THE Editor of The Mirror was interviewed under caution
yesterday by detectives investigating the alleged theft of
letters from Diana, Princess of Wales, to James Hewitt.
Piers Morgan, 35, was interviewed by officers from
Scotland Yard's Serious and Organised Crime Unit for 30
minutes at Charing Cross police station. They questioned
him about a story about the Princess's letters published in
The Mirror in April 1998.
In a prepared statement to the police, Mr Morgan said: "I
understand that James Hewitt accuses me of conspiring
with others to steal from him letters written to him by the
late Diana, Princess of Wales."
He added: "The Mirror, of which I was the Editor, was
approached some two and a half years ago by a woman
called Anna Ferretti who offered to sell to The Mirror for
£150,000 some personal letters written to James Hewitt
by Diana. Ferretti represented that she was not acting on
behalf of Hewitt, but I believed she was.
"It was decided to pretend to Ferretti that The Mirror
would, as asked, buy the letters for publication, but in fact
to give them to Diana's representatives and refuse
payment of the £150,000. Ferretti fetched them to The
Mirror and they were taken to Kensington Palace straight
away and handed over to Diana's former private
secretary."
Mr Morgan added: "The broad facts have been well
known since shortly after they occurred, not least because
they were published in The Mirror, and I am astonished
that I should be accused of criminal activity."
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Queen to get Bentley gift(Electronic Telegraph)
THE Queen is to be presented with her first Bentley to mark her Golden
Jubilee, the car company announced yesterday.
Bentley Motors, of Crewe, Cheshire, will design and handcraft the vehicle as
a new royal state car for the 2002 celebrations.
~*~
Editor's vow to protect Diana's memory(Yahoo:Ananova)
Mirror editor Piers Morgan says he will continue to expose attempts by Princess Diana's former lover
to "cash in on her memory" after he was interviewed by police over the alleged theft of her personal
letters.
Piers Morgan, 35, was questioned for 30 minutes at Charing Cross police station, the third anniversary
of the death of the Princess, by detectives from Scotland Yard's Serious and Organised Crime Unit.
Diana wrote more than 60 love letters to James Hewitt, now aged 40, between 1989 and 1991. The
correspondence was allegedly stolen from Hewitt's Devon home but was returned to him in February
last year after a legal battle with lawyers acting for Diana's estate. The police investigation concerns a story published in The
Mirror in April 1998.
In a statement, Morgan said: "It seems a curious use of public money to deploy high-ranking detectives from the country's most
important crime unit in such a matter. I have no criticism of the officers concerned who were very professional and courteous.
"But they had no explanation as to why it had taken so long for his interview to be conducted and frankly the evidence they
presented to me was thinner than William Hague's hair."
He said the Mirror would continue to expose Mr Hewitt's "repeated and revolting attempts to cash in on Diana's memory". "By
doing so I firmly believe we are acting in the public interest," he said.
Hewitt successfully argued that he had ownership of the letters, which reportedly detail Diana's frosty relations with some
members of the Royal Family and her battles with anorexia and bulimia, among other subjects.
Mr Morgan said he had asked detectives during his police interview if an investigation was being carried out into Mr Hewitt
under the 1351 Act of Treason, for committing adultery with the wife of a future monarch. He said: "They replied that they did
not believe any investigation of that nature was currently under way."
There was widespread speculation last year that Mr Hewitt intended to publish the letters in a forthcoming book, but in a
statement through a solicitor last September he said they would remain private.
~*~
Three years on, she still lives in our
hearts(Electronic Telegraph)
By Daniel Johnson
ONLY three years since the death of Diana, Princess
of Wales? It seems more like 30 since mutinous
republicans fantasised about manning the barricades.
The pomp and circumstance that followed the crash in
Paris drowned out the passing of a woman whose
legacy will prove far more enduring: Mother Teresa.
To love the sinner is divine; to admire her all too
human. Jesus pitied the woman caught in adultery; the
world ogled Diana. Since we are all sinners, we are
alarmed by saints, and gratified when they prove less
than perfect. Diana was Everywoman; Mother Teresa
was Superwoman. We were so preoccupied with the
sinful woman who tried to do good that we almost
forgot to mourn the saintly one who succeeded.
