On Monday, 14 October 2002, Paul Burrell, forty-four years old, stood in the dock of Court Number One at the Old Bailey, accused of stealing 310 items together worth £4.5 million. To be acquitted, he would need to show the jury that, from the outset and during the three years he possessed the items, he never intended to steal them.
Nearly a dozen famous people had been listed to testify on his behalf. The celebrities would enhance his reputation as Diana’s ‘rock’, praised for his seventeen years’ loyal service and for his public pledge to preserve her memory ‘as decently and as respectfully as possible’. None of Burrell’s witnesses was aware that he had planned to resign from Diana’s service and move to the United States.
After the first jury was discharged because one member was the wife of a policeman, a second jury was addressed by William Boyce. The prosecutor was competent, but with questionable self-confidence, and his unusual unwillingness to discuss the case with other lawyers suggested that he did not fully appreciate Burrell’s threats, nor understand the implications of Alex Carlile’s accusation of police deception, nor Burrell’s unproveable ‘sales’ in America. Apparently unaware of what had been going on behind the scenes, he did not anticipate the traps that Carlile would spring during his cross-examinations of Maxine de Brunner and Roger Milburn. Both officers assumed that Boyce would protect them; they were wrong.
In his opening statement, Boyce told the jury that the prosecution would seek to prove that Burrell had not informed anyone that he was holding property belonging to the executors of Diana, the Prince of Wales, or Prince William. Before the police arrived at his home, no one knew about the hundreds of items he had taken from Kensington Palace. Further, after his arrest he had refused to return them. His subsequent letters to Charles and William about ‘safekeeping’ proved only that he had been holding their property without permission.
The prosecution’s case rested on the evidence of Sarah McCorquodale, Frances Shand Kydd and the main police officers in the inquiry, particularly Milburn, whose most important piece of testimony was recounting his first question to Burrell after arriving early in the morning at the butler’s home in Cheshire.
‘Do you have any items from Kensington Palace in this house?’ Milburn had asked.
‘No,’ was the reply.
Burrell’s lie, and his obstructive answers during two subsequent police interviews, were crucial, yet Boyce chose not to ask Milburn for any details about those exchanges. The officer was puzzled. After all, in each of the interviews Burrell had said that he was unwilling to return Diana’s property, even those items that he later told William he held for safekeeping. Equally bewildering was Boyce’s silence during Carlile’s cross-examination of Milburn.
Towards the end of the day, Burrell’s counsel produced into court Diana’s large mahogany box. Burrell would subsequently write in his autobiography that, according to the police, the box’s lock had been ‘forced and broken’. That was untrue, as both de Brunner and Milburn insisted after the trial.
Lifting up the box for the jury to see, Carlile asked Milburn to describe what had been inside. Milburn knew that a full answer would terrify Charles, and also that the box’s contents, not being part of the charge, were irrelevant to the trial. He looked at Boyce for help. The lawyer’s rotund face remained expressionless. Instead of protesting to the judge that the defendant was not accused of their theft, so the box’s contents should be excluded, he said nothing. A chance of protecting Charles from Burrell’s threats was lost. Milburn was on his own.
To avoid falling into Carlile’s trap, he refused to answer the question, and instead asked the judge, Anne Rafferty, for guidance. As an experienced criminal lawyer, Rafferty was trusted by both sides. She ordered Milburn to write down one single item found in the box – he noted James Hewitt’s signet ring. Rafferty was handed his piece of paper and announced that she would decide whether that detail should be disclosed to the jury. She then adjourned the hearing until the following day.
Charles’s legal advisers were nervous. They assumed that once in the witness box Burrell would mention both the rape tapes and Prince Philip’s letters. Here they may have misread Carlile. The barrister and his defence team would later say that at this point they didn’t know what the box contained, and that they were simply hoping to discover whether the prosecution had withheld any evidence that might help their client. They would also claim they were unaware of McCorquodale’s allegation that the box’s contents had been stolen by Burrell. Milburn doubted both claims. After all, Burrell could easily have told his defence team what the box contained – and they must surely have asked him. In a courtroom trial, lawyers of Carlile’s experience rarely pose any question without knowing the answer.
