Earlier, Diana’s mother had denied wholesale destruction of her daughter’s papers, refuting the suggestion that she had sat on the sofa in Diana’s sitting room, glass of red wine in hand, shredding documents day after day. As she pointed out, the cable from the shredder, which was on the desk, about nine feet away, was not long enough to allow the machine to be operated from the sofa. It begs the question also of Burrell – if he were so concerned, why did he not stop her, or at least make his disapproval clear? They were at that time still good friends, after all.
While the Queen’s intervention added to the surreal domestic nature of the trial, equally bizarre is the fact that Paul Burrell, in the two years since his arrest, had not once mentioned this vital three-hour conversation with the Queen to his legal team. This is all the more remarkable given the fact that the thrust of the prosecution’s case, namely that before his arrest Burrell had never told anyone he was acting as a custodian of Diana’s property, had been known to the defence for months. Just to add to the sense of bafflement is the fact that, in his memoirs, he claims that his motive for the meeting with the Queen hinged on his concerns about Mrs Shand Kydd shredding documents. He went on to say in his witness statement that, because of his worries about this wanton destruction, he was going to keep some documents secure. But was this really the case?
Take, for example, the famous letters from Prince Philip to Diana. In his subsequent memoir, which he wrote after the trial, Burrell reprints extracts from these letters, or copies of letters, to which he has access. These letters were kept in the notorious mahogany box. In his police statement Burrell said that he had never seen the box or its contents, which included the Duke’s letters, after he and Sarah McCorquodale had opened it in the days after Diana’s death. If that is the case, how did he apparently come to have the Prince Philip letters in his possession, unless he copied them before Diana’s death and, therefore, before the shredding of historic documents allegedly took place? If he had copied them his motive for doing so could not have been to protect them from the shredding, which he subsequently complained about to the Queen. He already had them, or had access to them. So what was his motive? As he was never questioned about this matter in court under oath, the full picture may never be known. One clue to his motives was later provided by the Kensington Palace chef Darren McGrady, who often saw Burrell sending copies of royal documents to his friends in America, boasting, ‘They are for later on.’
As a result of the Queen’s intervention, the trial was not only halted but, after two days’ debate, abandoned, Judge Anne Rafferty directing that Burrell was free to go. The butler, who promptly broke down in tears, walked smiling out of court to tell the media scrum: ‘The Queen’s come through for me.’ In the stampede, the finger of blame for the collapse of the trial was pointed firmly in the direction of Buckingham Palace. It was widely believed that the Queen was so worried about what Burrell might say when he entered the witness box that it prompted her last-minute recall of that now famous meeting. Now both the monarchy and the justice system were called into disrepute.
With the flame of Diana’s memory spluttering in the Spencers’ torch, Paul Burrell eagerly stepped forth to tell the world about the Diana he knew and loved.
His legal trial was over. Now he faced trial by media when he decided to sell his story to the Daily Mirror. As he shredded the last vestiges of the Spencers’ dignity by his revelations, rival newspapers printed lurid details about what they claimed were his promiscuous homosexuality and seedy lifestyle. The reputation of Diana’s rock crumbled along with that of the family he had once loved and now loathed.
In the coming months, the one man who had never wanted the case to come to court in the first place now found himself in the dock. The ordeal of Paul Burrell may have ended. The trial of Prince Charles was about to begin.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Curse of the Lost Princess
SHE IS OUT OF SIGHT NOW, but rarely out of mind. While his heart belongs to another, Charles still wears her ring and prays for her each night. Even though his country home at Highgrove has been redecorated he continues to list the guest room as ‘Her Royal Highness’s bedroom’ and the study as ‘Her Royal Highness’s sitting room’. He signs his correspondence with a pen which the Princess gave him, still wears the gold and enamel cufflinks from her and has an assortment of monogrammed slippers, cashmere sweaters and cotton shirts she chose. After more than thirty years in the company of Camilla Parker Bowles there are still, as commentators never tire of observing, three people in the relationship. After all, Diana, Princess of Wales, is the mother of his children, the mother of the future king. It is her ineluctable legacy.
