Over Christmas, after reconsidering his position, Paul Burrell and his lawyers put together another statement, which was delivered to the police on 13 February 2002. They rated it as a bombshell:
The defendant will say that in a private conversation with the Queen she indicated to him that his relationship with Princess Diana was unprecedented. The defendant will also say that he received private counsel with the Queen which was in part a harbinger to future problems which may have been directed towards him … He remembers spending three hours with the Queen when he sat with her on her settee shortly after Princess Diana’s death. The Queen was telling him that she had tried to help Princess Diana. She warned the defendant to be careful. So many people were against Princess Diana and he had sided with her.
If Andrew Shaw and Alex Carlile, Burrell’s lawyers, calculated that the revelation of a three-hour conversation with the queen would alarm the prosecution and provoke new inquiries at the palace, their expectation was misplaced. Michael O’Kane was on the eve of leaving the CPS, and Patrick Stevens, his successor, appeared not to have fully mastered the case. The CPS’s lawyers decided that since Burrell’s statement did not mention Diana’s property, it was not relevant to the charge of theft. After all, even Shaw and Carlile had not suggested that anything relevant to the prosecution had been discussed.
In normal circumstances, John Yates and Maxine de Brunner would have interviewed any potential witnesses at the palace, but without an explicit directive from the CPS the police did not react. Taking the initiative had been firmly ruled out by Assistant Commissioner David Veness, Yates’s superior, who was close to palace officials. The traditional investigator’s practice of closing every possible avenue of escape was abandoned. ‘We got caught in the headlights of dealing with royalty,’ said one police officer, ruefully recalling the awe of Scotland Yard’s chiefs towards the monarchy.
By then the police were more influenced by the discovery that two of Burrell’s contacts in America, Ron Ruff and Chuck Webb, had in their safe a watercolour by Charles which appeared to have come from one of the Burrell brothers. They also claimed to have found evidence in Burrell’s home of his meeting Ruff and Webb in New York. But the investigation could go no further. Since the decision had been made that Charles could not be called as a witness, he could not be interviewed as a potential victim of a crime. Accordingly, nor could he be asked whether he had given any of his paintings to Burrell. So that trail of evidence had to be left unexplored.
In April, Detective Sergeant Roger Milburn flew to America. He returned with a signed statement by the memorabilia dealer Dr Will Swift that Harold Brown had sold him items from Diana’s household for between $2,000 and $3,000 a time. Swift’s website showed frequent trade in royal items, so he seemed a credible source. Milburn also reported that after Diana’s death Burrell had given some of her possessions to associates in America, including key rings (silver ‘Ds’ attached to a leather fob) and a religious medallion that had been a present from Mother Teresa. However, in the most important purpose of the trip, Milburn had failed – he found no evidence of Burrell selling items. Soon after his return, he visited Fiona Shackleton to report his lack of success. ‘I told my boss [i.e. Charles] that the police had no evidence of sales,’ Shackleton would later tell Milburn. The prince did not react to the news. Nor did Shackleton.
Unseen by outsiders, the partnership between Charles and Shackleton was fraying. Under pressure, her assertive reassurances had been replaced by a tendency to take every complaint or problem as a personal attack. ‘I’m just protecting my client,’ she would reply huffily. ‘I want to do what’s right.’ Those so addressed wondered whether she was playing her part in a team or angling for power. Charles’s reduced faith in her was fanned by Camilla’s conviction that Shackleton was not an ally, but rather than voice personal ill will, she criticised the quality of her advice. ‘Fiona’s strength was her self-confidence,’ observed an official, ‘and by then her self-confidence was misplaced.’ This had its repercussions; to say that the deterioration in the relationship was unhelpful would be a massive understatement.
In an unexpected sign of Burrell’s increasing concern, Andrew Shaw again approached the police. His client, he said, was offering to return all the royal items in his possession if the prosecution was dropped. The police, he was told, were no longer in control – he should approach the CPS. As a lawyer, Shaw would have been aware of that, but he bizarrely insisted that the offer should be passed directly on to Charles. The waters were truly muddied, with the result that the proposal never reached its intended destination.
Burrell’s trial was due to start in six weeks’ time. His latest threat to make embarrassing revelations from the witness box coincided with the publication of Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, Ken Wharfe’s memoir about his thirty-three years in the Metropolitan Police. The heart of his book was the six years he had spent with Diana. Breaking the confidentiality expected of a royal protection officer, Wharfe described Diana’s love affairs in detail, her possession of a vibrator, and how Britain’s intelligence service had bugged her telephone calls because ‘the Establishment was out to get her’. Portraying his charge as a helpless but perfectly sane victim, Wharfe revived public anger against Charles and Camilla, who was now dubbed ‘the Rottweiler’ because of her fierce attacks on Diana.
Upset by the effect of Wharfe’s revelations, Charles had also become aware of Burrell’s offer to return all the property. He hoped that the proposal would stop the trial, although legally that was impossible. Burrell should have formally declared his position before he was charged. Ignoring both the law and the CPS’s sole responsibility for the prosecution, Charles ordered his private secretary to tell the police that the prosecution was a lost cause.
