The royals - Kitty Kelley [271]
The butler stood next to his solicitor on the steps of the Old Bailey, nearly in tears. “The Queen came through for me,” he said, visibly shaken. His father, also vastly relieved, told the BBC: “It’s been a nightmare. At one point [Paul] was talking about ending it because he couldn’t cope.”
The forty-four-year-old former royal retainer, unemployed for the two years he fought his case, soon found his focus and shot his spleen into the establishment. “The attempt… to destroy my reputation with my trial has led me to [write A Royal Duty],” Burrell said of his tell-all book about working for the Princess of Wales.
Without naming names, he recounted Diana’s many lovers [nine] including an Oscar-winning Hollywood actor, a sports legend, a leading musician, a famous politician, a novelist, a lawyer, and a billionaire businessman. He said her only real love after her divorce was the dashing heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, whom she had wanted to marry but who had refused because he was Muslim. The butler savaged the Spencers, referring to Diana’s sister as “McCrocodile,” and quoting from Charles Spencer’s letter blasting the Princess for “the consternation and hurt” her “fickle friendship” had caused so many. “[The Spencers] said I was becoming too big for my boots,” Burrell told reporters. “I was a servant. I should know my place. I should never assume to be more than that. Why do you think the Princess had such an affinity with American culture? She was planning to move to California. She was buying a property on the West Coast in Malibu, the former home of Julie Andrews.”
While promoting his book in the U.S., he started up the rumor that one of Charles’s servants had witnessed the Prince of Wales having sex with a male aide. The British press was enjoined from publishing the charges but it spread like gasoline fire across the internet.
Despite his rancor, the butler remained loyal to the Queen. “Long may she reign,” he said. “While she’s on the throne, England is safe.” But after Elizabeth II? “I think Prince William will make a wonderful King. I don’t think we’ll ever see a King Charles III and Queen Camilla on the throne.”
Three years later he published a second book on the Princess of Wales (The Way We Were: Remembering Diana) and appeared on the British reality show I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here. Then he testified as a witness at the Diana inquest, claiming he knew “secrets” about her death but he produced none. He lost all public goodwill when he was caught on a U.S. videotape saying he had lied at the inquest. He admitted his testimony had been misleading and incomplete. “I know you shouldn’t play with justice and I know it’s illegal and I realize how serious it is.” The coroner implied that Burrell was tilling soil for a third tell-all book on the Princess. “It was blindingly obvious that the evidence that he gave in this court was not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” By then Burrell had flown to the U.S. to escape testifying further.
Three years after Diana’s death the Queen finally accepted the relationship between her son and his mistress by attending a birthday lunch at which Camilla was a guest. This public gesture by Her Majesty was heralded as a royal anointment, paving the way for the couple to announce their engagement five years later. Previously, the Queen had not allowed Charles to bring Camilla to family events like the Windsors’ annual Christmas at Sandringham. At the golden jubilee celebrations, Camilla was seated behind Charles, not next to him. But by 2000 the young Princes William, then eighteen, and Harry, sixteen, had come to know Camilla as their father’s greatest supporter. In fact, Charles’s sons probably were more accepting of their father’s mistress than were his future subjects, most of whom despised the divorced woman who smoked cigarettes and chased foxes through the English countryside.