POP into your local health centre today. If the hardworking staff have time to stop and chat, ask them what an extra £10m would do to improve life for their patients and themselves.

Quite a lot, they'll say - let's have it! Sorry, you say, the money's not there. You're spending it on solving a question everyone already knows the answer to.

Ten million pounds is the bill for the inquest into the deaths of Princess Diana, her boyfriend and their chauffeur: £1m for every year since the senseless, tragic incident that Lord Justice Scott Baker and 11 jurors are now picking over. The autumn air and daily papers are already thick with smoke from reheated conspiracy theories.

My father was a funeral director. From an early age I became familiar with death. I learned how hard people find it to come to terms with sudden and untimely loss.

Then I became a policeman. That taught me about evaluating evidence. I learned that simple explanations, provided they are supported by evidence, are often the correct ones.

So, when the smoke clears I am convinced the inquest will come to the same conclusion as the Lord Stevens' investigation. That is, if you sit in a car driven at speed by someone who has consumed a lot of alcohol, you are risking your life.

Incidents like this happen with awful regularity on our local roads. Perhaps it is this element of simplicity that made it so hard for many people to accept the facts. It contrasted so much with Diana's luminous and complicated personality and her extraordinary impact on the nation. People simply could not believe it had ended like this.

So the theories grew, watered by the grief of Mohammed Al Fayed. Mr Al Fayed is indefatigable, implacable and rich enough to wage a personal war.

An establishment nightmare.

The coroner has said that the inquest is not a trial, so whatever its outcome, Mr Al Fayed will not be content. He believes his son and his pregnant prospective daughter-in-law were murdered by the Duke of Edinburgh and MI6.

Now, if I were a red deer, I would give Prince Philip a wide berth. If I were a grouse, his invitations to tea would go unanswered. He is a man whose strong opinions on many topics - most of which he seems to know very little about - are well-documented. He has few fans and that is not surprising. But even for a society that laps up tales of alien abduction, surely this is a fantasy too far.

The inquest will cost us more than money. The way this paper covered the hearing was sensible and restrained; not so elsewhere. The national media invited us to look at "remarkable" and "astonishing" new pictures of Diana's last moments on earth. Cue footage of Diana smiling, then looking grumpy, a shot of the back of her head in the car and finally, the grisly wreckage in the underpass.

The images were ghoulish. There is no other description.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the Madeleine McCann case. At times this summer I have felt that this awful event was being treated like some bizarre board game in which every half-baked theory, fuzzy photo or false lead took us forward or back a few spaces.

The coverage of the inquest - and it will get worse - reminds me of nothing so much as one of those horrible computer car chase games in which jerky human figures move towards an inevitable doom. It is demeaning to public taste, no doubt soul-destroying for next-of-kin, and unlike the hearing itself, unbelievably cheapening.