Diana: In Pursuit of Love (42 page)

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.

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.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

The Curse of the Lost Princess

S
HE 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 spendthrift 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.