On July 7th I blogged about the absurdity of a classic Screws front page fantasy headed ‘BURRELL: I HAD SEX WITH DIANA’, with a photo of the Princess filling the page.

At the time it was clear to anyone with any perception of the Screws version of the truth that the whole story was nonsense. They’d paid Burrell’s brother-in-law, a shifty little chancer called Ron Cosgrove to tell them that Burrell had told him (back in 1993) that he’d had sex with Princess Diana.

As I observed at the time: Anyone who watched the video of Ron announcing his revelations would have seen a fine display of the body language of a man lying to camera for a large amount of money, which he wouldn’t be given until he’d told it like they wanted. And, as usual, the NotW showed a complete lack of sensitivity to the late Princess’s sons. Even though the Princes surely know that most thinking people won’t believe a word of it, it must still hurt to read the preposterous allegations, knowing that some poor suckers will believe it.

Paul Burrell instantly objected and instructed his solicitor, David Price to write to the PCC demanding an investigation.

I doubted then that the PCC would do more than find the Screws out of order, with no power to hurt the paper in any meaningful way, merely demanding a small retraction, no doubt heavily qualified, that wouldn’t fill the front page.

To their credit, the PCC has now issued a strong reprimand to the paper for breaching a clause in its Editors’ Code of Conduct which states that they should “take care to not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information.”

They accused the paper of failing to make it clear in their report of Ron Cosgrove’s interview that Mr Burrell categorically denies the allegations made by Cosgrove, who was paid £40,000 for his mendacity.

Further than that, the News of the World were required to publish in full the PC C conclusions. This they did yesterday, but regrettably, it appeared only on p28, by which time, most Screws readers have fallen asleep or run out of concentration.

And Paul Burrell was thought not to have received any compensation - so no fiscal penalty for the paper, who say they didn’t approach Burrell before publication because they were concerned he would block the story with an injunction, and they didn’t publish his denial because he was “a notorious liar”. Now that’s funny…