You tend to think of political and diabolical intrigue among royal families as something that happened hundreds of years ago. Jousting and Renaissance festivals come to mind.

But royal intrigue is still with us. Diana, Princess of Wales, was certainly one of the 20th century's most memorable Sacred Fems. Today's Sunday Times of London reports that the chauffeur of the car in which Diana died was working for the French secret service. This is not idle supposition; the French secret service has admitted this to the British investigators still looking into the 1997 accident.

Lord Stevens, head of the inquiry, has requested the driver's files from French intelligence, wanting to know what if any assignment he was on on the day he died. The French bureaucracy is refusing to cooperate.

So far the investigation has indicated that Henri Paul, the chauffeur, crashed the car, killing Princess Diana, her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, and himself in a tunnel in Paris.

The official cause of the accident, which was investigated by the French police, was that Paul, under the influence of drugs and alcohol, crashed the Mercedes-Benz in the tunnel while traveling at a high speed to escape paparazzi.

The father of Diana's boyfriend Dodi, Mohamed al-Fayed, is convinced that Diana and his son were murdered by British intelligence agents, and that the blood from his son's body was replaced with alcohol-contaminated blood from a suicide victim whose body was in the morgue when Dodi's body was brought in.

Scotland Yard has known for quite some time that Paul was employed by the Fernch government, but only released that information last week.

Lord Stevens says that French authorities have withheld several key witnesses from his investigation. Stevens says he still believes the deaths were an accident.

British Royalty | Princess Diana | Conspiracy