The following morning, Rafferty allowed the jury to hear Milburn’s testimony about Hewitt’s ring. Carlile did not ask any further questions, and the box was taken out of the courtroom. Despite that piece of good news for Charles, there was panic in St James’s Palace. Assuming that the defence lawyer had fired a warning shot, the prince’s legal team could not guarantee that the judge would exclude evidence of other scandals, and Boyce was steadfastly refusing to discuss the case with Robert Seabrook.
Charles’s fears grew during the cross-examination of Maxine de Brunner. Carlile ridiculed the notion that the original reason for the police raid was merely to find the paperwork for the model dhow. They were fishing. In their blunderbuss approach, he alleged, they couldn’t decide what to take and what to leave, as was illustrated by a video of Burrell’s house after the raid. A huge number of items taken from Kensington Palace remained there. De Brunner was asked whether she had entered the loft. No, she replied; she disliked heights. Carlile openly mocked her, as if her faint-heartedness proved Burrell’s innocence.
Next, he sought to persuade the jury that Charles and his sons had been misled by de Brunner during the meeting at Highgrove, although only John Yates had spoken on that occasion. First, because the police had implied that the man in the photograph wearing Diana’s dress was Burrell; second, more importantly, because de Brunner had failed to understand the source of Burrell’s income.
In his briefing to Charles at Highgrove, Yates had described how the butler’s bank balance had soared after Diana’s death. One reason was undoubtedly his book sales and lectures: he was a man in the news. However, before the trial, forensic accountants employed by the Fraud Squad had examined his bank account. Their report, in two large green volumes, showed that a credit of about £30,000 remained unexplained. The jury would have to decide whether the police had misled Charles about Burrell’s wealth.
Next, Carlile asked de Brunner whether she had told the princes that no evidence had been found of Burrell selling any items in America. ‘No,’ she replied. Carlile accused her of having grossly misled the royals. She was then addressed by the judge. ‘Is it right that you allowed the two princes to remain under that misconception?’ ‘Yes,’ she replied. As she watched journalists leave the courtroom to report this dramatic news, de Brunner realised too late what she had failed to mention.
Milburn had told Fiona Shackleton on 30 August that there was no evidence of Burrell selling anything, and Shackleton had duly passed the message on to Charles and his sons; so at least one of Carlile’s criticisms of police misconduct could have been rebutted. De Brunner had every right to expect Boyce to pick up on her forgetfulness on re-examination, but he never did. The impression was established that the police investigation had been botched. In the prosecution’s opinion, that was irrelevant to proving Burrell’s guilt or innocence on the actual charge, but the blaring media headlines disturbed St James’s Palace.
On that Friday afternoon, proceedings ended unusually early, the judge sympathising with Carlile’s plea that he was tired. The trial, it was assumed, would resume after the weekend.
Just after 8.30 on Monday morning, 28 October, Boyce was reading his papers in a small exhibits room adjacent to the court when John Yates unexpectedly joined him. ‘I’ve just had a conversation with Michael Peat,’ the policeman said, then repeated the private secretary’s exact words: ‘Her Majesty has had a recollection.’
On the previous Friday, Peat had explained, the queen had recalled a meeting one afternoon five years earlier, soon after Diana’s death. Paul Burrell had come to the palace to tell her about preserving some of Diana’s papers. ‘The queen agreed that he should care for them,’ said Peat. According to Yates, he had replied, ‘Michael, that clearly scuppers the prosecution.’ Peat had said, ‘Oh, surely not?’
Boyce visibly paled as he heard the news. Taking off his wig, he seemed to shrink. For a barrister who would later boast on his website, ‘He fights every case with tremendous passion,’ one eyewitness recalled, ‘He looked crushed. A vibrant man was shell-shocked, destroyed. The little courage he had disappeared.’ Boyce’s panic infected others – lawyers and police officers – who had arrived in the room for that day’s trial. He appeared to believe the case was as good as lost.
