In early November 2000, Scotland Yard’s Detective Chief Inspector Maxine de Brunner, one of Britain’s most senior female police officers, and marked within the Metropolitan Police as a high-flyer, was given an unusual tip by a retired police officer.
A director of Spink, a respected auction house and fine-art showroom in Mayfair, had boasted while intoxicated at a party during an antiques fair in America that he was selling a two-foot gold-and-silver model of a dhow originally worth an estimated £500,000. The piece, he said, had been a wedding gift from the Emir of Bahrain to Charles and Diana. Just how Spink obtained the model was unclear, but its path from Kensington Palace to Mayfair was undoubtedly murky.
While de Brunner considered her next step, a national newspaper reported the story, illustrated by a photograph of the dhow in Spink’s window. ‘Our hand was forced,’ admitted one of the officers on de Brunner’s squad. They had to investigate.
The following day, de Brunner and other officers drove to Mayfair and seized the expensive piece. Spink’s records showed that the dhow had been brought to the showroom on 11 November 1997, about ten weeks after Diana’s death. The seller was Harold Brown, a butler at Kensington Palace. His contact at the showroom was one Jan Havlik. Further searches in the records showed that Havlik had previously bought, also from Brown, a diamond-and-emerald pair of Diana’s earrings and a bangle. He had paid £1,200 in cash for the dhow; Spink was selling it for £30,000, as some of the precious stones were missing.
Days later, de Brunner led a raid on Brown’s flat at Kensington Palace. They found that the apartment was filled with Charles and Diana’s possessions, including the dhow’s base. The butler was arrested. In his first interview, he said that the dhow had been sold on Diana’s orders, and that he had passed the proceeds to her. That explanation, he later admitted, was untrue; the transaction had taken place after Diana’s death. Brown next insisted that the jewellery had been a gift to him from the princess. The royal couple, he said, frequently gave unwanted presents to their staff, who would invariably sell them on and keep the money. The police doubted that the princess would give jewellery to a male employee, but did realise that there might have been a curious relationship between Diana and her servants. De Brunner asked members of Diana’s former staff for guidance. All agreed that she did make gifts, but never of her jewellery or of something as valuable as the dhow.
To understand the palace’s attitude towards Brown’s apparent theft, de Brunner consulted Stephen Lamport. Their conversation revealed extraordinary relationships between the royals and their staff. The palace, explained Lamport, would support a prosecution if the alleged thief no longer worked there, but he was unsure about the position if the thief were still employed by the royal family. After Diana’s death Brown had been taken on by Princess Margaret, meaning that the police faced the first of many unprecedented problems.
The butler’s arrest was soon leaked, and the problem escalated. After reading a newspaper report, Kevin Ward, a police protection officer at Kensington Palace, called de Brunner’s office to report that nearly a year after Diana’s death, in the middle of the night – at 3.30 a.m., to be precise – he had watched Paul Burrell carrying bundles of dresses and a wooden ‘presentation’ box with brass fittings out of Kensington Palace and loading them into his car.
Since Diana’s fatal crash, her thirty-nine-year-old former butler, described by the princess as ‘my rock’, had become famous for his care of his employer’s corpse in Paris, and his emotional tributes to her over the following weeks. Employed initially at Buckingham Palace in 1976, Burrell had worked at Kensington Palace for Diana’s last five years, and had become an intimate, confidential accomplice in her life. In the aftermath of her death, he was the natural person to help clear her apartment.
Unaware of that close relationship, PC Ward challenged Burrell, who replied, ‘I’m removing some items that the family have asked me to destroy.’ Uncertain about his position, Ward called his superior officer. ‘Back off,’ he was ordered. Burrell drove away with Diana’s possessions.
Ward’s report puzzled de Brunner. The best person to explain Burrell’s position, she was told, was Sarah McCorquodale, Diana’s eldest sister. McCorquodale was also one of the princess’s executors, a role she shared with Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, and Frances Shand Kydd, Diana’s mother. As an honorary lady-in-waiting, McCorquodale often met her sister in the capital, and they occasionally travelled together.
