After the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, her former husband, like his forebear George IV, attempted to define himself apart from his wife and mistress, to be valued for his public achievements rather than his messy private life. As a strategy it was entirely understandable if ultimately unrealistic, the Prince’s followers seeking to diminish Diana’s memory by their indifference, quietly sniping from the sidelines. It was, however, the vacuum created by the withdrawal of the Prince and the royal family from any involvement in defining her legacy and memory that would ultimately diminish the institution. Diana’s influence on the royal family was to be far more potent from beyond the grave than when she lived.
In the void left by the Windsors’ apparent lack of concern, it was, paradoxically, among her erstwhile supporters and allies that the cruellest infighting took place as they attempted to define, burnish and control her memory. In the process, the self-appointed keepers of her flame were severely burnt. As the commentator Michael Ignatieff observed, ‘At the centre of it all, three great families – the Spencers, the Windsors and the Fayeds – duelled in public over the ownership of her symbolic remains.’ One name missing from his roll call was that of Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, who went from walk-on part to centre stage, the battle for her legacy ending in a raucous trial in No. 1 Court at the Old Bailey, as well as a formal police investigation into her last hours led by Britain’s most senior police officer.
Within a few months of her death it was as though Diana had never existed. Her apartment at Kensington Palace had been completely stripped bare; the furniture was taken to St James’s Palace for the boys or the Royal Collection, her clothes burnt or taken to Althorp, and her papers sent to the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle or to her family home. Everything, from the carpets, the silk wallpaper, the plants and even the light bulbs, was removed, leaving Apartments 8 and 9 empty and anonymous. It took six months to make a comprehensive inventory of the Princess’s belongings. Every single item from nightshirts to robes to writing pads was logged and noted. Just before the first anniversary of her death the sign outside her former home was painted over. The only reminder of her luminous presence was a portrait by John Ward exhibited in the public rooms at Kensington Palace.
It was a process that began within hours of her death. The bloodied and torn clothes she wore that fateful night were kept in the fridge at Kensington Palace and then secretly burnt in a brazier in the back garden of Paul Burrell’s Cheshire home. Diana’s gymwear, knickers, swimming costumes, tights and stockings were also incinerated to stop them getting into the hands of misguided collectors. The Spencers were terrified of trophy hunters. In the first days Prince Charles suggested that her apartment be sealed, but the Princess’s comptroller, Michael Gibbins, opposed the notion. He decided that it would be neither feasible nor appropriate – and he was concerned about what would happen if the suicidal Burrell was denied access to ‘his’ domain.
In the coming weeks it was left to Diana’s mother and her sister Sarah McCorquodale, as well as her butler, to sift through the detritus of a life cut short. As her family sat in the now quiet apartment, her spirit seemed still to be present: in the smell of her perfume and scented candles, the wardrobe filled with her clothes, and the notes and cards on her desk that spoke of a life in full flood. They were also presented with four sacks of letters assembled by the butler, which they divided into bread-and-butter thank-you notes, letters for her boys and correspondence to friends, family and others. As they began the sad task of sorting through her belongings, they were helped by Meredith Etherington-Smith, who had catalogued Diana’s dresses for the charity auction in New York. She now made a final inventory of the Princess’s four giant wardrobes – Diana habitually gave away many of her clothes, to her sisters, friends and staff, including Maria Burrell – while David Thomas, the Crown jeweller, compiled details of her jewellery. Burrell himself went through the twenty rooms labelling, describing and noting their contents. Every night the rooms they were working in would be sealed with masking tape.
As the family sifted through her life, they could see at first hand the impact Diana’s death had had on her butler. Before the funeral, Mrs Shand Kydd was so concerned about Paul Burrell’s mental state that she handed the grieving butler a necklace with a gold cross to give him spiritual sustenance. Afterwards, when they went through the Princess’s belongings, the three of them, as well as other visitors like Diana’s hairdresser Sam McKnight, were able to reminisce about Diana’s foibles and fads, vices and virtues with the ease of those who knew the character concerned intimately. With Burrell they didn’t have to pretend. He was considered part of the family. Often when they had finished their work for the day, Mrs Shand Kydd would join Paul and his wife Maria in their grace-and-favour apartment in Kensington Palace, a home that was something of a shrine, every surface covered in framed photographs and other memorabilia of their life with the royal family. Taking pride of place on the wall was a bullwhip given to Diana when she attended the première of an Indiana Jones movie. Knowing his love of films – he is a collector of cells from Disney movies – she had passed it on to her butler with the joking proviso, ‘As long as you don’t use it on Maria.’
Relations between the Spencers and Burrells could have been very different. In those first months, the Spencers found Burrell’s intimate knowledge of her affairs invaluable. On one occasion when Lady Sarah asked about the significance of a rosary amongst Diana’s belongings, Burrell told her, to her evident surprise, that it was a gift from the Pope. And it was he who retrieved the key, from the bottom of a tennis racket case, which opened the now notorious mahogany box containing Diana’s ‘crown jewels’ – notably a signet ring from James Hewitt; letters from Prince Philip to the Princess following the publication of Diana: Her True Story in 1992; the resignation letter from her private secretary Patrick Jephson; and a tape recording of her conversation with Prince Charles’s orderly George Smith in which Smith alleged that he had been raped by a member of the Prince’s staff.
