WHEN the Director of Public Prosecutions is knighted by the Queen next week, he may reflect that the timing is less than perfect.

It was Sir David Calvert-Smith, QC, who intervened yesterday to drop the prosecution against the royal butler Harold Brown. The decision may have been right, but the collapse of proceedings a month after the Paul Burrell trial was halted is the second big recent embarrassment for the head of the Crown Prosecution Service.

Questions were asked as to why the decision took four weeks; and why, until the last minute, the Crown appeared to be gathering evidence.

To some observers, the halting of the Brown trial was inevitable from the moment that the Queen’s intervention — her recollection that Mr Burrell had told her that he had certain papers for safekeeping — had effectively sabotaged the Crown’s case.

Anthony Scrivener, QC, a former Chairman of the Bar Council, said that the decision to stop the Brown trial should have been made sooner. “There has been plenty of time since the Burrell case finished to realise what effect (it) would have on this case. It is chaotic . . . huge sums of money would have been involved.”

He speculated that the prosecution’s hands had been tied in the same way as with the Burrell trial — that they were unable or unwilling to approach royal witnesses.

“You are going to have to produce someone to say that the defendant did not have permission to sell,” he said.

“That could cause all sorts of problems if it means another trip down to the Palace, saying: excuse me, I need a member of the Royal Family to come forward and say we hadn’t given our consent.”

The Crown had tried to have the trial delayed until the Peat Inquiry, which was set up after the Burrell trial, reported. But James Townend, QC, for Mr Brown, argued that further delay would be “oppressive”.

The Crown had to concede that the Queen’s recollection had caused the collapse of a second trial: it had given credibility to Mr Brown’s defence lawyers, who could argue that “Paul Burrell was an apparently credible authoriser” of his disposal of royal property.

The Brown trial could have gone ahead before that of Mr Burrell. But the prosecution asked for it to be delayed until the Burrell trial, which was far greater in scope, was over.

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