In the months after Diana’s death, McCorquodale and Shand Kydd had regularly visited Kensington Palace to weed through Diana’s possessions. Some would be taken to McCorquodale’s home in Grantham, others given to Diana’s sons. To Burrell’s dismay, the two women were also reading and destroying documents. They explained that many were intimate letters written during Diana’s affairs. They also found records of her medical history, the destruction of which, they believed, would avoid future embarrassment. Burrell would later describe what he witnessed as ‘shredding’. He did not realise that the two women, even as executors, did not necessarily have authority to act in the way they did.
Now, three years later, de Brunner and Detective Sergeant Roger Milburn visited Grantham, where they asked McCorquodale whether Burrell was authorised to take away Diana’s possessions. ‘No,’ she replied in a shocked voice. The most Burrell would have received, she said, were small mementos like a pillbox and some photos – nothing more. She emphasised that he did not have permission to remove any of Diana’s possessions, and recalled that when Burrell was offered more mementos while clearing Kensington Palace he replied, ‘I can’t take anything. I have enough. All of her memories are in my heart.’
The police mentioned that their next call would possibly be to Burrell. ‘If you’re there,’ said McCorquodale, ‘could you ask him for the contents of a large mahogany box? They’re ours.’ The locked box, she said, contained some of Diana’s most precious secrets. On the advice of Richard Kay, the Daily Mail confidant of Diana, McCorquodale had found the key to the box hidden in a tennis-racquet cover. ‘What were the contents?’ asked de Brunner. ‘Letters from Prince Philip, a signet ring belonging to James Hewitt, and some tapes,’ McCorquodale replied.
‘Why are you so worried?’ de Brunner went on.
McCorquodale said that there had been a lot of newspaper articles at the time speculating that Harry was Hewitt’s son, and that the press were trying to get a strand of Harry’s hair to link him to Hewitt by testing its DNA.
She did not reveal her main concern, namely that the letters from Philip detailed his intimate thoughts about Diana’s marriage to his son. Even more potentially damaging was a tape recording made by Diana of George Smith, a valet, describing his rape by another valet employed by Charles. The police remained unaware of those details that day, but Paul Burrell knew the dramatic contents of the mahogany box.
Three years earlier, as he and McCorquodale looked into the open box, he had said (according to her), ‘I don’t think we should leave it here. There are so many workers and strangers passing through.’ McCorquodale had agreed. She was taking the train back to Grantham that day, but the box was too big for her to carry. ‘Well, take it home for the night,’ she had said, referring to Burrell’s flat in Kensington Palace. Thereafter, she told the officers, he had been reluctant to return the box, and she had become anxious. Eventually he did return it – empty. She had pressed him for an explanation, but Burrell had prevaricated. ‘He’s refusing to give me the contents back,’ she said.
Unaware of the sensitivity of the tapes and letters, the police returned to London to focus on Harold Brown and the dhow. In his third interview, on 28 November 2000, he offered yet another explanation. The dhow, he said, had been given him by Burrell, on whose instruction he had sold it to Spink. Afterwards he had given Burrell the paperwork for the sale and the £1,200 he had received, which he presumed would be put into the Diana Memorial Fund, of which Burrell had been appointed a trustee. Later, when the police checked the Fund’s accounts, they discovered there was no such deposit.
More loose strings soon appeared. Shortly after, a curator from the Victoria and Albert Museum contacted the police. He revealed that a man named George Grimes, an amateur photographer attached to the museum, had been given a vase by Burrell after Diana’s death; the butler had told Grimes that it had been a wedding present to Charles and Diana. Uncertain about the story, the police were next contacted by Louis Munday, a handyman living in Bicester. Munday showed Milburn a photograph of an unnamed man wearing a dress owned, he said, by Diana. He refused to hand over the photo because he intended to sell it to a newspaper, but Milburn was allowed to take a photocopy.
Setting aside these seemingly random tips, de Brunner focused on the dhow. Finding the original copy of Spink’s sale document was crucial. Accordingly, four police officers led by de Brunner arrived unannounced at Burrell’s home in Cheshire at 6.50 in the morning of 18 January 2001. He was woken by his wife.