Eventually he explained his reasoning. In his opening statement, Boyce had said that Burrell had been silent about taking Diana’s possessions. During the years after her death, no one had been told about any ‘safekeeping’ role her former butler might have assumed. Now Burrell would testify about what he had told the queen and how he received her approval. He could quote her ‘recollection’ in his defence. Only by questioning the queen in court could Burrell’s version of the conversation be rebutted, and that was constitutionally impossible; no reigning monarch could appear in ‘Her Majesty’s’ court. ‘That’s the end of the trial,’ Boyce told his perplexed audience. Next, he texted de Brunner, who was drinking tea in the canteen: ‘I’m sorry for what is about to happen.’ With that, he went into the courtroom to continue what was left of the prosecution.
During that same day, the circumstances of the queen’s recollection emerged. Peat revealed to the CPS lawyers that the previous Friday, she, Charles and Philip had driven together to St Paul’s for a memorial service for the victims of the Bali bombings. Driving past the Old Bailey, she asked why a crowd was standing outside. Charles answered that Paul Burrell was on trial. The queen was apparently unaware that he was being prosecuted. Then she mentioned that, some years before, Burrell had sought an audience with her to explain that he was caring for some of Diana’s papers, and she had agreed that he should do so.
After the royal family returned from St Paul’s, there was unusual activity in St James’s Palace. Lawyers were summoned for a conference to discuss the queen’s recollection. Peat was told that Boyce should be informed immediately. Next, Robin Janvrin was called. Told about the new evidence, the queen’s private secretary expressed his astonishment. ‘Oh my God,’ an eyewitness heard him exclaim. Thereafter Janvrin did nothing, allowing Peat to continue managing the crisis on Charles’s behalf.
Then something very strange occurred. Contrary to Seabrook’s advice, neither Boyce nor the CPS was told on that Friday afternoon about the ‘recollection’, and the lack of communication continued through Saturday and Sunday. According to palace rumours, however, Peat did tell Peter Goldsmith, the attorney general, that the recollection was a ‘golden opportunity to get rid of this embarrassment’. Early on Monday morning, Peat called Yates to report the queen’s remarks.
To some in the prosecution team, and to the police at the Old Bailey, Peat’s version of the circumstances connected to the trial, subsequently described in the written report by Edmund Lawson QC commissioned by Peat and submitted to Charles (the Peat Report), lacked credibility.
First, Janvrin, an assiduous official, had been regularly briefed about the investigation, not least because William and Harry were involved. He would certainly have fulfilled his duty and reported the main details of the case to the queen during their daily meetings.
Second, the queen was known to read the newspapers regularly, and for over a year Burrell’s plight had been widely reported. The trial itself had dominated the front pages for the eleven days before her drive to St Paul’s.
Third, it was unusual for the monarch and the heir to travel in the same car, for security reasons. The coincidence that mother and son, who seldom spoke to each other, should have been so publicly united on that particular day while driving past the Old Bailey was a coincidence that raised questions.
Fourth, the version offered by Peat contradicted that of others in the palaces. He failed to explain why the prosecution was not told about the queen’s recollection for two and a half days; he failed to report his own consultation with a lawyer to understand the significance of the recollection; and he omitted to explain why he, rather than Janvrin, asked the queen about her suddenly jogged memory. The reason for that at least was clear to observers inside the palaces: Janvrin wanted no part in the undertaking.
All those inconsistencies led to one question: who had masterminded the operation over the weekend? Amid the speculation there was also admiration. Using the queen to halt the trial was a masterful tactic. The police and the CPS were unprepared for a challenge at that exalted level. Both had been naïve to believe that they could prosecute without the Establishment’s wholehearted support. ‘Stardust clouded our judgement,’ confessed one stunned officer.
