The reaction of the sane majority will be a sense of relief that the jurors subjected to months of outlandish claims – primarily from Mohamed al-Fayed whose son Dodi was killed in the same accident – managed to retain a grip on reality and delivered a verdict that corresponded to the facts.

This common sense conclusion, however, should not be allowed to obscure the – at times – farcical nature of these inquest proceedings.
A terrible price has been paid to produce this outcome, and not just in financial terms.

The last vestiges of dignity in the English legal process were set aside when the Royal Courts of Justice was transformed into a circus; one that certainly generated much heat but shed little new light onto a tragedy that had already been the subject of two exhaustive inquiries.
The Diana inquest strayed into territory that, in other similar circumstances, a coroner would have dismissed as irrelevant without hesitation.

Would the death of any other woman in a car crash have lead to her relationship with her father-in-law, her romantic involvement with various men and her use, or not, of contraception being pored over in public?

When a deluded individual or fantasist next finds himself in the dock and claims to be the victim of a plot by the security services, will they, too, have the opportunity to cross-examine the head of MI6 – despite the total absence of any objective evidence supporting his case?
The justice system only narrowly avoided complete ridicule when a line was mercifully drawn over efforts to compel the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen to appear in the witness box.

This was the stuff of farce, but the joke will not have been shared by victims of crime, the relatives of people who have died in unusual circumstances and also the individuals seeking compensation who frequently find the English courts to be a frustrating and expensive route to justice.

They will be rightly horrified at the way the system has bent over backwards to accommodate baseless conspiracy theories – and their proponents who were led by Mr al-Fayed.

Grief can have a strange effect on the bereaved. Any comment on Mr al-
Fayed's behaviour should always be tempered by an acknowledgement that he too lost a son that fateful night.

But it is not the job of the courts to provide an outlet for the
anger of the grief-stricken, particularly when it takes
the form of irrational, unsubstantiated allegations.

Mr al-Fayed's claims were so full of holes that his legal team had stopped pursuing most of them by the end. They were not among the possible verdicts offered to the jury and their implausibility meant it was never likely they would be.

So why was this man given such a prestigious platform from which to air them?

During his summing-up, Lord Justice Scott Baker, the Coroner, argued precisely the opposite. In making a last ditch effort to defend the length and breadth of the inquest, he claimed that it had been necessary to end the cottage industry in conspiracy theories that has sprung up since the accident in 1997.

But, as the Coroner himself was forced to admit in the same breath, those determined to find something amiss about Diana's death will never be satisfied – not even by the inquest's comprehensive nature – until they are told there was a conspiracy, and perhaps not even then.

Type the word "Diana" into an internet search engine and it does not take long before the screen is filled with comments suggesting the "truth" has yet to be revealed.

To these delusional people, the inquest's considered conclusions will only serve to confirm that the Establishment has again successfully covered up what really happened. The contribution of one obsessive to a Diana website sums it up: "We will never be told the real truth no matter what happens and the fact that there is an inquest will change nothing."

Just as the inquest will do nothing to stop the conspiracy theorists, it will have little effect on the activities of those who have traded on Diana's name since she died.

The likes of Paul Burrell, Diana's former butler and self-styled "rock", have certainly seen their reputations suffer after appearing in Court 73, but there will always be an audience for those who have had the merest brush with life in the Royal household.

The British public may have a more discerning eye, but untold riches await overseas – particularly in the US – for those who are willing to break confidences and, where necessary, embellish the facts to produce a better story.

The Diana inquest has achieved nothing more than a far more focused process would have done years earlier at much less cost and, most importantly, in a far more dignified manner.

In the immediate aftermath of Diana's death, the country collectively asked whether the forensic scrutiny of any individual's private life was ever justified solely in the name of public entertainment, and vowed never again.

More than a decade later, it has fallen into the same trap – and it is to our collective shame that it is the conduct of a court which has made it possible.