Standing by the front door, Milburn fired off the first question: ‘Do you have the paperwork regarding the sale of a dhow which belonged to the Prince and Princess of Wales?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have any items from Kensington Palace in this house?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have the contents of a large mahogany box which belonged to Princess Diana?’
‘No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Milburn told Burrell he was under arrest, and that his house was to be searched.
What the detectives found was a surprise. The living room, study and other rooms in the house were filled with paintings, drawings, china and photographs that had clearly belonged to Diana and her children. ‘Oh my God,’ exclaimed de Brunner. In Burrell’s study was an expensive inlaid mahogany desk inscribed ‘Her Royal Highness’.
‘How did you get all this?’ asked de Brunner.
‘The princess gave it to me,’ replied Burrell, who then collapsed into a chair and began sobbing. As the search continued, the police discovered a pencil sketch of Prince William as a baby. ‘Did Diana give you this?’ de Brunner asked. Burrell’s sobs intensified.
An officer opened a wooden bench in the butler’s study: inside were two thousand negatives. A cursory look revealed Charles in the bath with his children, and many other photos of the young princes naked. Next, they found a box of thirty signed photographs of Diana, many empty silver frames, a box containing Diana’s ‘Wombat’ postcards – her daily personal notes to William at school – and another box of intimate letters from Diana to William.
‘Did Diana give you all this?’ de Brunner asked again. ‘Even these family photographs?’ Dozens of cellophane and leather wraps containing photographic negatives of the royal family’s intimate moments were an unusual possession for a butler.
While Burrell became convulsed by even louder sobbing, the police search continued. From the small attic an officer shouted, ‘It’s full of boxes, wall to wall!’ The boxes were wrenched open: inside were clothes and other possessions that had belonged to Diana – bags, blouses, dresses, nightgowns, underwear, shoes, jumpers, suits and hats, including a blue-ribboned hat she had worn during her visit with Charles to Korea in 1992, their last official trip together. Her perfume, de Brunner noticed, lingered on the fabric.
Late that afternoon a truck sent from London was filled with two thousand items that de Brunner judged had been illegally removed. Diana, she believed, would never have given away such personal material, and certainly not in such quantities. The family photographs and letters, numbering in their thousands, could not be left unsecured and at risk of embarrassing the royal family. Nevertheless, a large amount of Diana’s possessions remained in the house. Without orders from Scotland Yard either to seize everything that had belonged to the family or to seal the house as a crime scene, the officers departed with Burrell for Runcorn police station. ‘I want white lilies on my coffin,’ wailed Burrell as he was escorted to the waiting police car.
Tipped off by a member of the Burrell family, a Mirror journalist was waiting inside the station. The police’s hope for discretion had been sabotaged by the inevitability of newspaper headlines about the arrest. (It was later established that Graham Burrell, Paul’s brother, indirectly received money from the Mirror.)
In his interview under caution the next morning, accompanied by Andrew Shaw, a local solicitor specialising in crime, Burrell refused to explain why his house was filled with Diana’s possessions. He did not even say that they were presents. He denied knowledge of the dhow, but admitted giving Diana’s vase to George Grimes without authorisation. The police were naturally suspicious – Burrell had clearly lied at the outset of the raid by denying that any items from Kensington Palace were in his house. He was released on bail.
The following day’s newspapers provoked Stephen Betts, an acquaintance of Burrell and his brother Graham, to sign a police statement that the brothers had travelled to America about ten times to meet Ron Ruff and Chuck Webb, a gay couple in Florida who were good friends of Paul Burrell, and who had made the butler’s two children beneficiaries in their will.
The police report sheet was automatically forwarded to the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS’s lawyers, led by Michael O’Kane, an intelligent and articulate solicitor, were responsible for any prosecution. Since Burrell refused to explain fully why so much of Diana’s property was in his home, the CPS’s advice to the police was that he could be accused of theft. However, O’Kane added, ‘it would be helpful’ to prove a sale in order to challenge Burrell’s defence that Diana had given him everything as presents. But to convict him of theft did not require evidence of a sale, as the case appeared to be sufficiently strong without it: he had taken items belonging to Diana, William and Charles, apparently without permission, to a transition point for storage, and months later had transferred them to his new home in Cheshire, where he had kept them for three years, apparently without telling any official or member of the royal family. ‘They are very precious and very important for William,’ Clair Southwell, an aide of Diana’s, would later say about the letters and photographs. ‘They should be with William.’
