All this week, Paul Burrell has rarely been off the airwaves, with an endless round of radio interviews, daytime television sofa appearances and podcasts.
It culminates tomorrow with a two-hour ‘in conversation’ live event hosted by TV presenter Lorraine Kelly at London‘s Cadogan Hall which promises a ‘revealing and unmissable evening of stories, secrets and royal insight’.
Daily Mail readers, of course, are already familiar with many of the candid revelations following our four-day serialisation of the former royal butler’s newly published memoir, The Royal Insider.
Subtitled My Life with the Queen, the King and Princess Diana, it is a moving and at times jaw-dropping account – not just of his two decades when he had a ringside seat at the heart of the Royal Family, but also of the years since.
Twenty-eight years have passed since Burrell last donned the royal household livery, but as he explains to sceptics: ‘I have never lost contact with the world in which I once lived and worked’.
This is his third volume of memories. His first in 2003, which came after his acquittal at the Old Bailey on charges of theft following the extraordinary intervention of the Queen, caused a sensation with its claim that Diana predicted a plot to kill her in a car crash ten months before her death.
A second book with a portrait of Diana’s life at Kensington Palace and their friendship came three years later. Now we have a more personal memoir in which he details unexpected moments of intimacy with the Queen as well as the late princess and the then Prince Charles.
It would be easy to dismiss this latest offering as a mere money-making exercise for Burrell, or to join others who have poured scorn on what more he can possibly have to say.
To many, Burrell is a divisive figure who has been accused of capitalising on his reputation as Diana’s ‘rock’ and turning it into a cash machine
To many, the Coal Board lorry driver’s son who moved from footman to the Queen to confidant of the Princess of Wales is a divisive figure who has been accused of capitalising on his reputation as Diana’s ‘rock’ and turning it into a cash machine.
Even this week Burrell acknowledged that he is a ‘Marmite’ character, and he knows he can never win over those who believe his actions have been unforgivable. Notwithstanding commercial success, all his books have received accusations of treachery.
So, in the light of such hostile reaction – and after a gap of 19 years since publication of his second tome – why has Burrell chosen to return to a subject that is bound to enrage so many?
In interviews he says he was motivated to write it because he has never previously spoken about how ‘wonderful’ Queen Elizabeth was.
And it is true that throughout its 300 pages there are stories which paint a warm picture of the late monarch.
But he also discloses brand-new details about her cancer diagnosis and the circle of trust that kept the illness a secret not just from the outside world, but also, according to Burrell, from her immediate family.
There is certainly a poignancy in his account of how she took the news in the summer of 2021. ‘Well, that’s a shame because next year is my Platinum Jubilee and I’d quite like to have seen that,’ he quotes her telling physicians. ‘Can you keep me alive for that?’
He goes on to detail the blood transfusions and changes of diet, including giving up her beloved gin and Dubonnet aperitifs, he says did keep her alive to witness the landmark of her reign in June 2022.
Burrell writes how, in a statement to support one of his many cases against newspaper intrusion, Harry had repeated ‘flippant and damning allegations’ the ex-butler had sold his mother’s possessions
But I believe the real reason for the book lies in a recurring theme: his anger towards Prince Harry. And in a chapter he sardonically entitles ‘There’s Something About Harry’, an explanation for this rage is revealed.
Burrell writes how, in a statement to support one of his many cases against newspaper intrusion, Harry had repeated ‘flippant and damning allegations’ the ex-butler had sold his mother’s possessions. Reading his words, Burrell says, had ‘shocked me to the core as they are serious and totally unfounded claims. It is a defamation of my character.’
Suggestions that Burrell had sold some of Princess Diana’s property were part of Scotland Yard’s investigation which led to him being arrested and charged with theft. Indeed, it had been put to both Charles and William by detectives as a fact in a critical meeting not long before the case came to court.
But after offering no evidence during the 2002 trial that anything had been sold, police were forced to withdraw the claims under cross examination.