So helpful was he that, if they were at all aware of any of his curious behaviour, they turned a blind eye to it. A few days after the Princess’s death he was caught by a patrolling policeman at 3.30 in the morning loading his estate car with two of Diana’s designer evening dresses and a mahogany-topped box. Was this the box containing the ‘crown jewels’? Burrell has always denied it. Burrell told the officer that he was working ‘discreetly’ at the specific request of Sarah McCorquodale. When the incident was followed up, however, Sarah denied ever giving him such instructions. Further suspicions were aroused when Earl Spencer’s estate manager, David Horton-Fawkes, went to collect some of Diana’s clothes from Kensington Palace. When he observed that she only had four hats, yet countless shoes and handbags, Burrell told him that she gave many of her clothes away. On another occasion, the Princess’s chef, Darren McGrady, who claimed that he was offered a pair of Diana’s diamond earrings by Burrell as a keepsake for his daughter, also witnessed the butler loading his car late at night.
Far from being suspicious of Burrell’s nocturnal activities, Sarah and her mother were grateful for his loyalty and discretion at a difficult time. Indeed, in appreciation of his endeavours, they, as executors of the estate, altered Diana’s will to include a bequest to him of £50,000 in recognition of his service. Their largesse continued. In December 1997, as he was no longer employed by the royal household, he and his family were given notice to quit their grace-and-favour apartment in Kensington Palace. In a gesture which Burrell described as ‘incredibly kind’, Mrs Shand Kydd offered him £120,000 towards a London base on condition that she held the lease and had a room for her own use when she came to London.
Before Diana’s death, the Spencers were aware that Burrell was on the point of leaving. Earl Spencer knew that he was registered with several domestic agencies. Now, in 1997, Diana’s sister, Jane Fellowes, knowing that the royal family were not going to offer him alternative employment, petitioned her brother vigo
rously to give him a job as butler at Althorp. Earl Spencer, however, refused, telling Burrell that he would find life ‘boring’ on his Northamptonshire estate, adding that he already had a full staff complement. The Earl was to pay dearly for that rejection.
With a £50,000 cheque, the offer of £120,000 for a home and members of the Spencer family trying to find him work, Burrell repaid his benefactors by seeking an audience with the Queen on 19 December 1997 to pour bitter complaints into her ear about the family, especially Diana’s mother, who were trying to support him. By his own account he spent three hours with the Sovereign – although courtiers dispute this – outlining his grievances against Dodi Fayed, who had threatened to take his Princess away; his concerns about the Memorial Fund, and most particularly his complaints with regard to Mrs Shand Kydd’s unilateral decision to shred some of the Princess’s correspondence. She had even shredded the ink blotter on Diana’s desk. ‘I was not shredding history,’ Mrs Shand Kydd declared four years later at the Old Bailey, asserting that what she had shredded had been mundane invitations or routine correspondence. That was not the case as far as the butler or her friends were concerned. Both Rosa Monckton and Lucia Flecha de Lima knew that their correspondence had been shredded and when Richard Greene called from California to ask for the return of his letters, Burrell told him that it was too late as they had been shredded. At least that is the butler’s version of events.
Crucially, Burrell told the Queen that he intended to keep Diana’s secrets safe and hold on to the documents and artefacts she had given him. His audience with the Queen raises many more questions than it answers. He has given no convincing explanation as to why the meeting took place in the first place. Certainly, as far as the Spencer family are concerned, he went to see the Queen in order to return Prince Philip’s letters that were in the famous mahogany box. The Queen’s courtiers, on the other hand, have suggested that Burrell, still agitated and emotional after Diana’s death, had sought an audience with the Queen to ask for advice on how he should comport himself after being asked in November 1997 to be a member of Chancellor Gordon Brown’s memorial committee to select a suitable memorial to commemorate Diana’s life. Her now famous words about ‘powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge’ were, they aver, nothing more than a warning to him about the strong and important characters, who included Rosa Monckton, Lynda Chalker and Lord Attenborough, on the committee. Burrell reflected that she might have been referring to media barons, the Establishment or the intelligence services.
At the same time, for a man who had complained endlessly to his lawyer friend, Richard Greene, ‘How am I going to take care of my family?’ when he was made redundant, it seems remarkable that, in the very month that he was given notice, he did not use the opportunity of a royal audience to plead for another job in the world that he loved and knew so well. Or perhaps he did and the Queen was not forthcoming.
The subtext of this extraordinary meeting, though, as his memoirs make clear, is that her butler felt that he was losing his grip on a woman over whom he felt he had power during her lifetime. The erstwhile puppeteer had lost his puppet. ‘After being in charge of the Princess’s entire life when she was alive, I suddenly found myself on the periphery,’ he recalled. ‘I felt I was losing control over a world the princess expected me to control for so long. I had never felt so helpless.’ Ultimately then, his audience with the Queen was a cri de cœur, a last-ditch attempt to gain dominion over Diana’s life, an ersatz control that, realistically, during the last months of her life he knew was slipping away.