Inevitably, some of those involved in the case questioned whether the queen had ever met Burrell in the ‘three-hour’ audience he had described in his statement of 13 February 2002. After all, even Peat would claim to have been unaware of the statement in which Burrell mentioned the meeting. But three witnesses would have been available had the police sought that information. First, Michael Gibbins had been asked by Burrell in December 1997 for permission to visit the queen to complain about ‘the activities of the executors’; second, a palace page told Richard Kay about accompanying Burrell to the queen’s sitting room, where he remained for between forty-five and ninety minutes; and finally, soon after that audience, Burrell told Kay that he had met the queen to complain about how the Spencers were destroying history, and to tell her he wanted to save documents for posterity. The queen had, he said, replied, ‘How interesting. Good idea.’ Pertinently, in Kay’s version Burrell mentioned only ‘documents’.
The police failed to seek those witnesses, and in hindsight allowing Burrell’s disclosure to remain unquestioned appears inexplicable. In their self-interest, both palaces blamed the police and the CPS for failing to follow up. But in reality, Peat and others knew that each organisation was under orders to limit its access to Charles, while the police were forbidden to interview the queen. And both the police and the CPS harboured doubts about Burrell’s crucial meeting at the palace.
Few believed the butler’s version of spending three hours with the queen, and in any event his description of their conversation – about documents and not hundreds of Diana’s personal possessions – was irrelevant to the charges he faced. Similarly, none of the prosecutors or police expressed at subsequent meetings their outright belief of the Buckingham Palace spokesman’s explanation that ‘the queen did not realise that her evidence was important, and no one told her’.
Nevertheless, that explanation could well have been true. The queen, by nature a reactive person who absorbed enormous amounts of information, would not have taken any initiative after meeting Burrell. The surprise was the timing of her revelation, coinciding with Charles’s increasing despair and the palaces’ highly convenient interpretation of that meeting. ‘An act of genius,’ was the judgement of one Whitehall observer, ‘a machination to solve desperation. Only a golden bullet could have stopped the trial. And they invented it.’ A senior police officer was more succinct: ‘The palace lied.’ The sceptics could not name the mastermind of any conspiracy, but they assumed that Charles participated in the crucial discussions. Identifying the other participants, and establishing the timeline of their conversations, was impossible. When required, members of the royals’ inner sanctum were masters at protecting their secrets.
At 8.30 a.m. on Tuesday, 29 October, Boyce chaired a meeting with de Brunner, Milburn and two CPS lawyers, Patrick Stevens and Sue Taylor, at the Old Bailey. The prosecutor had decided to ask the judge to stop the trial, but he added a peculiar twist. He intended to ask for the court to be cleared of everyone, including the police, the defence lawyers, the jury and even the stenographer. To suspend proceedings, he would apply for a Public Interest Immunity hearing – although without any intention of pursuing that application. The ruse would conceal the true situation from the outside world while the prosecutors secretly sought a way around the queen’s intervention. To protect himself, Boyce asked the police to hide two tape recorders in a briefcase that would be placed on his desk in court. The tapes would then be kept under seal by the CPS. He did not reveal who had advised him to follow this extraordinary arrangement.
Next, Boyce explained why the queen’s ‘recollection’ had skewed the trial and would help Burrell. By telling the queen that he was caring for ‘documents’ he had covered everything, including two thousand sensitive photo negatives, Diana’s ‘Wombat’ cards to William, and the family photo albums. ‘Why?’ a police officer asked. Sarah McCorquodale would never have destroyed family photographs or Diana’s letters. On the contrary, the evidence was that all such items were to be sent to Highgrove.
Boyce ignored the question and said, ‘Burrell wants to keep Diana’s underwear and clothing, which will make him a multi-millionaire within one month. The only way out is to negotiate with the defence.’ For his audience, to start such a negotiation in the middle of a trial was uncharted territory.
‘Princes Charles and William need protection from threats,’ said Boyce. He mentioned ‘Joseph’, another defence lawyer, who in a private conversation had said that Burrell was ‘anxious to talk and be indiscreet’. Boyce continued, ‘We must protect the source from the media frenzy if the recollection is released.’ ‘The source’ was his way of referring to the queen.
