 1937 at the funeral of Prince Philip’s sister Cecile. Philip’s favourite sister had died in an air crash in thick fog over Ostend, along with her husband the hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse and their children, while en route to London for the wedding of Prince Louis of Hesse. In this photograph, sixteen-year-old Prince Philip is seen walking through the street of Darmstadt, the Hesse family’s home town, which was festooned with swastikas, in the company of his brothers-in-law Prince Christophe of Hesse in SS uniform and Philip of Hesse in his brown SA uniform. Prince Philip’s uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten followed behind in British naval uniform.

Al-Fayed added: ‘Prince Philip is a person who grew up with the Nazis, brought up by his auntie who married Hitler’s general. This is the man who is in charge of the country, who can do anything, who manipulates.’