Diana

by Andrew Morton

  Like her mother and sister, Lady Sarah felt a sense of responsibility towards Diana’s former right-hand man. Knowing that her brother had no intention of offering Paul Burrell a job and seeing that the butler’s brave talk about working in America had come to naught, she was entirely instrumental in offering him, in March 1998, a full-time post as the Fund’s events manager. In so doing she faced strong objections from a number of trustees, including Michael Gibbins, who believed that Burrell was ‘nothing but trouble’. Others thought that he was a ‘man on the edge’ and ‘would be in tears most of the time’ and hardly able to function. He took to using the Princess’s fountain pen because, he would say, ‘it brings me closer to her’; he aped Diana’s mannerisms and boasted how her mother considered him her ‘second son’.

  More than that, they had seen how, even before he was on the payroll, he and Lady Sarah had embroiled the charity in a controversial commercial deal. In February 1998 he agreed with Flora to use Diana’s name on their tubs of margarine, a move that was greeted with ‘an audible intake of breath’ at a trustees’ meeting. Sarah curtly stilled criticism by saying that she too had signed off on the proposal.

  Within weeks, the Fund, already on the ropes for spending £500,000 on legal fees, was blasted for ‘tastelessness’ by none other than the Spencer family themselves. Earl Spencer wrote to the Fund, calling for it to be wound up at the earliest opportunity. It was a spectacular blunder especially as Sarah had approved the arrangement and, as executors, she and her mother had the final right of veto over matters of taste and sensitivity – they were effectively complaining about themselves. Moreover, they played into the hands of St James’s Palace, who leaked the Earl’s confidential letter to the media. ‘Their motive is clear,’ noted Vivienne Parry. ‘The Fund has filled a media vacuum left by her death and the quicker we are shut down, the quicker she will go away.’

  In spite of the ill-feeling surrounding the Flora débâcle, Lady Sarah kept faith with Paul Burrell, insisting on his appointment as a £35,000-a-year fundraiser. She was to regret it bitterly. Enthusiastic but commercially inexperienced, it was clear he was better at glad-handing at public functions than trying to negotiate business deals on behalf of the charity. Very quickly he became the Fund’s human face, Diana’s rock in action, appearing at galas, village fêtes and carnivals, even spending a weekend in Glasgow to judge a bagpipe contest. He enjoyed his newfound celebrity, being interviewed on TV and appearing regularly in the social pages of celebrity magazines. In the past he had dealt with the media on behalf of the Princess. Now he found that he had become the story, and naively believed that journalists courted him out of a genuine interest in him, rather than to glean titbits from him about his life with Diana.

  With rumours about his private life, notably his friendship with the gay entertainer Michael Barrymore, now beginning to surface in the media, there was concern that this fragile character was, to borrow a phrase used to describe Diana, a loose cannon who was a danger to himself and to the Fund. Indeed, Barrymore later claimed that Burrell had tried to seduce him just days after Diana’s death. Burrell subsequently denied the allegations, calling them a ‘vengeful pack of lies’.

  When Burrell flew to Los Angeles in March 1998 to represent the charity at the Princess Ball fund-raiser event there was concern when he slipped away from his colleagues to spend time on private activities. At the time he considered himself untouchable and was mortally offended when he was told by the charity that he could not appear on a BBC religious broadcast to talk about family values. While other trustees voiced their concerns, Sarah McCorquodale would not hear a word said against him, staunchly defending him from his critics. ‘In her eyes,’ according to Vivienne Parry, ‘Paul could do no wrong.’

  With the Spencers staying out of the limelight and friends of the Princess remaining silent, Paul Burrell eagerly stepped into the publicity vacuum, believing that he and he alone was prepared defend Diana’s memory and prevent her from disappearing from view. Slowly Lady Sarah came to see, like the other trustees, that the butler had lost sight of what the Memorial Fund was about and had become more interested in being a celebrity, using the charity to promote himself while ostensibly seeking new ways to raise funds. ‘Remember where you are from,’ a senior figure in the Spencer clan was said to have told Burrell, a snobbish reference to his lowly upbringing.