Boyce’s defeatism stung Patrick Stevens: ‘Surely it’s not as bad as you think. Surely we can carry on. We can’t put a lid on this. We’ll just put a statement about the queen’s recollection to the court and leave it for the jury to decide.’
‘Yes,’ replied Boyce, ‘it’s not hopeless. The jury will come to the right decision.’ Then suddenly he somersaulted. ‘My gut feeling is that after hearing about the recollection, the jury will not convict.’ After wondering how the queen should be approached, he said, ‘I need to speak to the attorney general.’
At exactly 10 a.m. Boyce walked into the courtroom, asked the judge to halt the trial and send the jury home, then disappeared for the next ninety minutes.
Neither the defendant nor his lawyers had any idea why the trial had been halted. Burrell hadn’t told his counsel any more about his conversation with the monarch than his mention in his statement about her warnings during ‘three hours on the settee’. Andrew Shaw was certainly unaware that his client had supposedly mentioned to the queen that he was ‘safekeeping or acting as a custodian of any of Diana’s possessions’.
At 11.30 the same morning, Boyce returned to his small office and dictated a list of questions for the queen. Who else was present at her meeting with Burrell? What was said at the meeting? Why was the meeting not revealed before? How many meetings did she have? Were any entries made in the Buckingham Palace diary?
At 4.35 that afternoon, de Brunner and Milburn met Peat, Seabrook and Shackleton at St James’s Palace to present Boyce’s questions. Two hours later, Peat handed over the written answers provided by the queen. ‘You’re overreacting,’ Seabrook told the officers. ‘This is a storm in a teacup. The case can continue.’ He added, ‘Someone’s fingerprints are all over this to disrupt the prosecution.’ He did not identify the culprit, but the officers wrongly assumed he meant Mark Bolland.
For their part, the police regarded Seabrook as part of the Establishment conspiracy to end the trial. Again, they were mistaken. Like other criminal lawyers, Seabrook could not understand Boyce’s dogmatic pessimism. There was nothing, he would later say, to prevent the prosecutor from describing the queen’s recollection to the jury, obtaining a ruling from the judge that Peat’s statement could not be challenged, and allowing the trial to continue. Any references in the charges to Burrell stealing Diana’s ‘papers’ would be dropped, and the trial would carry on.
After Seabrook’s intervention, Peat explained the background to the queen’s intervention to the police and lawyers. The palace, he said, was concerned that any failure to disclose Burrell’s meeting with the queen would reflect badly on the royal family if he were convicted, or if he harmed himself because of his depression. None of his audience was disposed to accept this explanation. Moreover, the police were struck by Peat’s incredulity about the consequences of the queen’s action. Shackleton shared his amazement. ‘The prosecution lawyers,’ she told Milburn, ‘are reacting too quickly to the information.’ Milburn and de Brunner returned to the Old Bailey in a state of bewilderment. As an independent institution, Scotland Yard could have pushed for the truth, but Assistant Commissioner David Veness told them, ‘We must protect the monarch,’ and ruled against any further activity. Charles and William similarly required protection. Yates passed the order down. ‘I think the prosecution left a number of open goals,’ he said ruefully in the aftermath.
The first crisis meeting of the prosecution lawyers was held at the offices of the CPS on Tuesday evening. The principal players present were the prosecutors William Boyce and Richard Whittam; David Perry, a criminal lawyer and constitutional expert invited by the CPS; John Yates; and Maxine de Brunner. In the chair was the CPS lawyer Patrick Stevens; David Calvert-Smith, the director of public prosecutions, who should have been present, was away on holiday in Greece.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Perry asked the prosecutors and the police. ‘You should let it go away. It cannot be in the interest of the monarchy to pursue a simple theft.’
‘We have enough evidence,’ replied Boyce, ‘but it’s not my call.’
In the brainstorming session that ensued, there was even discussion about whether a new trial could be convened inside Buckingham Palace, with a jury of courtiers and peers empowered to hear the queen’s testimony. That fantasy was discarded after it was generally agreed that there was no legal reason to stop the trial.
