As with Diana's death, so with her inquest: it is impossible to predict how customarily sober, hysteria-proof individuals will react. In 1997 one soon learned not to ridicule the mass keening, just in case a formerly dependable fellow cynic turned out to be a born-again vigil-fancier. Today, while people who should know better discuss the contents of Diana's womb, cautious types who would not trust Mohamed Fayed to look after their sandwiches, let alone a deposit box, are aligning themselves with the obstreperous shopkeeper. Accordingly, anyone who puts their trust in seat belts rather than in the imprecations of Mr Fayed is likely to be asked to prove a negative. How can we be sure the car accident wasn't assassination? How do we know Charles didn't do it? Because it's risible? "You don't know him, do you?" was the dark rejoinder from an acquaintance who normally considers himself far removed from vulgar speculation. Well, no. But still: to go from temper tantrums to what-the-butler-saw to a murder rap in three months - shouldn't even a preposterous, priapic, self-styled defender of faiths be considered innocent until proven guilty?  It would help his cause, of course, if the behaviour of Charles and his family were not so incorrigibly shifty. If the Windsors had not shown themselves to be overwhelmingly averse to public scrutiny - whether it related to marital disharmony, tax avoidance, domestic servants' memoirs, malicious prosecution or flogging official gifts - there might   now be more inclination to believe that Diana's death was, as the official version had it until yesterday, an accident. With an inquest, as the royal coroner explained, which was only put off for six years because of adminstrative reasons to do with the French. And not, therefore, anything whatsoever to do with a defensive and secretive royal family. Why believe him?  Only a year ago the official version had it that our normally astute sovereign - the same one whose wisdom has been prized by a succession of prime ministers - had somehow forgotten a conversation with Paul Burrell in which he told her he would take some royal bits and bobs into safekeeping. A recollection which, when it came back to her - at a crucial stage of the butler's trial for theft - not only saved Burrell from jail, but coincidentally prevented more embarrassing disclosures from the witness box. Disclosures from Burrell, that is, not the Queen (the royal family still considering itself exempt from giving evidence in a criminal trial).   Shortly afterwards, when the same trial prompted allegations of financial impropriety in Prince Charles's household, the official version assured us that the best possible person to investigate the alleged malpractice was Charles's very own private secretary, an accountant called Sir Michael Peat. More recently there was some deliberate-looking obfuscation about which of Princess Anne's killer dogs had dispatched a corgi. When it was announced - after an internal inquiry, presumably headed by Peat - that it was Florence and not, as initially alleged, the known criminal Dotty, we were assured that, this killing being a first offence, the beast should live, like Dotty, to bite another day.  Concealment has become so reflexive a royal habit that even when something of little consequence is reported, the palace can be relied upon to try to suppress it. Thus, after two batches of Mirror photographs portraying life at court, with its tabletop Tupperware and two-bar fires, in an endearingly frugal light, the palace responded with one of its traditional royal injunctions. Paul Burrell's book, which shows the Queen to be just as noble and gracious as it says in the anthem, is considered so damaging that its publisher, Penguin, must not be allowed anywhere near a forthcoming hagiography of the Queen Mother.  All this pointless evasiveness only adds, now, to a general suspicion that the truth is being suppressed. The very last-minuteness of yesterday's intervention by the former royal coroner, with his repellent Amanda Burton-style confidences from the autopsy room, recalls the Queen's last-minute intelligence about her conversation with Burrell. Why did Mr Royal Coroner never mention it before?  Another year or so of gruesome Diana-related histrionics beckon, and like the last time, the uncomprehending, arrogant inhabitants of the palace must accept responsibility for much of the excitement outside. If its officials will dissimulate about the extinction of a corgi, who is going to trust them on the death of a princess?   <B>My fellow columnist, Osama</B>With his first column for this paper, my new colleague, Osama bin Laden, reminds us how rarely today's commentators attempt to take the long view. Leaving aside our regular references to the emperor who made his horse a consul, and the occasional, hazy deployment of Walter Bagehot, most journalists clearly feel that too much dwelling on the past will sound either schoolmasterish, or show-offy, or both at the same time.  No such scruples beset Mr Bin Laden, who this week compared Arab rulers who cooperate with the Americans with "our forefathers, the Ghassanids". Perhaps sensing that parts of his audience may not be au fait with these forefathers - whom I now understand to have been an ancient, pre-Islamic tribe living in what are today's Jordan and southern Syria - he supplied the following gloss: "Their leaders' concern was to be appointed kings and officers for the Romans in order to safeguard the interests of the Romans by killing their brothers, the peninsula's Arabs. Such is the case of the new Ghassanids, the Arab rulers. Muslims, if you do not punish them for their sins in Jerusalem and Iraq, they will defeat you. They will also rob you of the land of the two holy places."   Did the early Ghassanid collaborators do so much damage? Wouldn't we have heard about it? Even at this distance? A rudimentary search confirms that the Ghassanids were, as Bin Laden states, successful and accomplished vassals of the sixth-century Byzantines. In the Oxford History of Byzantium, Robert Hoyland quotes a Ghassanid poet addressing his master: "Do you not see that God has granted you such a degree of power that you will observe every king trembling at your feet; for you are the sun, the kings are stars, and when the sun rises, no star will be seen." Less than a century afterwards the Ghassanids had been crushed in battle and absorbed into the rapidly expanding Islamic empire. Indeed, from this admittedly unscholarly perspective, it is hard to see how the defeat of the Ghassanid collaborators could be anything other than a reassuring precedent for the jihad-minded Bin Laden reader.  Still, whatever the lesson of the Ghassanids, Bin Laden's latest references to ancient history confirm comments made by Bernard Lewis, in his enlightening and lucid The Crisis of Islam. "In current American usage," he says, "the phrase 'That's history' is commmonly used to dismiss something as unimportant ... The Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are shaped by their history, but unlike some others, they are keenly aware of it." It is hard, he adds, "to imagine purveyors of mass propaganda in the west making their points by allusions dating from the same period, to the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy in England or the Carolingian monarchs in France". And even if our politicians did go in for more historical allusions, alluding to the past is not the same as trying to enforce it.  If there is no point in arguing with Bin Laden's implacable call to arms, there is every reason to try to comprehend his appeal to his followers. Which requires some acquaintance with history. Which, as we know, is not compulsory in the national curriculum for children over 14: precisely the age, some teachers point out, that they begin to understand it.