  In June 1998 matters were not helped by the appointment, as chief executive, of Andrew Purkis, known as ‘the vicar’ by the Spencers because he had worked for the Archbishop of Canterbury. Not only had he never met the Princess but he also sought to focus the charity away from fund-raising to grant-giving, dispersing the existing millions of pounds quietly and effectively to the causes Diana espoused, such as landmines and care for the dying. While Burrell still felt he could ‘bring a unique perspective to the table and inject the Princess’s wishes into the Fund’s work’, the tide was running against him. That December, just nine months after he had started, an awkward lunch in a London wine bar with a typically silent Sarah McCorquodale and Anthony Julius made clear what Purkis had already told him: his job was redundant. Within minutes of the meeting he had told two journalists about his plight and the story of his abrupt departure made front-page headlines.

  Later the new chief executive acknowledged, with laconic understatement, the dilemma that Burrell faced: working for the charity or promoting himself. ‘There’s bound to be tension,’ Purkis observed, ‘when someone who is a full-scale media personality, and who in many ways would dearly love to be even more of a media personality, is working as just one staff member in a charity.’ Burrell was ‘saddened and distressed’ and the Fund was in even deeper trouble than before.

  Burrell’s departure – with his head held high but nursing a grievance against the Spencers and the Fund – from the charity marked a parting of the ways for other members of Diana’s staff who resigned shortly afterwards. In a tearful statement, Diana’s former assistant, Jackie Allen, said that Burrell’s departure was ‘tragic’ and praised his contribution to the Fund. There was even more sympathy for the loyal butler when he signed on the dole. But he soon found himself an agent and made a lucrative living on the British and American lecture circuit and on cruise liners regaling his eager audiences with anodyne anecdotes about life with the royal family. A book on royal entertaining further established his celebrity status, the butler deftly revealing the secret of how to cut a banana while himself deftly avoiding the figurative banana skins by discussing any personal details of Diana’s life. The image of the discreet royal servant was complete.

  While Burrell’s star, as the keeper of Diana’s flame, was firmly in the ascendant, the moral high ground was rapidly slipping away from the Spencer family. Earl Spencer had been warned by the MP Alan Clark soon after the funeral that the fallout from his oration would be harmful. ‘Just watch now,’ he had written. ‘The press and the Royal family are two of the most powerful institutions in this country and they will make sure your name is dragged through the dirt.’ His warning evoked memories of similar advice Rupert Murdoch gave to Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil shortly before he serialized Diana: Her True Story. The fallout began with the gleeful coverage of Earl Spencer’s messy divorce in December 1997, with merciless reporting of the legal tussle between him and the bizarre alliance of his wife Victoria and his former mistress Chantal Collopy. In court the Earl was depicted as a cruel, arrogant adulterer who claimed to have bedded a dozen other women while his wife was recovering from an eating disorder. Neither did it escape notice that for all his brave words about letting the boys sing openly, their uncle had had little contact with William and Harry in the year after Diana’s death. It was conveniently leaked, by royal courtiers, that the Princes had turned down an offer of a summer holiday with the Spencers in Cornwall, and it was also noted that they were in Balmoral for the first anniversary of their mother’s death. A family friend remarked, ‘They [St James’s Palace] are keen for the Spencers to be portray
ed as a squabbling, dysfunctional family.’

  The Spencers’ blemished image was further tarnished not only by the misguided Flora deal, but also by the way Earl Spencer was portrayed as rushing to exploit his sister’s memory by building a memorial at Althorp which was variously described as ‘vulgar’ and ‘tacky’. As the first visitors queued to visit the museum celebrating the Princess’s life, Lady Sarah was storing up yet more trouble for the Spencer family. That summer she travelled the country in her estate car visiting the homes of Diana’s seventeen godchildren, distributing trinkets, usually wrapped in newspaper, chosen by the executors (namely herself and her mother). They included a framed print, a gift to the Princess from the Argos catalogue company, a coffee set, a china cockerel, a porcelain bunny, a decanter inscribed to the Princess from a Women’s Institute in Wales, along with an incomplete tea set. Under the terms of her will, signed in June 1993, the Princess had agreed a letter of wishes which allocated 25 per cent of her ‘goods and chattels’ to her godchildren, the remainder to be given to her sons. Unknown to most of the parents of her godchildren, the executors had chosen to ignore her instructions, instead handing out items that they considered appropriate. The family, and Lady Sarah in particular, were to pay a heavy price for their high-handed actions.