The news of Burrell’s arrest reached Charles about a week later. Unaware of the scale of the alleged theft, he was wary at first. Considering their low pay, he was unsurprised and unbothered about pilfering by staff. Burrell probably did steal some things, he told Bolland, ‘because they all do’. Within hours, however, he reconsidered. Police probes into murky palace habits could produce difficulties, and the arrests of Burrell and Brown were unprecedented.
At the end of January 2001, after discussions with Charles, Bolland asked Richard Kay to contact Burrell and suggest that he write to Charles. The butler’s response was swift. In his letter he described his plight and the unjustified seizure of many gifts he had received from the royal family. He added: ‘Most sensitively, [there is] some material which was entrusted to me. There is also a number of “family” items which quite simply I incarcerated in storage and then recently in my attic for safekeeping.’ Significantly, he did not offer to return any of the property, but instead proposed that he and Charles should meet ‘to resolve any misunderstanding and stop this sad episode escalating beyond control’. On Stephen Lamport’s advice, and to keep him out of any investigation, Charles was not shown the letter, and it was returned to Burrell. Neither the police nor the lawyers at the CPS would ever read it.
The investigating officers were in uncharted territory. ‘You’ve ruffled feathers at the palace,’ Inspector Ken Wharfe, Diana’s former protection officer and still a serving policeman, told Roger Milburn. ‘The gay mafia are angry.’ Wharfe’s warning about a group of palace employees was recorded in writing.
On 27 February Burrell was again interviewed for an investigation now codenamed ‘Operation Plymouth’. On the way to the interview room, Andrew Shaw said to de Brunner, ‘You’re making a terrible mistake. They won’t let Burrell’s secrets be splashed in the public domain. They’ll never let this come to trial.’
‘It’s up to the CPS,’ she replied.
‘Did you tell anyone that you had the property?’ Milburn asked Burrell in the recorded interview under caution.
‘No.’
‘Why didn’t you tell Diana’s two sons?’
Burrell did not answer the question directly, but instead said, ‘She had a very generous nature. She received a very large number of gifts. She couldn’t keep all of them. I wasn’t dishonest in retaining them.’ But that did not explain why he possessed two thousand photographs and hundreds of letters from Diana and Charles to their children, and all Diana’s school reports – potentially a valuable hoard, the authorities believed, on the memorabilia market.
To prevent the situation spiralling out of control, Burrell was asked, ‘Will you sign a disclaimer to the property?’ The police tape recorder registered his laugh. He refused to return anything, repeating that the items were gifts. The interview was then halted by Shaw. Burrell, he said, was bound by the Official Secrets Act from giving further answers. ‘We had that advice from Lord Carlile,’ he added, referring to a senior London barrister.
Back in Whitehall, Lamport, looking beaten and downhearted, confessed to a colleague, ‘We’ve got a terrible problem with this man Burrell. He’s been taking things. The police are onto it. The Prince of Wales is distraught. The prince will say he gave the things to him and that Burrell’s actions were all right.’
Lamport’s anguish reflected his inability to take command. His confidant warned him that even Charles had to allow justice to take its course. But Lamport was not the man to persuade Charles to accept such advice. He may also have lacked the background to understand fully the quicksand surrounding the prince, but he did realise that Charles needed legal advice. The prince turned to Fiona Shackleton.
Just as Charles required of all his advisers, she had become devoted to his cause. Day and night, at weekends and on family holidays, she took his calls and obeyed any summons to travel to Highgrove, London or Scotland.
Aware that she was not a specialist in criminal law, she consulted Robert Seabrook QC, who had acted for Charles in his divorce. In the narrow terms set by Shackleton, the barrister’s brief was limited to preventing Charles or William from stepping into the witness box. He was not consulted about any negotiations to recover property from Burrell. Like all the advisers, he knew only that Charles wanted to avoid any prosecution.