Yet while the Prince may still think fondly of his former wife, may perhaps, in his own way, still love her, Diana has returned from beyond the grave to haunt and torment him in ways that even she never dreamed possible. As the writer Dominick Dunne observed, ‘It’s hard to resist thinking that, beneath her celestial tiara, Diana has a plan. My theory is that she’s not going to rest until her son William becomes King of England in place of her ex-husband.’ Her legacy has shredded his dignity, questioned his integrity and provoked doubts about his sexuality.
At first the Prince attracted overwhelming public sympathy not just for the dignified manner in which he handled the tragedy of her sudden death, but also as a bereaved single parent trying to bring up two boys during their difficult teenage years. In many ways the slow, subtle introduction of Camilla Parker Bowles into the public arena became the litmus test of his rehabilitation. That Camilla was to be a permanent fixture in his life was, as far as the Prince was concerned, ‘non negotiable’. In the months following Diana’s death, she stayed out of sight, allowing the man the boys called ‘Lord Blackadder’, the Prince’s spin doctor Mark Bolland, to handle her public profile. As acid-tongued and scheming as the nobleman from the BBC TV comedy, Bolland, one of the so-called ‘gay mafia’ who surrounded the Prince, worked on the simple but effective carrot-and-stick approach, giving favoured journalists titbits of information about Prince William in return for favourable coverage about his master and his mistress. So when Camilla met Prince William at St James’s Palace in 1998, an encounter which went well but had the nervous ‘Mrs Wales’ calling for a stiff drink afterwards, the overall media impression was positive.
The Prince and his paramour were even able to fly to Greece on board a friend’s private plane that summer for their first ever holiday together without attracting unduly hostile headlines. This policy of stealth culminated in a photocall at the Ritz Hotel in London where the couple entered the building in January 1999. In September, Bolland was on hand to guide her through her launch into New York society, meeting TV doyenne Barbara Walters, media mogul Michael Bloomberg and designer Oscar de la Renta. By the end of what was to all intents and purposes a royal trip – even though it was a private holiday – photographers were calling Camilla ‘ma’am’. When she and the Prince hosted King Constantine of Greece’s sixtieth birthday party at Highgrove in June 2000, which was attended by the Queen, there was carefully choreographed talk about Camilla as a future consort. The idea of Queen Camilla was, however, a spin too far, the lady herself apparently preferring a supportive rather than starring role. When she was invited to join the Queen for the Golden Jubilee service at Westminster Abbey in June 2002, her acceptance in royal circles was complete. Her excitable biographer, Christopher Wilson, even went so far as to predict a royal marriage in early 2004. While Camilla now has her own suite of rooms at Clarence House, into which the Prince has moved, following the death of the Queen Mother, and is the mistress of Highgrove, there is still no sign of a ring.
A year after Charles and Camilla had taken their seats at the Queen’s Golden Jubilee service, however, the heir to the throne was under attack and Camilla back in the shadows. ‘Positive coverage of the Prince has, frankly, disappeared, while acres of newsprint are devoted to what is wrongly depicted as the cranky Prince, the spend
thrift Prince, the hunting and shooting Prince and the meddling Prince,’ lamented Mark Bolland, who is now a newspaper columnist.
The unravelling of this carefully composed tapestry of parental devotion, civic dedication and connubial decorum began during the appearance of Paul Burrell at the Old Bailey. As Burrell’s solicitor warned, the royal family, particularly Prince Charles, were on trial as much as the butler. The revelations about the practice of gifting – where servants were given unwanted royal items; the allegations of male rape contained in the tape held in Diana’s mahogany box, and the activities of the Prince’s valet Michael Fawcett, relentlessly demolished years of duty and dependability. The resulting furore, which rumbled on for nearly two years, ensured that Diana’s voice was heard from beyond the grave. She would not, as she herself had said, go quietly.
