- Gavin Allen
- 8 Apr 08, 05:15 PM
I'm fat. Officially.
After three months of pounding the streets and just hours before I set off on the London Marathon, this is slightly disheartening news.
But the 蜜芽传媒's fat calculator doesn't lie - and after a rigorous diet of lager, red wine, pot noodles and pork pies (there must be some carb-loading in there somewhere, surely?), I'm officially 25.58 on the Body Mass Index.
That tips me, or heaves me sweatily, into the "overweight" category. Fat, to you and me. And unless I've got very heavy glands, it isn't glandular.
But don't mock just yet - check out your own BMI here first.
The question is what, if anything, to do. And should I be doing it alone? After all, the government's very keen to help. "Tackling obesity" is the war du jour.
There are ministers, taskforces, committees and tsars all sipping tap water and foregoing the biscuit plate as they thrash out solutions to Fat Britain.
But are my love handles - and there's handle room there for a whole lotta lovin' - really a matter for Gordon Brown? Do we really need to be told about fruit and exercise, not curries and pints?
I know it costs the NHS billions every year. I know 90% of my fellow men - assuming I'm still around to be amongst them - will be obese by 2050.
Burgers for kids are a form of child abuse. Every snack bar should have traffic light alert warnings. This is a fat fight to the death. And on, and endlessly on.
But does it all work? And does it even matter?
On the Politics Show this Sunday we'll examine whether the government's right to spend millions of pounds trying to educate the public into eating and living healthily - or whether diet is one choice people should be allowed to make for themselves, regardless of the consequences.
Ultimately, is obesity just not a matter for government? The Health Secretary Alan Johnson will join us to chew the fat with our resident couch-potato Jon Sopel, so let us know what you'd like Jon to ask him.
And don't forget we're on air a bit later this week - 2pm - to give the likes of me plenty of time to trudge round the marathon course.
Now, where's that packet of chocolate hob-nobs?
Gavin Allen is editor, and executive editor,
- Mike Rudin
- 8 Apr 08, 11:16 AM
Normally an inquest takes place within months of a death. This one came after ten years, three coroners and millions of pounds of taxpayers鈥 money.
Not only did something extraordinary and tragic happen on the last day of summer in 1997 when Princess Diana, her companion Dodi Al Fayed and the driver Henri Paul, died in the crash in Paris; but something extraordinary has happened ever since.
There鈥檚 been ten years for to evolve, mutate and grow ever more elaborate.
Ten years for officials to try to get to terms with a new phenomenon a truly modern conspiracy theory 鈥 developed on the internet, relayed on the mass media and eagerly consumed around the world.
We鈥檝e had the initial two-year , then Lord Stevens鈥 Metropolitan Policy inquiry, Operation Paget, at a cost of 拢3.7m and now an inquest over six months and costing on a conservative estimate another 拢3.6m. The total cost to British taxpayers of investigating Princess Diana's death is expected to exceed 拢10m.
Lord Stevens said he hoped the clear verdict that Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed were unlawfully killed due to the "gross negligence" of driver Henri Paul and the paparazzi could bring 鈥渃losure to what has been a traumatic event鈥.
Will the inquest verdict finally end the speculation? I doubt it.
Last night Mohamed Al Fayed refused to accept the verdict. He said both the French and the Metropolitan police inquiries were wrong and he insisted that Diana was murdered: "I'm not the only person who says they were murdered. Diana predicted she would be murdered and how it would happen.鈥
As tonight鈥檚 , produced by Diana Martin, shows new evidence has helped resolve some of the key questions.
For example, it's confirmed there definitely was a second car, a , which collided with the Princess鈥檚 Mercedes; all the evidence suggests Diana was not pregnant; and it's now acknowledged that her driver Henri Paul had definitely been that night - he ordered and drank two Ricards in the Ritz bar, the equivalent of three measures of whisky.
The coroner said the inquest had served "an important purpose" by examining the conspiracy theories "in minute detail" through the evidence of more than 250 witnesses. Lord Justice Scott Baker concluded that there 鈥渋s not a shred of evidence鈥 to support the theory that Princess Diana was or any other government agency. But with many important French witnesses refusing to appear before the inquest, some questions will remain unanswered.
Forensic scientists reviewing the toxicological evidence have not been able to explain high levels of carbon monoxide in Henri Paul鈥檚 blood samples - which some people claim is evidence that the samples were switched. And a key witness, the driver of the white Fiat Uno has still not been identified.
The investigative journalist Gerald Posner puts that down to the faults of the initial French inquiry. But he tells the programme conspiracy theories have a life of their own:
"When you present solid and credible evidence to somebody who has embraced a conspiracy theory it is extremely difficult to have them give up on their belief. They will claim the evidence you presented has been planted, tampered with, faked by the conspirators themselves. It鈥檚 almost impossible to get someone to change their minds."
So was it all necessary? Well yes if so many doubts persist about such a public figure.
We now have a verdict that Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed were unlawfully killed due to the actions of driver Henri Paul and the pursuing paparazzi. But should it all have taken ten years to get to this stage?
Of course officials in the UK are not alone in having to deal with counter theories.
In the United States nearly seven years on from 9/11 and yet despite tens of millions of dollars being spent on official inquiries the debate about what really happened on 11 September 2001 continues.
The final, or so it鈥檚 planned to be, official report has still to be published and it is due out this summer.
The subject is a third tower that collapsed that day. The 610ft (186m), 47-storey skyscraper collapsed in a few seconds but it was never hit by a plane. According to the official investigators it is the first and only skyscraper in the world to have collapsed solely due to fire.
Later this spring on 蜜芽传媒 Two, The Conspiracy Files will report on 鈥 a building that has become a rallying cry for those who question the official account of what happened on 9/11.
How Diana Died: A Conspiracy Files Special will be broadcast on Tuesday 8 April 2008 at 1900 BST on 蜜芽传媒 Two.
Mike Rudin, series producer of Who's Watching You and The Conspiracy Files