Faced with Burrell’s attitude, Michael O’Kane, the CPS lawyer, and de Brunner arrived at St James’s Palace on 3 April to brief the royal family’s senior officials. Around the table were Robin Janvrin, Lamport, Shackleton, Michael Gibbins (an accountant who had been promoted to be Diana’s last private secretary) and, representing the Spencer family, Sarah McCorquodale and her mother Frances Shand Kydd. Robert Seabrook was not invited to this first, critical meeting.
Soon after the meeting began, Diana’s sister and mother showed that they were on a mission. There was a side to Burrell that Sarah McCorquodale had not grasped during the tumult immediately after her sister’s death. But his over-the-top effusions of loyalty had gradually aroused her suspicions, and she no longer believed that he had been as close to Diana as he now asserted. Gibbins shared her disquiet. Before Diana’s death, he knew, Burrell had secretly negotiated to buy a house in Cheshire in anticipation of leaving Kensington Palace and working in America; the new home was possibly intended to be a base in Britain for his wife and children while he worked abroad. The police had obtained a copy of his application for employment.
Gibbins had also been disturbed by Burrell’s habit of stirring animosity in St James’s Palace by suggesting that various employees might be dismissed if he, the all-powerful butler, reported adversely about them to Diana. Dishing out hints of royal displeasure was a potent destabilising force. All in all, Burrell no longer seemed to the family the saintly figure he had appeared to be immediately after Diana’s fatal accident.
And there was another feature. Soon after Diana’s death, the Spencers had obtained a court order to amend Diana’s will to give Burrell £50,000, and had offered to buy a home in London so his children could continue at the Oratory school in Fulham. Burrell took the money, but refused the genuinely altruistic offer of the house, although he did become a trustee of Diana’s Memorial Fund. Thereafter, to McCorquodale’s irritation, he emerged as a brash celebrity, a frequent guest on TV shows and at parties, even posing for photographers at the Oscars. After a year, he had been asked to resign from the Fund’s board. Following that acrimonious split, McCorquodale considered Burrell’s possession of Diana’s property totally unacceptable. At the meeting in St James’s Palace, she had done little more than agree that he should be prosecuted. But thereafter, Burrell’s friends believed, she pursued a vendetta rather than wanting justice. Neither de Brunner nor O’Kane – both straightforward public servants – had spotted at their first meeting with the royals the swirl of animosities between Charles, McCorquodale and Shackleton.
Nor did the police or O’Kane realise the poisonous disdain between the prince and the Spencers. Diana’s brother Charles had not been forgiven for his speech at her funeral, and the legacy of that day lingered. Ever since the breakdown of his marriage, the prince spoke to Sarah McCorquodale only if there was no alternative; and he still loathed Robert Fellowes, Sarah’s brother-in-law. For similar historic reasons, McCorquodale and Shackleton scorned each other, not least because McCorquodale wrongly assumed that Shackleton was associated with Diana losing the title ‘Her Royal Highness’. The Spencers refused to accept that she had renounced the honour voluntarily. Finally, there was tension between Shackleton and Lamport. Charles had less trust in his private secretary than in Shackleton, and she in turn wanted Lamport excluded. Lamport, a decent man, assumed that Charles could rely on Shackleton’s legal expertise, and appeared unaware of the animus against him.
Surrounded by those hostilities, the facts were outlined by O’Kane. An added ingredient to his briefing was that the police had become even more suspicious about Burrell. A Mirror journalist had called to report that she had overheard conversations at the newspaper that employees of the royal family had been selling items to a Dr Will Swift, a memorabilia trader in New York. When officers checked, Swift’s website did indeed show several sales of royal items, but none were connected to Burrell.
After O’Kane had completed his briefing, McCorquodale and Gibbins repeated their belief that Burrell had no authority to take Diana’s possessions, especially to his home. The same was said about Harold Brown.
‘Brown could say the dhow was a present from Charles,’ said Shackleton.
‘That’s not possible,’ replied de Brunner, ‘because it was not Charles’s property, and Brown admits that it was taken – on Burrell’s suggestion – from Diana’s household and sold.’