The following day, the same group met again. Decisions were needed. To bring the issue to a conclusion, Peter Goldsmith, the attorney general, and David Calvert-Smith, now back from holiday, joined them. Richard Whittam, the junior prosecutor, again suggested that the prosecution could withdraw the charge of the theft of ‘papers’ or documents and continue with the theft of the remaining items. Boyce ignored him, and repeated his opinion that proceedings must end, without any prospect of a new trial. David Perry agreed: ‘The queen cannot provide evidence in her own court and the queen can do no wrong. No chance of rebuttal or contradiction.’ The prosecution, he continued, would have to accept that there had indeed been a conversation, and could not disprove whatever Burrell testified that he and the queen had discussed. The decision about Burrell’s guilt or innocence would then be left to the jury, as it always had been.
Only two people could order the trial to end: Calvert-Smith and Goldsmith. Calvert-Smith prevaricated, speaking ‘on the one hand and on the other’, so Goldsmith took the lead. He went to see the queen to explain the consequences of what he termed the ‘fiasco’, then consulted Tony Blair. Robin Janvrin had also called Downing Street. At that moment, Blair was immersed in deciding the size of Britain’s military commitment for the invasion of Iraq. Once again he was being asked to consider how to save the monarchy. His decision was that the trial should be brought to an end.
Goldsmith reappeared at the meeting of lawyers. Understandably, he did not want to direct Boyce to stop the prosecution – technically that was the responsibility of the director of public prosecutions. Accordingly, Calvert-Smith had invited Milburn and de Brunner to the final stages of the meeting. ‘If the coffee pot is half empty,’ Milburn told de Brunner, ‘it means they’ve made up their minds before we got there.’ On entering the room, Milburn looked at the cafetière. Half full.
Little was discussed. At midday, Yates said to Milburn, ‘Give me six good reasons why the case should go ahead.’
‘I can give you thirty, sir,’ replied Milburn.
Thereafter, according to a hostile eyewitness, Yates was ‘as useful as a chocolate fireguard’. Late that afternoon, Milburn and de Brunner were asked to meet Calvert-Smith in his office. Over a glass of cheap wine he asked them why the prosecution should continue. After they had again given their reasons, the DPP said nothing except to bid them farewell.
Reflecting on the mismanagement of the royal interests over the previous two years, not one of those involved – Janvrin, Peat, Shackleton and all the lawyers who regarded themselves as among the finest in London – appeared to consider what Burrell would do after the trial. None openly discussed how the former butler might make his fortune by doing precisely what they had sought so hard to avoid – selling royal secrets. Led by Goldsmith, an insecure attorney general, the seemingly blinkered satraps composed a statement for Boyce to announce in the courtroom on Friday, 1 November: the complete end of the prosecution. His statement, expressly mentioning the queen’s recollection, took everyone in the court by surprise. The trial was over. Charles and Peat breathed sighs of relief.
So did Burrell. Crying on Carlile’s shoulder in the gloomy corridor outside Court Number One, he exclaimed, ‘The queen came through for me.’ In the excitement, his brother Graham told a journalist, ‘He will have his revenge, but he will do it with dignity.’ After repeating to the crowds outside the court that his life had been ruined, Burrell headed off towards Covent Garden to celebrate. Among those drinking with him was Richard Kay, who had cared for Burrell for two years, especially during his nervous breakdown and a drug overdose. In return, Kay expected that Burrell, steeped in debt, would sell his story exclusively to the Daily Mail. Instead, as he had always planned to do, Burrell offered his revelations to the Daily Mirror, which had secretly paid money to his brother Graham and had broken the story of Burrell’s arrest. His agent mentioned £1 million as the possible fee. The Mail was not given the opportunity to make a counter-offer. Not only Kay felt double-crossed: all of Diana’s famous friends who had been prepared to testify about her butler’s loyalty would be shocked by his duplicity.