Following the ignominious collapse of the Burrell trial, the Prince asked his new private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, to investigate the now notorious allegations, the first ever inquiry into a member of the royal family. While his report, published in March 2003, cleared the Prince and, for that matter, Michael Fawcett of any wrongdoing, the impression was left of a self-indulgent heir and a louche, sycophantic and chaotically organized royal household. It emerged that capital gains tax was not paid on the sale of gifts; that unwanted presents were sold or exchanged, while some were burnt or otherwise destroyed, and that proper records were not kept. ‘If the Prince of Wales were a government minister he would have spent last week drafting his resignation letter,’ commented one observer. Even Prince Charles admitted that the report made for ‘uncomfortable’ reading.
After the Peat Report and during the summer of 2003, a whispering campaign began, hinting that the now notorious rape tape contained even more sensational allegations, namely that a member of the royal family had been witnessed in a compromising position with a servant. After weeks of circling round the issue, which involved Michael Fawcett obtaining several court injunctions, it emerged that orderly George Smith’s central claim was that he had witnessed an ‘incident’ involving Prince Charles and a member of staff after taking the Prince breakfast in bed.
That these allegations, made by someone who was, as even the newspaper concerned admitted, ‘hardly a reliable witness’, were even printed showed the cynicism with which the media and the public now viewed the monarchy. A Sunday Times leader went to the heart of the malaise: ‘The problem for Charles is that an environment has been created in which people can believe almost anything. A dysfunctional family is attended upon by an oddball collection of servants, many of whom are only too ready to sell their accounts of life with the Windsors. Others profit in different ways.’
Even after the Prince’s former valet Simon Solari, who worked with Smith at the time of the alleged incident, had said that Smith simply could not have witnessed what he claimed because his position as an orderly would never have allowed him access to the royal bedroom, the gossip still continued. Eventually, in a bid to calm the media hysteria, the Prince’s private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, made a televised statement in which he dismissed the claims as ‘risible’, adding, ‘Anyone who knows the Prince of Wales at all would appreciate that the allegation is totally ludicrous.’
After the Prince’s private secretary’s high-risk and high-profile intervention, the only sound that could be heard was of knives being sharpened. For the sub-text of this whole affair was about palace politics as much as it was about personal peccadilloes. When Peat – a successful accountant who had effected dramatic cost savings and administrative reforms at Buckingham Palace – was given the job of guiding the Prince, it was widely viewed as an attempt by the Queen, Prince Philip and senior courtiers to bring Charles to heel and his office into the twenty-first century, ending the culture of feuding, feudalism and favourites.
Top of the hit list were Michael Fawcett, who was felt to be too close to the heir, ‘too flaky and too extravagant’, and Mark Bolland, whose spin-doctoring in the Prince’s favour had left other members of the royal family, including the Queen, as collateral jetsam. In the fallout from these scandals, Bolland and Fawcett, both enthusiastic supporters of Camilla Parker Bowles, were ousted, though Peat himself was not immune from bitchy criticism. Bolland, in his newspaper column, took the opportunity to score points against his nemesis, claiming in the News of the World that, after the collapse of the Burrell trial, Sir Michael had telephoned him and asked if Prince Charles was bisexual. ‘I was astonished at Sir Michael’s question. I told him emphatically that the Prince was not gay or bisexual,’ Bolland insisted. ‘It is astonishing that even he . . . wanted to check the various allegations with as many people as possible.’
If the fallout from the Burrell trial had caused even those closest to the Prince to question his attitudes and behaviour, fate had not finished toying with him. In October 2003, Paul Burrell, now running a flower shop in Cheshire, published his memoir. A Royal Duty was not just an act of vengeance on the Spencer family, whom he blamed for his two-year ordeal from the day the police raided his home in January 2001 till the collapse of his trial in November 2002; it was also to prove a further torment for Diana’s husband. Much as Burrell tried to paint a portrait of Charles and Diana as affectionately reconciled following their divorce, William and Harry, in an unprecedented public attack, called it a ‘cold and overt betrayal’.
At the same time the book contained a secret that even the butler refused to reveal, a secret that went to the bitter heart of their marriage, the tragedy of her death, and was manna from Heaven for conspiracy theorists the world over. In the handwritten letter, allegedly given to the butler in October 1996, just ten months before her death, the Princess had written about her suspicions of a plot to kill her. When the book was published, the name behind this plot was blacked out.