  A knock on the door of Paul Burrell’s Cheshire home early on the morning of 18 January 2001 began a chain of events that was to expose the keepers of Diana’s memory to the searing flame of public exposure, humiliation and disgrace. When Burrell, bleary-eyed and still in his dressing-gown, came to the door he was confronted by two officers and told that he was being arrested on suspicion of the theft of a golden dhow. The dhow, valued at anywhere between £30,000 and £500,000, had been given to the Prince and Princess of Wales by the Emir of Bahrain as a wedding present in 1981. For years the small jewel-encrusted ship had been on display in the hall at Kensington Palace. When it was sold to a Chelsea dealer for £1,200 by Princess Margaret’s butler, Harold Brown, it was scratched and marked – probably because William and Harry had used it for marble-throwing practice when they were youngsters. The sale of this incongruous treasure ship, which, Brown claimed, had been effected on Burrell’s instructions, had led to the police arriving on the doorstep of his Georgian home in Farndon.

  ‘We’ve come for the Crown Jewels,’ one officer reportedly said when they arrived in the first stage of what was codenamed Operation Plymouth. The police officers, who had a search warrant, were taken aback by the Aladdin’s Cave of royal memorabilia they uncovered, much of it stored in the loft. More than thirteen hours and dozens of plastic bags later, they had carefully noted hundreds of items belonging to the late Princess, Prince William and Prince Charles. Their haul was as varied as it was huge, and included an 1826 silver salver inscribed to the Duchess of Clarence, numerous photograph albums and negatives, signed CDs, designer bags, hats and dresses by Valentino and Versace, a presentation US bicentennial proof set of silver coins, a Baywatch card autographed to Prince William by the Hollywood star David Hasselhoff and three framed pictures of Prince William with supermodels Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell and Claudia Schiffer, as well as the Indiana Jones bullwhip. While memorabilia, clothes and photographs comprised the majority of the 342 items, there were also numerous memos and letters – including some from Earl Spencer, the former Prime Minister, John Major, and Mother Teresa of Calcutta – and a floppy disk containing Diana’s personal accounts. During the course of the search, Burrell was asked if he was writing a memoir and whether he had removed a mahogany box from Kensington Palace – the storage place for her sensitive items, the so-called ‘crown jewels’. The whereabouts of the mahogany box is still a mystery. By the end of the search Burrell was too distressed to attend a black-tie dinner, organized, as fate would have it, by the Cheshire police, at which he was guest speaker.

  While Burrell’s prospects looked bleak he wrote, in April 2001, to Prince William to try to explain the misunderstanding. He argued (as his defence was to do at his trial) that he was merely acting as the custodian of the Princess’s world: ‘I know that you realize that I would never betray the trust and confidence which your mother placed in me and that I remain the person you have always known.’

  He was helped by the fact that Prince Charles felt that if Burrell apologized, confirmed that he had only taken the property for safekeeping and promised that he would not reveal confidential information that might hurt the boys, then there would be no prosecution. But then, in August 2001, the police came to High-grove for a critical meeting with Prince Charles and others, at which they outlined a damning case against Burrell. They informed the Prince that they had ‘compelling’ evidence to show that Burrell’s bank balance had soared, presumably from the sale of Diana’s belongings to wealthy American collectors. (As a sign of their intention of ‘catching him in the act’, Burrell had been followed by plain-clothes Scotland Yard officers when he gave lectures on board the QE2 cruise ship, and teams of officers had also been sent to Italy, Australia and America to seek Diana’s belongings.) Moreover, they said that they had photographic evidence showing male servants dressed in the Princess’s clothes before they were packaged up and sent abroad. (It later transpired that the servants had been photographed at a fancy-dress party.) Not only did it seem that her ‘rock’ was profiting from her death, he was mocking the woman he so strenuously sought to champion.

  Plans to meet with Burrell and sort out the matter were dropped and both the Prince and the Spencer family agreed to follow police advice, which ultimately proved to be grossly misleading. The runaway train was gathering speed.

