It’s been less than a day, but already Michael Jackson’s death is taking on shades of Princess Diana.

The parallels are remarkable – every media outlet around seems to be grimly fixated on the details surrounding Michael Jackson’s death, crowds of mourners are spontaneously popping up in public and, you know, they both did a lot for children. Too soon?

But if Michael Jackson’s death really is going to be compared to Princess Diana, there’s one thing missing – a conspiracy theory. Luckily, though, there’s one of these here too – apparently Michael Jackson died by overdosing on prescription painkillers. So that’s something.

So the bad news, as you all know by now, is that Michael Jackson is dead. The worse news is that we’re all going to be hearing about this for weeks. There’ll be the obituaries, then the post-mortem, then the slightly-too-lavish funeral, then the all-star memorial concert, then the wave of tacky, badly-made unauthorised Michael Jackson tribute merchandise – seriously, we give it a week before eBay starts selling hokey commemorative plates featuring Michael Jackson as an angel, tops – and it’ll be endless.

But that’s all to look forward to. For now, let’s try and figure out what killed Michael Jackson. Reports are stating his cause of death as ‘cardiac arrest’, which is fairly obvious – after all, most people tend to die when their heart stops beating. What caused the cardiac arrest, that’s the real issue. And Michael Jackson wasn’t exactly short on ailments, was he?

Not so long ago it was claimed that Michael Jackson had a progressive lung disease. Then he apparently had skin cancer. Then, not to put too fine a point on it, there was Michael Jackson’s entire face. But according to The Sun, none of these things did Michael Jackson in. According to The Sun it was down to an overdose of painkillers:

Michael Jackson died last night after a massive heart attack. He collapsed and stopped breathing after an injection of a powerful painkiller named Demerol. Jacko, 50, was said to be addicted to the drug – similar to morphine – and it is feared he took an overdose. Paramedics found he had no pulse. And frantic attempts to revive him failed.

We’ll have to wait for the official autopsy and blood test results to see if the Demerol overdose theory is right, which – as the deaths of Anna Nicole Smith and Heath Ledger proved – could take some time. But in the meantime we’re sure that Michael Jackson’s more obsessive fans will manage to cook up some even more outlandish conspiracy theories. Just a hunch, but we’re guessing that by Monday someone will have claimed it was deliberate suicide, someone will have claimed he faked his own death to get out of this summer’s London concerts and someone will follow current conspiracy theory fashion and blame it on a rival kung-fu gang.

But, again, that’s something to look forward to. For now let’s remember all the good times that Michael Jackson brought us. Admittedly you’ll need a fairly good memory to do that, since anyone who only knew of him recently will think of Michael Jackson as the creepy, unpopular, baby-dangling, Jesus Juice-swigging, heavily-indebted, constantly-sued, surgically-deconstructed tragic freakshow that he’d sadly become. But it’s not impossible. This should do it…

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