It is unjust, but there is no need to worry on Mother
Teresa's account. In the long run, their relative status
will be reversed. Diana will have a tragic niche in
history, like Mary, Queen of Scots or Queen Caroline of
Brunswick, but her memory is already fading. Mother
Teresa will be revered, emulated and thanked by
countless beneficiaries of her charity.
No species of fame lasts longer than that of the saint.
Nobody has influenced humanity more than the
patriarchs and prophets, the holy men and women who
have taught us how we should live and die. The
memory of sanctity is hallowed long after worldly
achievements, however heroic or meritorious, pass into
oblivion. Hagiography is the ancestor of biography, and
the late-20th-century cult of celebrity is its corrupt
descendant. Those who worship nothing will make an
idol of anybody.
Mother Teresa looked like a nobody, and would have
been content to remain one. She was, in fact, a unique
phenomenon of our time: a saintly celebrity. She was
not, like her Spanish namesake St Teresa of Avila, a
learned mystic and a beautiful woman. Her diminutive,
frail, wizened form stood out as a sign of contradiction,
bearing witness to God in a seemingly godless world.
By the time she died at 87, her name had become
synonymous with charity far beyond Catholic circles.
Starting in Calcutta, her Missionaries of Charity grew
into a global movement: in more than 100 countries,
the Order feeds, nurses and teaches hundreds of
thousands.
Even more important, she was, for the multitudes who
had little or no other knowledge or experience of
Christianity, the living embodiment of the Gospels. Her
way of life was ascetic: she subsisted on rice and
lentils, slept only four hours a night, washed in a
bucket of cold water, inhabited a tiny cell.
In her work, she gave visible expression to the
Beatitudes, in which Christ poured out his benediction
on the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the
righteous, the merciful, the pure in heart and the
peacemakers. She spoke for these, and for all those
who had no other voice; and she spoke chiefly by her
deeds.
Such defiance of the conventions of celebrity, the
paradoxical fact of sainthood in the media age, could
not go unpunished. Mother Teresa was denounced from
many quarters. She was alleged to be too ready to
associate with tyrants or to take money from dubious
sources; too rigorous in her attitude to modern
medicine and palliative care; too strict in her adherence
to Catholic doctrine on abortion and contraception. All
these accusations made no impression on her.
Sanctity is, and has always been, a question of
obstinacy.
The nature of her accusers, indeed, spoke for itself.
Germaine Greer protested that she was a Christian
imperialist, whose real motive was conversion. It is true
that Mother Teresa was a missionary; but she and her
sisters made converts by example, not by exerting
pressure on those they helped. The anathema of the
arch-priestess of feminism did the Albanian nun no
harm, serving only to emphasise how radical an
alternative to modernity she represented.
The sustained assault of an American-based British
journalist, Christopher Hitchens, brought out a different
aspect of Mother Teresa. In film and book Hitchens
depicted her as a fraud, who spent donations on her
nuns rather than the sick, and a sinister reactionary,
who toadied to dictators.
The tribunal appointed by Pope John Paul II to study
the case for her beatification is investigating these
charges and we must await the outcome. It is,
however, striking that Hitchens sneers at Mother
Teresa as a symbol of the Catholic Church: its wealth,
its political compromises, its rejection of this world in
favour of salvation in the next.
What is the Crucifixion about, if not death and
suffering? Such accusations were really a tribute to her
Christian witness. Catholic apologists for Mother
Teresa, such as Cardinal Basil Hume, missed that
point in their protests.
Saints must expect to be persecuted, as James
Fenton, a close friend of Hitchens, observed with his
usual mordant wit: "They carry the emblems of their
martyrdom with pride. They look down from church
walls, St Barbara with the pliers, St Lawrence with the
grill and - give it a few years - St Teresa of Calcutta
with the Channel 4 logo."
It is a safe prediction that Mother Teresa will, in due
course, take her place in the church calendar,
alongside the other great founders of religious orders:
St Benedict, St Bernard, St Francis, St Dominic, St
Ignatius, St Teresa of Avila and the rest. But her
memory is not the exclusive preserve of the faithful: all
the despised and rejected of men, the outcasts and
lepers, Christian or not, may draw comfort from this
woman of sorrows.