Ten years after she died, and with an estimated $20 million spent trying to establish what led to her death, there are those who will always believe what they want to believe about Princess Diana. Today Cafe Diana in London has become a pilgrimage spot for tourists who hanker after the “queen of hearts”.
Waiter Fouad Fattah has seen them come and go for more than a decade and wearily heard them expound all their theories.
“We get French, British, Americans, Germans – they all come and they all have their opinions,” he says. “Most of those who come in believe the conspiracies.”
A few tourists sits staring at the pictures on the walls, but mostly the cafe’s full of construction workers and taxi drivers getting stuck in to plates of fried bacon, eggs and chips.
Owner Abdul Basit, an Iraqi who opened the cafe in 1989 and decided to name it after Diana – rather than Abdul’s – after spotting her crossing the road, became a friend of the princess’s and was hugely saddened by her death.
“It was misfortune – the driver was drunk, was going too fast and crashed. That’s all there is to it.”