While Burrell drank champagne, Maxine de Brunner was hiding in the Landmark Hotel in Marylebone. Unrelated to the trial, she faced a serious threat to her life from a known terrorist living in London who was involved in another of her investigations. He had recognised her from the media coverage. Isolated in her room, she feared criticism in the following morning’s newspapers.
The comments were even more vitriolic than she could have anticipated. ‘The police have covered themselves in disgrace,’ said the Daily Mail, referring to ‘a black farce’. In a withering attack on the CPS and the DPP for having ‘shown an incompetence that beggars belief’, the paper accused de Brunner of lying about the ‘Burrell photograph’ and the CPS of concealing his conversation with the queen. Both accusations were unjustified. Other papers charged Shackleton and McCorquodale with ignoring Charles’s wise judgement and pushing for a prosecution that was doomed from the start. Bolland was reported to have threatened Shackleton that he would have ‘her legs blown off’. Everyone was blamed except Charles. On 4 November he had flown to Italy, and he returned four days later determined to ensure that responsibility for the embarrassment fell upon the police. In his reception room at Highgrove he emphasised to selected newspaper editors the folly of Scotland Yard.
Simultaneously, palace officials aggressively briefed journalists about the officers’ deception. Leading the charge was Stephen Pollard, a respected commentator who had not previously written about the royals. His article, prominently featured in the London Evening Standard, eviscerated the police. There was ‘no crime and no victim’, he wrote, only a conspiracy to put Burrell behind bars. The prosecution was ‘a result of a potent mix of malice and quite astonishing incompetence’. The entire case was based on ‘the idea that Mr Burrell was flogging the Princess of Wales’s possessions in the US’. To implement that conspiracy, wrote Pollard, de Brunner went to ‘quite extraordinary lengths to obscure this lack of evidence’. He continued, ‘At no stage did she inform the Prince of Wales or his solicitor of her “mistake”.’ De Brunner, he wrote, had either been lying or had been ‘grotesquely incompetent’. He concluded that the world had witnessed a ‘once-in-a-generation, high-profile prosecution which defines the reputation of the police for years to come. And they have blown it quite spectacularly.’
Given the source of his information, Pollard’s invective was inevitably based on multiple errors. The media’s humiliation of the police nevertheless failed to suppress entirely the suspicion that it was Charles who had orchestrated his mother’s ‘recollection’. A handful of perceptive journalists conjured up a scenario of courtiers inventing the ruse to stop Burrell describing a palace riddled with staff who indulged in cross-dressing, selling official gifts, theft and rape. At the centre of this narrative was The World versus Maxine de Brunner, with the police officer the inevitable casualty.
At 2.30 on the afternoon after the trial, de Brunner’s mobile rang. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Sarah McCorquodale. ‘They shouldn’t have done that to you. It’s disgraceful. We’re totally behind you. This investigation has been sabotaged. A deal was struck by Paul Burrell and the Prince of Wales.’
As McCorquodale went on, de Brunner made sure she wrote down all that was said. ‘They agreed that the trial would be stopped if three things happened,’ McCorquodale continued. ‘First, Burrell would not mention certain things in his book; second, William’s property will be given back to William; and a third thing which I don’t know. Once the deal was agreed, Fiona contacted the police to tell them about the queen’s recollection of events.’ She concluded, ‘They couldn’t afford for Paul Burrell to go into the witness box. Burrell had told the Prince of Wales that he would tell all unless the trial was halted. The palace have maintained that they didn’t know about the queen’s and Burrell’s conversation.’
McCorquodale agreed to sign a note describing the meeting organised by Peat on 11 September to end the trial. At de Brunner’s suggestion she met Milburn for coffee on 12 December and signed the handwritten account on an A4 sheet of paper that he had prepared for her.* Michael Gibbins signed the same note a week later, agreeing that Peat, on Charles’s behalf, had sought to stop the trial. In Milburn’s words, ‘I was protecting my back.’