Just as he had jealously ousted those who came too close during her lifetime – whether bodyguard, chef or boyfriend – so in her death he strove to diminish those whose position threatened his own. While her family were the official keepers of her flame, in his eyes he was the one true believer, Diana’s self-appointed representative on earth. The Spencers then were a threat not just to his position but his very identity. Thus at the time of their greatest largesse towards him, he worked assiduously to undermine them. ‘All the time they were creating a monster and they never saw it coming,’ said the Princess’s friend Vivienne Parry.
Of all the ironies of Diana’s life, this is one of the more poignant. If she was anything, Diana was a woman who courageously struggled to take control of her body, her heart and her life. She endeavoured to make her own choices in spite of her querulous heart and outside hostility. Yet in death her memory was massaged by a man whose protestations of loyalty and duty masked, it appears to me, a profound need to manipulate, manage and monitor. In his memoir the word ‘control’ seems to occur more often than ‘duty’.
But whatever delusions and illusions he harboured away from the limelight, Paul Burrell cut a rather forlorn and pathetic figure – out of a job, facing eviction and unable to let go of his Princess.
The Diana Memorial Fund was a remarkable charity, founded from the spontaneous public outpouring of grief, expectation and hope following her death. Within days of her fatal accident, thousands of pounds had been sent to Kensington Palace, the royal garages turned into a makeshift postal sorting office as her driver-cum-bodyguard Colin Tebbutt and two police officers attempted manfully to open and sift the 6,000 letters that arrived every day. ‘The flood of tears that followed Diana’s death has been matched by a tidal wave of cash,’ noted one commentator. Cheques and cash were arriving in a flood. One had a £1 coin and was marked ‘pocket money’. Another contained a letter which read ‘I hope you are OK in heaven and Thomas’ dad’ll look after you.’ It was accompanied by a note from the sender’s teacher explaining that Thomas’s father had died on the same day as Diana.
Born out of sentimental enthusiasm, the infant charity came to symbolize the Princess’s life and spirit, inevitably becoming the hub of arguments, as her memory was fought over, and where so many matters unresolved in Diana’s life would continue to cause disquiet after her death. The very existence of the Fund was seen as a provocation to those who had wanted Diana’s voice curbed in life, and it became a focal point for the snipes and sneers of her enemies, notably at St James’s Palace, Prince Charles’s London base. Her brother, Charles Spencer, commented, ‘I think there is a feeling among those who were never Diana supporters of “Let’s try and marginalize her and tell people she never mattered.”’ That antagonism was obvious the moment the Fund came into being. ‘Certainly, St James’s Palace wanted the Diana Fund wrapped up as quickly as possible,’ Vivienne Parry, one of the charity’s first trustees, recalled.
Within a matter of weeks this embryonic charity, still without an office or full-time staff, became a commercial licensing organization, charged with the virtually impossible dual task of protecting the Princess’s image while exploiting it for the greater good.
A critical and ultimately disastrous element of this legal burden was the fact that they had to police any perceived infringement of Diana’s image. After taking extensive legal advice the trustees agreed on a course of action which would cost the charity dear. In April 1998 they sued Franklin Mint, an American company which produces porcelain dolls and other collectables, for manufacturing and marketing a Diana doll without their approval. After a four-year legal battle not only did they lose the case, but it cost the charity £4 million. Worse followed. Franklin Mint’s billionaire owners, Stuart and Lynda Resnick, stung by accusations from the charity’s agents that they behaved ‘like vultures feeding on the dead’, now sued the Diana Memorial Fund and its trustees for ‘malicious prosecution’. The charity’s assets were frozen and over a hundred charities found their projects put on ice during the bitter legal wrangle which, at the time of writing, has yet to be resolved. The only people who suffered were the disadvantaged and dispossessed, the very people to whom Diana spent her days reaching out.
Certainly those who called and wrote to the Fund in the months following her death would never have wanted her charity to go down this route. They saw it as much more than just a charity; it became
also a conduit for grief counselling and an emotional lightning rod for much unresolved hurt and anguish, the public inundating the Fund with heartfelt poems, poignant letters and tearful phone calls. Dramatic, complicated, wellintentioned but prone to reckless errors, the Fund was to become a mirror image of Diana’s complex character.
The figure who symbolized this emotional conflict was Diana’s sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale, chairman of the trustees along with Diana’s comptroller Michael Gibbins and her lawyer Anthony Julius. In the months after the funeral Lady Sarah, known for her biting wit and, like Diana, love of risqué jokes, cut a desolate figure. Painfully thin, emotionally tightly wrapped and tense, she sat in meetings with her arms folded across her chest or her hands clenched so tightly that her knuckles showed white. The wife of a wealthy Lincolnshire farmer, like many of her class she had little awareness of or interest in organizations or committee work. Inexperienced, arrogant and impulsive, she was a difficult team player but, as both executor and trustee, she was easily the most powerful figure in this brave new charity. On her slim, hunched shoulders rested much of Diana’s legacy.
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