Diana - read all about it if you still give a damn

Legal drama has never appealed to me. Lots of people obviously love films about trials. They relish Rumpole - and, come to that, even novels by John Grisham about brave young lawyers taking on the corrupt establishment.

But I'd rather read about rats than lawyers. Or trilobites. Or trees. Almost any other life form whatsoever. Lawyers must exist but why give them any more of our attention than is absolutely necessary?

The coroner's inquest into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Mr Dodi Fayed began on 2 October and on present form is never going to end. A transcript of the proceedings is put up on a website (www.scottbaker-inquests.gov.uk) twice daily, so that if anybody at all out there wants to keep absolutely up to date with every word uttered, they can do so, gratis to them, although not to the taxpayer.

You would think that being able to read the cross-examinations of such figures as Raine Spencer, Nicholas Soames and the private secretary of the Duke of Edinbugh, about what they knew and said about Diana, would make the most compelling reading. You would be wrong.

Each half-day session produces up to a hundred pages of mortifying to-ing and fro-ing. For sure, it's possible to find tiny flashes of irrelevant human interest. Raine Spencer revealed that she believes in horoscopes but, being "a Virgo, terre-àterre, very practical", she didn't trust the endless soothsayers whom Diana favoured and even forced her to visit. "Your Lordship, it always makes me a bit surprised that if they were so good, why did not one of them say 'Beware the Ides of March', as in Shakespeare? Why did not one of them actually foretell the horror of the accident?" Good question, that.

And then there was Nicholas Soames challenged with calling the Princess a "totally unguided missile", responding first that he did not recall it and then comically allowing: "It certainly sounds like me, yes." And a quote from a letter from Diana assuring Prince Philip that he's much too modest about his "marriage guidance skills", a line to treasure in the context.

But these are thin pickings from proceedings estimated to cost the public more than £10 million, which have been put on purely to satisfy aggrieved and unappeasable theorists. The truth is that, though the day's goings-on are eagerly reported as though Diana were still a hot potato, I don't know a single person, inside or outside the media, who is genuinely interested in her any more. Diana is a dead duck. With luck, that will be Lord Justice Scott Baker's verdict. The short version, anyway.