However, the Daily Mirror, which serialized the book, eventually named Prince Charles following the formal announcement of an inquest into her death in January 2004. ‘My husband is planning “an accident” in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for Charles to marry,’ she wrote. As previously discussed, it is more likely that this was written a year earlier, in 1995, not long before her famous television interview – certainly these thoughts haunted her then. This extraordinary turn of events was propelled by the decision of the official coroner, Michael Burgess, to instruct Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, to open his own investigation into Diana’s death, rather than simply rubber-stamping the findings of the exhaustive two-year French inquiry. In announcing his decision, the coroner said that he wanted to ‘separate fact from fiction and speculation’ and indicated that he was aware of ‘speculation that their deaths were not the result of a sad, but relatively straightforward, road traffic accident in Paris’. It meant that, with ten officers assigned to go over the ground again, it will probably take until mid-2005 before a full inquest is completed.
The release of further details from Diana’s letter to coincide with the inquest announcement caused further anguish for Prince Charles. Headlines stating, ‘Charles: How much more can I take?’ accompanied stories saying that the heir to the throne was expected to be interviewed by Britain’s top policeman who was formally assigned to investigate her death. Diana’s letter, which spoke of her husband’s cruelty and her own anguish, now formed a vital part of the inquiry. During a visit to the Pont de l’Alma crash site in April 2004, Sir John emphasized his determination to ‘draw a line’ under the affair, while interviewing all concerned, including Prince Charles.
For the first time since her funeral, the Spencers and Windsors were united, dismayed that the coroner had seen fit to leave open the Pandora’s box of rumour and speculation once again. ‘As far as my family is concerned, the sooner the legal technicalities surrounding Diana’s death are finalized, the happier we will all be,’ declared Earl Spencer. ‘I have never seen a shred of evidence that it was anything other than an accident.’ A friend of the shell-shocked
Prince of Wales admitted: ‘We just never saw this coming,’ while Princes William and Harry, who had, in 1998, urged the nation to stop grieving and move on, were ‘hurt and upset’ when their mother’s letter accusing their father of plotting against her was published.
It was also a slap in the face for the French investigation which had used thirty detectives and interviewed 300 witnesses. They condemned the British media for creating an ‘atmosphere of controversy’ which in turn fed ‘hypotheses, theories and allegations’ which they had already investigated. The only torchbearer of Diana’s memory who was delighted by the inquiry was Mohamed Fayed, who had spent £5 million and hundreds of thousands of man-hours attempting to prove that his son and the Princess were murdered. ‘Absolutely black-and-white, horrendous murder,’ he stated, a view which resonated deeply with the public, particularly in the Arab world where it is widely believed that the couple were killed because the royal family did not want a Muslim to marry a princess. Who Killed Diana? Order From the Palace was the title of one best-selling book in Egypt, while the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, joined in, broadcasting his view that British and French secret services arranged ‘the assassination of the Princess of Wales and the Arab citizen who were planning to get married’.
Many went along with Fayed’s conspiracy theories – one British newspaper survey revealed that 43 per cent of the public believed that Diana was murdered. Fayed, however, was a largely discredited figure as so much of what he had previously contended had been found to be untrue. Even though many of his assertions, notably that the paparazzi had caused the crash, that she had said last words to a nurse which he had passed on to Lady Sarah McCorquodale, and that she was pregnant, proved to be demonstrably false, he doggedly continued to pile up theory upon conjecture upon allegation. Every official conclusion was contested, every avenue explored. He offered a £1 million reward for information leading to the discovery of the driver of the mysterious white Fiat Uno that he believed had forced the Mercedes to crash, while his lawyers even strong-armed the American National Security Agency to produce 1,056 pages of documentation they possessed which related to Diana for the period surrounding the accident. As 124 pages were classified as ‘Top Secret’ this further encouraged the belief that her telephone calls were being tapped by a security agency.
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