Just how much did the butler see? Paul Burrell has swapped the silver salver he carried for Diana, Princess of Wales for silver bullets to fire at her royal enemies. Tomorrow he will publish A Royal Duty, memoirs that will provoke spooky thoughts about how Diana died and show that there were indeed three in the Wales marriage: Charles, Di and the crusty old Duke of Edinburgh, whose letters to the princess Burrell has controversially quoted.
“The duke did rather more to save the doomed royal marriage than did the Prince of Wales,” Burrell tells me. As for Chazza, Burrell admits he wanted to “grab him by the throat”; there will never be a Queen Camilla and Charles should not have ordered spin doctors to blacken Diana’s memory, while Elizabeth, the “dinosaur” Queen, must modernise to survive.
On Friday, Princes William and Harry accused him of a “deeply painful, cold and overt betrayal”; he accuses courtiers of poisoning their “little minds”. Oh, and alarmingly for the royal family, Burrell says the letters he has used in his book are the “tip of the iceberg” of missives he has stashed away. If the “dark forces” allegedly invoked by the Queen should continue to besmirch Di’s name or threaten his security, more could come out. They will be spluttering on their kedgeree in Windsor Castle.
We meet in a chintzy Cheshire hotel where Burrell is holed up, while representatives from tabloid newspapers prowl the corridors for Burrell carrion. He praises the electric blue lining of my suit (he’s getting one made in mauve) and has the lively ego of a Jeeves, but otherwise he is not a butler that Wodehouse would recognise. In black short sleeves (Armani?), revealing bulging biceps to match his bulging eyes, he looks more disco demon than pillar of protocol.
It’s a dangerous question with which to begin an interview, but shouldn’t he learn the art of silence? Haven’t William and Harry got a point about betrayal? “I hope one day they would like to know how their mother lived. They were at school, she was estranged from Prince Charles, she lived a very solitary life. I am the only one who witnessed that life.” Not shy about emphasising his importance then, they’re only her sons.
If it’s really their welfare he’s concerned about, why not tell them in private, why the money-spinning book? “I know where the boundary is and I do not cross that line. Anything I reveal is to illustrate a fact. Other books have been rather sad betrayals,” he says in rather too well learnt BBC-ish English (middling posh with northern vowels).
Surely if he wanted to illustrate a fact, he should have told the police six years ago about the letter he has just revealed in which Diana writes about her fears that there was a plot to bump her off in a car crash. “When she died I put everything in a box and grieved for longer than people would know,” he says, tears welling.
But having suggested initially that he forgot, he says later of the crash letter: “I was in turmoil and didn’t trust the French inquiry, I thought there was bound to be a British inquest.” At another point he suggests he sat on it out of fear: “The Queen had mentioned dark forces. I had lost everything. So don’t you think this little chap was a little bit frightened?” Ugh.
What were those dark forces? “We all know there are security services. There are a lot of people employed at that building on the south of the Thames. What do they do? I found during my trial there were 20 numbers I regularly rang that were recorded. It made me think how accurate the princess had been when everyone thought she was mad for thinking people were listening to her. I am under no illusion that I am listened to all the time.”
Even now? “Oh, sure. I’m a loose cannon myself, aren’t I?” he laughs. “It concerns me, for Maria (wife) and the boys. The shop (he runs a flower shop in Cheshire) has been attacked. My QC’s chambers were raided. The trial left more questions unanswered.” (The court case was abruptly halted when the Queen “remembered” that Burrell had told her that he had some of Diana’s gear after a police investigation costing more than £1m and lasting two years. Egg splat on faces all round.) That episode and the lack of an inquest into Diana’s death lend credibility to conspiracy theories, but don’t justify his keeping letters. “I’m the keeper of these secrets. Who could I turn to? I couldn’t give them to the princes, they were grieving. The Spencers would have shredded them. Frances Shand Kydd (Diana’s mother) sat for a week at Kensington Palace burning letters. The royals would have put them in their private archive. But Diana was an icon and the public have a right to know about her.”
If in life Diana had few she could turn to, in death she had even fewer prepared to protect her legacy. But it seems rather arrogant of Burrell to have taken upon himself the role of protector of Diana’s flame; you can’t blame the police for being suspicious of him. And he does seem to be something of a control freak — he mentioned the word “control” alarmingly often.
So back to the raid in 2001 when the police removed Diana’s personal effects from his house. “When the police knocked there were lots of things in my attic I hadn’t even looked at. I thought it obscene that they took control of the princess’s private possessions.” He smiles as he tells me gleefully how the police missed stuff, including letters: “They didn’t search every room. They came to a dark house without a flashlight. They took lots and left other stuff. They found lots of beautiful dresses but didn’t understand the culture, of how I could be so close and things could be given.”
He talks of the public’s right to know about how Diana was treated but I wonder if his primary motive is to show the world how close he was to his boss, to throw back the sneers, such as Earl Spencer’s alleged call to remember his place. Burrell, Hewitt et al seem mesmerised by the royal headlights. It is as if they can’t adapt to civilian life, find it impossible to move on.
