The absurd Princess Diana conspiracy theories have now had their day in court and been dismissed. So here are a number of other preposterous conspiracy theories.
Can you work out what it is that connects these ridiculous allegations?
1. Harold Wilson's political secretary, Marcia Falkender, made his life such a misery that the Prime Minister's doctor, Joe Stone, hatched a plot to murder her. He told other Wilson aides repeatedly that his plan was foolproof and would not be detected. He dropped it only when they refused to co-operate.
2. In 1959, when Francois Mitterrand was already a famous politician, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt outside the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. His car was riddled with bullets but he leapt to safety.
When the gunman and the organiser of the attempt were arrested they were able to prove that the whole thing was a fake organised by Mitterrand to win favourable headlines and implicate General de Gaulle. Charges against the "assassins" were dropped. Mitterrand was later elected President of France.
3. John F. Kennedy shared a mistress with a notorious Mafia boss and used her as a courier to bring him Mob money from her other boyfriend. Frank Sinatra disbursed the cash which was used to bribe election officials to fix the outcome of the West Virginia primary.
4. A future member of the Cabinet, Peter Hain, was charged with bank robbery after a man snatched money from Barclays in Putney. He was acquitted and now believes, with good reason, that Boss, the South African secret police, arranged for a Hain double to carry out the crime in order to discredit him.
5. The leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, was charged with conspiracy to murder after the shooting of a dog belonging to a man who claimed to have been his homosexual lover. This man was also threatened with a chisel hidden in a bunch of flowers. The allegation was that money for the "plot" came from a donation made, entirely innocently, by a future owner of Wolverhampton Wanderers.
6. Jacques Chirac claims that there was nothing suspicious about his financial accounts while he was Mayor of Paris. He and his wife really did consume, personally, more than £100 worth of fruit every day, quite separately from money spent on official entertainment.
7. After World War Two communist cell was established connecting a number of officials with senior roles in the US government and stealing top secret documents. These documents were then photographed and passed on to Soviet agents. Eventually one of the communists defected, shopping the others and revealing that he had secreted incriminating evidence in his pumpkin patch.
8. Presidential candidate Edmund Muskie was forced out of the 1972 race for the White House by a series of documents that later turned out to have been forged.
One, produced on Muskie's letterhead falsely alleged that U.S. Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a fellow Democrat, had had an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old. Another letter alleged that Muskie had made disparaging comments about French Canadians. These letters were in fact the work of paid agents of the campaign to re-elect President Richard Nixon.
9. The first British Labour government lost the 1924 election after only a few months in office. In the final days of the campaign, a letter appeared in the Daily Mail that appeared to have originated from Grigori Zinoviev, president of the presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (Comintern) and been sent to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
The letter advocated intensified Communist agitation in Britain, not least in the armed forces. It suggested that a deal between the Soviets and Britain, as proposed by Labour Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald, would help such agitation. The letter damaged Labour profoundly, but was, in fact, a fake. It had been concocted by mebers of the SIS (MI6) based in Riga, Latvia deliberately to undermine Labour.
10. In November 1974, the papers ran obituaries of a Labour MP and former minister after he disappeared on a Miami beach, leaving behind a pile of clothes. In fact he wasn't dead at all. Realising he was about to be arrested for fraud, he had made his way to Australia to start a new life with his mistress. Quite by accident he was discovered by police who thought they had finally found Lord Lucan. He returned to the UK and resumed life as a Labour MP. The party did not expel him. Eventually he went to jail.
What do these all have in common?
They're all true.
So, the next time, someone tells you their theory, instead of automatically dismissing it, remind yourself that, every once in a while, the theories are on the money.
The Night Stalker