Shackleton was not persuaded, and now delivered a surprise. Charles had told Lamport that he did not want Brown to be charged. ‘The Prince of Wales,’ she told the meeting, ‘is distraught. He does not want it going any further, and is determined.’ The prince, she went on, just wanted the property returned.
Lamport confirmed Charles’s instruction. Burrell could argue in his defence that some of the items were gifts. ‘Something,’ he emphasised, ‘which is common practice.’ The prince would state as much. But Lamport retreated when the size of Burrell’s hoard, especially the number of photographs and letters, was mentioned. That appeared to be far beyond the norm. Neither O’Kane nor de Brunner could believe that Diana would entrust to Burrell her personal letters to William, or photographs of her naked children.
Equally, the lawyers and police could not grasp the profligacy of Charles’s lifestyle. Unlike the queen, whose household itemised and stored away every gift at Windsor Castle as part of the Royal Collection, forbidding any sales, Charles randomly allowed his staff to sell unwanted gifts and keep the money. Rewarding his butlers and valets, he believed, kept good staff loyal, and that could be equally true with Diana and Burrell. Outsiders might consider such a practice ill-advised, but royals made and lived to their own rules.
That habit was irrelevant compared to another revelation that emerged during the discussion. Shackleton told the meeting of the handwritten letter Burrell had sent to Charles, and which had been returned to him on her advice. She described the letter’s message: Burrell was willing to return some items if Charles agreed that he would not support any prosecution. In hindsight, the butler’s attitude was confusing, not least because what Shackleton said contradicted what others recalled Burrell had told the police. However, what followed made the letter irrelevant.
O’Kane explained that Burrell’s offer was not enough to bring matters to an end. The case could be closed only if Prince William and McCorquodale, who together inherited Diana’s property, signed statements to drop their complaints.
Shackleton appeared surprised. Inexperienced in criminal law, she seemed unaware of the importance of the victim’s opinions about an alleged crime. She now changed her mind. Agreeing to accept the return of some property in exchange for dropping the investigation, she said, would make it look as if Buckingham Palace were participating in a cover-up. Charles could not be party to undermining the legal system. ‘It needs to be all or nothing,’ she said. A partial return of the property ‘would be a disaster both legally and for the family’. She and McCorquodale agreed that only a total return could stop the prosecution, which otherwise should go ahead. Having ruled out a compromise, Shackleton did not appear to consider that the absence of a wise manager in the royal palaces with the expertise to broker a deal with Burrell was a handicap.
The eight disparate participants – two lawyers, a policewoman, two former Foreign Office officials, an accountant and two aristocrats – stumbled to an uncertain conclusion. The meeting ended with Lamport and Shackleton agreeing to brief Charles, and Janvrin to inform the queen. In the light of what followed, this would be an important pledge. If the monarch had any knowledge of Burrell’s legitimate safekeeping of Diana’s possessions, her briefing by Janvrin would be her moment to say so. But she did not apparently say a word.
With the discussion concluded, Janvrin decided to have no more involvement with the Burrell saga. This was Charles’s mess to solve; his priority was to oversee a perfect celebration of the Jubilee. Officially, the burden of managing the case would henceforth fall on Lamport. Soon after, the private secretary summarised the meeting for Charles. ‘There is no alternative,’ he wrote, ‘but for formal charges now to be made against both men.’
On 23 April 2001, Lamport told Maxine de Brunner that the Prince of Wales supported the prosecution of Harold Brown, and the following day Brown was formally charged. Nothing was said about Burrell’s fate. Diana’s butler, Charles knew, had witnessed his secret meetings and phone calls with Camilla while he was married, as well as Diana’s many rendezvous with her boyfriends. Such knowledge was a time bomb.
On reflection, Charles was unhappy with Lamport’s report, in particular its conclusion that there was ‘no alternative’ but to prosecute Burrell. The prince believed that Lamport was too influenced by McCorquodale. He told his assistant to step aside and allow Bolland to navigate a way out of a prosecution. Bolland faced an awesome task. ‘No one knew the truth,’ he recalled, ‘and the episode was damaging all the relationships.’ There was, however, one truth: the intimacy among all Charles’s friends and family was strained, not least because of their indulgent lifestyles.