Michael Peat had only formally taken over his new role on 12 August, and as would become clear over the following years, he was occasionally underprepared. In the Burrell case, he knew little about the background, he was not a lawyer, and without any experience of a police investigation he had an unhelpful temperament when managing sensitive issues. ‘I warned Peat that the police were not always 100 per cent truthful,’ recalled Bolland, who was willing to contribute to his new colleague’s steep learning curve. ‘But he wouldn’t accept an anti-establishment view without a huge confrontation. He believed in the hierarchy.’ Peat’s natural inclinations thus conflicted with his employer’s instructions.
By the time Peat, on Charles’s orders, summoned Maxine de Brunner and Roger Milburn to St James’s Palace on 30 August, he thought he understood his brief. With Shackleton and Colleen Harris, Charles’s press secretary, present during the two-hour meeting, he adopted his favoured manner. At the outset he directed de Brunner to a low chair so he could look down on her – a higher chair was noticeably moved away – and thereafter spoke only to Milburn.
‘How can you be sure that these items were not gifts?’ he asked the junior officer.
Milburn redirected the question to de Brunner. Not persuaded by her answer, Peat was emphatic that the prosecution should be stopped. ‘You have not got enough evidence,’ he said. ‘We want the property back without a fuss.’ In his concern to protect Charles, he forgot that Burrell had been charged with stealing property belonging to Diana’s executors, not the prince, and that the fate of any prosecution rested with the executors, the CPS and ultimately David Calvert-Smith, the DPP, who was sure he could prove Burrell’s guilt.
‘He wants the case stopped,’ the two officers agreed afterwards, both of them disturbed by Peat’s performance, ‘but the train has left the station.’ The meeting ended inconclusively.
There was much that still baffled Scotland Yard, not least the CPS’s strategy about which case to bring first. In the straightforward prosecution of the alleged theft of the model dhow, Harold Brown’s conduct could be more easily established than Burrell’s. But the CPS chose to prosecute the more difficult, more controversial case. Charles was well aware of the inherent dangers, and again directed Peat to remove them.
Even for the secretive House of Windsor, the meeting between Peat, Shackleton, Sarah McCorquodale and Michael Gibbins in St James’s Palace at 5 p.m. on 11 September 2002 was unusual. All three visitors knew the topic for discussion, and that the initiative had come from Charles. ‘The police,’ Peat told the executors, ‘don’t have enough evidence to mount a successful prosecution and the case must be stopped. There is a risk of acquittal.’ His disdain for Yates and de Brunner was obvious, and Gibbins shared some of his doubts. As an accountant, he had been Peat’s superior at KPMG, and he was equally not accustomed to managing the political pressures swirling around the royal palaces. The police, he thought, were enjoying their involvement in the case too much, and had failed to appreciate the nuances. Considering the unique circumstances, that may not have been surprising, but Scotland Yard had a credible track record. The same team had successfully prosecuted both the novelist Jeffrey Archer and the politician Jonathan Aitken for perjury. Nevertheless, Gibbins was uncomfortable.
By contrast, McCorquodale was absolutely focused. She told Peat that she wanted all the property returned, and that she had sought the advice of John Nutting, a senior criminal barrister who was close to the royal family (he was the queen mother’s godson). Nutting had approached William Boyce, but like Robert Seabrook he had been rebuffed. His first advice to McCorquodale was not to interfere. Nutting would be criticised by Burrell’s lawyers for being too close to the coterie around Charles, and for failing to put clear water between McCorquodale and the royal family. He would dismiss the accusations. His advice to McCorquodale echoed Seabrook’s to Charles: Burrell’s latest offer was too late to stop the prosecution.
The meeting had just got under way when Peat came to the point. Charles, he said, feared Burrell testifying in detail about the rape tapes, Diana’s anger at her treatment by the royal family, and her love life. But it was no good. After two hours of discussion, he had failed to persuade Charles’s sister-in-law to change her mind. ‘Sarah McCorquodale wanted Burrell to get his come-uppance,’ said Gibbins. ‘She was convinced that he had made away with the property. She wasn’t interested in deals.’ After the meeting McCorquodale called de Brunner, with whom she had built up a working rapport. The trial, she warned, would be thwarted in some way. At that time, supervising more than ten other investigations, de Brunner decided there was nothing more she could do.
With the same objective as Peat, Alex Carlile met Robert Seabrook. A conversation between two criminal lawyers representing different sides was not unusual, but the content of their discussion was unprecedented in modern royal history. Carlile repeated his belief that the police briefing at Highgrove had misled Charles, and that since then the prosecution had failed to understand the relationship between Burrell and Diana. According to a subsequent report for Charles by Edmund Lawson QC, a criminal barrister hired by Peat to investigate the accusations, Carlile threatened that Burrell’s ‘embarrassing revelations’ would cause the three princes ‘distress and embarrassment’, and described the case as ‘a disaster waiting to happen’. He said that Charles might be called as a witness, and added that the prince had been ‘deceived by the police’. He urged Charles and McCorquodale to intervene to protect the royal family.
Seabrook was in no mood to agree. Carlile, he said, was making a ‘huge assumption’ that Yates had persuaded Charles to support the prosecution. Whatever Yates said about the sales had not influenced the prince’s decision. Charles, he said, could not interfere, but he would support McCorquodale if she decided to stop the prosecution. The shuttlecock fell to the ground.