To learn they had again resurfaced thanks to Harry provoked Burrell. ‘I was furious that my character was being questioned, so I challenged Harry through his solicitors regarding the inaccuracy of his statement,’ he says.
Burrell says Harry offered no substantive response other than a pro-forma acknowledgement from his lawyers that they had ‘received no instructions from their client as to responding to you’.
What makes his dismay at Harry’s actions all the more intriguing was his disclosure that he had come face to face with the prince, along with William, at a secret meeting at Kensington Palace.
The possibility of such an encounter seemed virtually impossible as, on publication of his book A Royal Duty in 2003, the brothers condemned their mother’s former aide for his ‘cold and overt’ betrayal. In a devastating statement dripping with anger, they said: ‘It is not only painful for the two of us but also for everyone else affected and it would mortify our mother if she were alive today and, if we might say so, we feel we are more able to speak for our mother than Paul.’
So, what happened and why on earth did they agree to meet him? In late 2017, not long after the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death, they wrote to Burrell inviting him to return to Kensington Palace.
During that year the brothers, then still on good terms, were collaborating on two television documentaries about their mother. Perhaps understandably such a heartbreaking project had stirred other emotions.
Their own memories of Diana were incomplete, so throughout that year close friends were contacted and invited to share with them recollections and even photographs of her. One friend told me after one such meeting that Harry had said there were ‘blanks’ in his memory of his mother and he was desperate to try to fill them in.
But because the princess compartmentalised her life, the story was incomplete.
Therefore they called in Burrell, whose sons Alexander and Nicholas had been childhood playmates. The meeting did not dwell on the butler’s previous indiscretions, but neither did it ignore them.
‘I wish you could have run things through us and done things differently,’ he says William said.
He replied he had been unable to reach them. ‘They were in their father’s world,’ he writes, ‘And I wasn’t allowed anywhere near them.’ This was a familiar phrase to me. Many of the princess’s friends were also similarly thwarted in their attempts to keep in touch with the boys. I have heard of letters and birthday cards being unanswered and phone calls never returned.
Burrell was grateful to the brothers for the meeting. ‘I could fill in gaps for them, especially during the years when they were at boarding school,’ he recalled.
The encounter provoked a wise William to note: ‘Mummy drew you too close to her, Paul… We won’t do that with our household.’
And in another aside, Burrell quotes William as saying to him: ‘You can let go now, Harry and I can take over.’ Burrell does not record whether the allegations of theft or his trial were ever brought up. According to him, what they really wanted to know was where he thought things had gone wrong for their parents.
He says he told them that it dated from the moment of Harry’s birth in September 1984.
Peering at the newborn in the cot he quotes Charles as saying, ‘Oh, red hair.’ To which the princess reminded him that reddish colouring was the Spencer gene.
If Burrell’s version is correct, the prince then brutally observed: ‘Well at least I have got my heir and spare now and I can return to Camilla.’
Harry received this in silence, ‘poker-faced’, in Burrell’s telling. ‘I was in floods of tears, but he never flinched. I remember this moment distinctly because it looked like he was bearing his mother’s pain.’
Burrell suggests that it may have been the first time Harry had heard this story, although versions of the encounter between prince and princess have circulated ever since Andrew Morton’s book about the royal marriage in 1992.
In his book Burrell doubles down. ‘I said, ‘Harry, it’s the truth. I wouldn’t tell you that unless it was exactly what your mother told me. And I think you know that’ before adding, ‘You’re old enough to know that now.’
The meeting was meant to remain secret, but according to Paul Burrell, Harry’s ‘hateful and hurtful words’ meant he had no alternative but to write about it.
‘I have been humiliated by Harry,’ he says. ‘I never wanted to disclose that I met the boys at Kensington Palace. The boys wanted to know about their mother’s life from me.
‘However, as a result of Harry’s actions since then, I have been left with no choice.’
Whatever one’s view of Paul Burrell, in the week that Prince Harry has been in Britain to begin what he hopes will be a reconciliation with the Royal Family, the words of the former butler are at the very least a timely warning.
