Diana: In Pursuit of Love (40 page)

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 vigorously 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.

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.