Yesterday was not a good day for Paul Burrell, former butler to Diana, Princess of Wales and, by his own admission, a good friend of the Queen.

Having agreed voluntarily to fly from the US to give evidence to the inquests of the Princess and Dodi Fayed, Mr Burrell was subjected to a mauling in the witness box at the hands of Mohamed Al Fayed’s legal team. He was then ordered by Lord Justice Scott Baker, the coroner, to travel immediately to his home in Cheshire, retrieve certain documents in his possession and be back in court with them by noon today.

Documents were Mr Burrell’s downfall yesterday. Giving evidence in the morning, he claimed to have a large collection of notes and journals, together with memoranda from his employer, which he referred to when writing his two lucrative books on life with the Princess. He told Ian Burnett, QC, for the inquest, that they were too intimate for him to disclose.

But by mid-afternoon he had changed tack. Under cross-examination he claimed that he had given all his material to his ghost-writer, Steve Dennis, and that it had since been destroyed. “I felt some of it was sensitive material that should not be in the public domain, and shouldn’t be in a book,” Mr Burrell told the hearing.

“This does seem a different picture from the one you painted earlier,” the coroner observed. In the morning Mr Burrell claimed that he kept the Princess’s notes and correspondence because they were “part of history”.

But there was one document that he said still existed: a handwritten, undated note written by the Princess to him in August 1997 inviting him to share her excitement at an unspecified forthcoming event. He was dispatched last night to fetch it.

Mr Burrell, in a dark suit and green silk tie, gave his evidence so softly that he had to be asked several times to speak up. He began confidently, adding touches of obsequiousness about what a kind lady the Queen was, and how the Duke of Edinburgh had his shortcomings but they did not extend to plotting the murder of his grandsons’ mother.

He was less kind about Frances Shand Kydd, Diana’s mother, who had attended regularly at Kensington Palace after the Paris car crash to help Mr Burrell and Lady Sarah McCorquodale, Diana’s sister, to put the Princess’s possessions in order. Mrs Shand Kydd spent her time at the shredding machine destroying so many of the Princess’s papers that she filled six black plastic bin bags, Mr Burrell said.

He also claimed to have listened in to a phone call from Mrs Shand Kydd to the Princess, but at first declined to repeat the conversation. Pressed by Michael Mansfield, QC, for Mr Al Fayed, Mr Burrell said quietly: “She called the Princess a whore. She was messing about with effing Muslim men, and she was disgraceful.”

Mr Mansfield also wanted to know about the mysterious mahogany box, in which the Princess kept private letters, and which may have contained letters from the Duke of Edinburgh adopting a harsh tone towards his former daughter-in-law. Mr Burrell, whose trial for appropriating the Princess’s property collapsed when the Queen suddenly remembered a conversation she had had with him, did not know where the originals were.

During earlier questioning Mr Burrell said he had seen the letters, written in 1992, and from memory had made notes of some phrases in them. They had all been written on an old-fashioned typewriter and signed “Pa”.

My Burrell said: “They are frank and supportive and contain constructive criticism. They are sharp; the Duke does not mince his words, but he’s not a nasty man.

“The Princess was the mother of his grandchildren; why would he want to harm her? He didn’t always like the things she did, but he tried to understand her.”

He told the hearing that the Princess had accepted an invitation to holiday with the Fayeds because an arrangement to visit Milan had fallen through and she needed somewhere to go while her sons were with their father at Balmoral.

She had been overwhelmed by the Fayeds’ hospitality. “The impression the Princess conveyed of Dodi was that it was fresh, new and exciting. But I didn’t get the impression she felt Dodi was ‘the one’,” Mr Burrell said.

Under subsequent cross-examination the witness looked increasingly uncomfortable, pausing in his answers and glancing around the court.

Asked by Mr Mansfield which member of the Royal Family, as Mr Burrell claimed, had tipped Diana off that she was being bugged, he declined to say but eventually agreed to write the name on a piece of paper for the coroner’s eyes only.

The coroner read it, said he did not see the relevance, and then announced that the name on the paper was not the Queen, nor the Duke of Edinburgh, nor the Duchess of York.

Earlier, under the less combative questioning of the inquest’s own counsel, Mr Burrell said that he found it difficult to believe that Diana was on the cusp of an engagement. “This was a 30-day relationship. She had just finished a long-term relationship with someone she cared deeply about.”

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