  In August 2001, Burrell was charged with the theft of items valued at £6 million from Diana, Princess of Wales, Prince William and Prince Charles. For a serious breach of trust, he would face a minimum of five years in jail if found guilty. In spite of various manoeuvrings beforehand, the trial assumed a grim inevitability for all concerned. Just days before the trial began, Burrell’s defence counsel privately warned the Prince of Wales’s legal adviser that, as the essence of the defence was the butler’s close and unique relationship with Diana, the case was ‘a disaster waiting to happen for the royal family’. He could have also included the Spencer family in this dire prediction.

  All sides were struggling with the tension surrounding the trial of the year at Number One Court at the Old Bailey, the scene of so many sensational dramas through the years. The son of a truck driver and canteen worker, Burrell was on medication as he prepared to face two of the mightiest families in the land. His skin had started to flake with the stress, he was drinking too much and at one point considered suicide. It was little easier for the Spencer family, particularly Mrs Shand Kydd. Not only was she suffering from a degenerative illness, but she had taken a nasty fall at her island home not long before the trial started. ‘Can’t say I want to be there but she was my daughter and so I’ll be giving it my best shot even though my insides are like a tumble dryer,’ she revealed in a letter to Princess Margaret’s chauffeur, Dave Griffin. He – formerly Diana’s immediate neighbour as well as a friend of Paul Burrell – was also due to be called as a prosecution witness. Diana’s mother knew what she faced even before she took the stand. ‘I’m sweating a bit over Paul’s do,’ she wrote to Griffin later. ‘I’m portrayed by him as a dysfunctional mother – perhaps I am but it’s not great to be in open court with that sort of thing.’ In another note she wrote: ‘What a wretched business it is. I’m glad she and her dad aren’t around to witness such total abuse of trust.’

  Yet it was the question of trust that went to the heart of the case, just as the issue of taste went to the core of the Memorial Fund. In a way these values, indefinable, imperceptible, and imprecise, highlighted the difficulty of describing Diana’s legacy. What she stood for, who she was and where she was going were open to endless interpretation and debate, just like the character of the woman herself. If the trial at the Old Bailey was to prove anything it was that those who sought to claim
dominion over her soul, spirit and legend were chasing shadows.

  Stripped of its legal flummery, the Old Bailey trial was the equivalent of a domestic row about who was Diana’s best friend – her family or a one-time honorary family member. So when Diana’s mother told the court that Paul Burrell, the man she had called her ‘second son’, was not her daughter’s ‘rock’, she was promptly reminded that she had not spoken to Diana for six months before her death and then had drunkenly accused her of consorting with Muslim men. ‘There were normal up-and-downs but it was normal family behaviour,’ she said, hotly denying that she would ever have criticized the men in her daughter’s life. If she was skewered as a bad mother and a snob, then Lady Sarah McCorquodale was diminished as arrogant and unfeeling, arbitrarily ignoring Diana’s letter of wishes in her will to give her godchildren a quarter of her goods and chattels. When questioned about the bequests that the godchildren had never received, Lady Sarah replied blithely that there were ‘not too many paupers there’. She never explained why she and her mother ignored Diana’s instructions, especially as they did not stand to gain personally by altering the will and her letter of wishes. When details emerged about Earl Spencer’s letters to Diana rejecting her plea for a house on the Althorp estate, it added to the impression of a superior and condescending family who had little time for, or true understanding of, their sister and daughter.

  Just before Burrell himself was due to take the stand, the trial was halted. As in many family feuds, it was the mother-in-law who played a crucial role. On 25 October 2002, just before the memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral for victims of the Bali bombing, the Duke of Edinburgh apparently mentioned to Prince Charles that the Queen had had a conversation with Paul Burrell in which he had referred to safekeeping documents. She had not considered this relevant as they formed only a small proportion of a large quantity of property allegedly stolen. This revelation fatally undermined the prosecution’s contention that Burrell had never told anyone that he was taking Diana’s property for safekeeping. Now it seemed he had. When the Queen was further questioned by Prince Charles’s private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, she confirmed that Burrell was going to look after Diana’s papers as he was concerned what might happen to them. During this conversation, the Queen was non-committal about his actions but assumed that Burrell was not going to keep these items for ever.