He led an inquiry into the 1997 Paris crash in which the princess died, which ruled it had been a "tragic accident".

Lord Stevens said over the years he had been accused of being negligent and being influenced by other parties.

He did not name anyone but looked at Mohamed Al Fayed's legal team as he said he was "looking for an apology".

And Lord Stevens denied "scurrilous accusations" that he had not done his job properly when overseeing the Paget report into the princess's death.

His brief for the inquiry, which was launched in 2004, was to investigate allegations that Diana and her partner Dodi Al Fayed were murdered - the theory most commonly associated with Dodi's father, Mohamed Al Fayed.

Speaking at the inquest, the former police chief also referred to the "extraordinary allegation that I had been got at in terms of how the evidence and the report was going to be put forward".

Addressing these claims, he said: "It's quite outrageous. I will take that on my behalf, but I will not have it said about people who worked for me for four years who sometimes can't defend themselves about these issues."

Ian Burnett, counsel to the inquest, told the court that there had previously been observations of discrepancies between what driver Henri Paul's parents had been told and what appeared in the final report.

Following this, Lord Stevens replied: "I would say these are scurrilous allegations."

Drink discrepancy

He then went on: "I'm looking for an apology for this in due course."

The princess, Dodi Al Fayed and driver Henri Paul died in the 1997 Paris crash and tests indicated Mr Paul was three times over the French drink-drive limit.

The inquest heard that Operation Paget officers had a meeting with Henri Paul's parents in Paris before the publication of the report.

A note from that meeting recorded that Mr Paul's parents had been told the report would say their son had consumed two glasses of the spirit Ricard on the evening of the crash.

Mr Burnett said: "Reading that, it might infer that the message conveyed was that Henri Paul had only consumed two alcoholic drinks."

This, he said, would be at odds with the suggestion that the driver had a reading of 170mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood - well over the drink drive limit.

'Pig' drunk?

But the former police chief said such an inference "would not have been the natural reading" of the message.

"We're talking about what evidence there was against Henri Paul that night. The evidence was that he had taken two Ricards," he said.

Lord Stevens said his team was "being fair to Henri Paul", adding that details of the drinks he consumed "referred to the evidence we had".

He said a police officer determines whether a person is drunk based on whether they have slurred speech, glazed eyes and are unsteady on their feet.

And the court later heard that Lord Stevens was "happy to state at this point, in my view, based on all the evidence available to us, that Henri Paul was not "drunk as a pig", as referred to in some publications, but more correctly described as under the influence of alcohol."

(BBC)

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