Who remembers Neil and Christine Hamilton? The Tory MP and his wife, ruined over the cash-for-questions affair? Booted out of Parliament by a white-clad Martin Bell, then bankrupted and forced onto the z-list celebrity circuit to scrape a living. Where are they these days?

I only ask because I watch the antics of their main protagonist with mounting incredulity. Mohammed Al-Fayed, long known as the Phoney Pharaoh to Private Eye readers, has been in the courts and our papers spouting his extraordinary theories about Prince Philip and MI6 and their plot to murder Princess Di. If you put edited highlights of their lives side by side, Fayed and Hamilton, which one carries himself with dignity, and which one is the court jester? Which one is the real human being, and which one is the caricature?

I don’t know Hamilton or Fayed personally, all I know about them is what I see in that distorting lens which is the media, yet the difference between them is stark. If we go back to the cash-for-questions affair therefore and ask ourselves which one of these two we believe, I can’t think anyone would now side with Fayed. Do you find him credible? I was never convinced the charge was that serious in the first place, even if true it is mind-numbingly trivial by the standards of what passes for our corrupted government today.

But I don’t think it is enough simply to say that even if it was true, it wasn’t serious. The consequences to the Hamiltons were devastating. And the root cause of that devastation is the man who stands up in court and tells the world that Prince Philip is a Nazi, that he ordered MI6 to murder Princess Di, that she was pregnant with Dodi’s child, and that Prince Charles also plotted to murder her, and so on, and so on, and so on.

You had to wonder, when you read these extraordinary allegations before, if they were what he really believed or whether the reports were exaggerated. But he has now said all of this and more on oath, in court. And so there it all is, word for word, the evidence that he is living in a fantasy world. You also had to wonder when the cash-for-questions affair was raging in the media which side was telling the truth. Well on the evidence of Fayed’s testimony in Court yesterday, this particular jury of one has returned with an unequivocal verdict: Hamilton is entirely innocent.