‘Let’s nick Peat for seeking to pervert the course of justice,’ Milburn said to Commander John Yates after showing him the signed note. After apparently consulting David Veness, Yates agreed, telling Milburn, ‘You’ve set off an Exocet.’ Milburn believed that Yates had given the note to Patrick Stevens to consider whether Peat should be formally cautioned and interviewed. Later, he assumed that the CPS lawyer decided that a prosecution was not in the public interest. He was mistaken. Yates had done nothing to stir that pot.
That same week, still isolated in her hotel room, de Brunner answered a call from Stuart Osborne, one of Charles’s protection officers. ‘You can’t fight the Establishment,’ said Osborne sympathetically. ‘That press statement [about the recollection] from the palace was a lie, but the police view is that the House of Windsor must be protected at all costs.’ De Brunner wrote down what Osborne had said on the Landmark Hotel’s notepaper.
By this time, she and Milburn were feeling so battered that both were convinced by an official at the Scotland Yard’s Department of Professional Standards that a police group was on standby at Putney police station to await an official complaint from Buckingham Palace that would trigger their arrest for perverting the course of justice. The truth about the existence of such a group has never been established.
Charles, despite his immediate relief, was similarly beleaguered. Burrell had apparently agreed not to embarrass the royal family, yet the publicist Max Clifford had obtained not only his original thirty-nine-page statement but also his proof of evidence. That document, composed by his lawyers, described in explicit detail Diana’s relationship with many boyfriends, including Hasnat Khan, a Pakistani surgeon who more than once had been smuggled into Kensington Palace either under a blanket or in the boot of a car for night-time encounters. Burrell described cancelling Diana’s public engagements so that she could stay with Khan, even specifically so that she could stay in bed with him.
To add spice to such revelations, Burrell presented Charles as a pampered, absolute monarch similar to France’s notoriously self-indulgent kings before the Revolution. In his statement, he revealed that the prince had ordered him to lie to Diana about his movements, and once, after the butler had inadvertently told the truth, had thrown a book at him; how Charles insisted that his own crystal goblets and silver cutlery be brought to the hospital after his polo accident so he would not have to use institutional crockery; that the prince had ordered staff at Highgrove to burn a crafted table presented to him by South Sea islanders; and that he would sneer at Diana about her clothes, describing her on one occasion as looking like an air stewardess and on another as a member of the Mafia. In graphic detail, he described how Michael Fawcett had held a specimen test tube for his master to pee into. (He did not mention that at the time Charles was handicapped by having one arm in plaster.)
Clifford obtained £300,000 for the two statements from the News of the World, undermining Burrell’s relationship with the Mirror. The paper splashed headlines about Diana’s sex life, including Burrell’s breathless account of her seduction of Khan wearing just sapphire-and-diamond earrings and her fur coat, and about serving the Pakistani doctor breakfast in bed on one occasion after Diana had left Kensington Palace early.
Burrell cashed in further in the following day’s Mirror, this time giving a taste of his cast of mind as directed against the Spencers. Depicting the grieving family as a collection of snobs and predators, he targeted Charles Spencer for his refusal to rent his sister a cottage at Althorp in the summer of 1997, ostensibly to avoid public intrusion. ‘The Spencers found Diana unacceptable in life,’ wrote Burrell, ‘but after her death they found her very acceptable at £10.50 a ticket,’ referring to the price the public were charged to visit Diana’s grave at Althorp. He held back a letter Spencer had written to Diana on 4 April 1996 in which he branded her as manipulative, deceitful and mentally ill. That titbit was saved for his book. Amid the tsunami of media vilification aimed at Charles and his family, such an omission was barely a mercy.
The royal palaces were being plagued by recriminations about the trial. The internal furore was concealed from the world outside by discreet courtiers – with one notable exception. At 8.30 a.m. on Thursday, 7 November, Fiona Shackleton telephoned de Brunner and in the course of a tirade said that Mark Bolland had organised the queen’s recollection. ‘He’s the head boy, he’s evil and he hates the police,’ she ranted. ‘Bolland has infiltrated the whole system. He knew about it [the recollection] on the day it happened. You cannot let that man win.’ After confessing that her own position was now in jeopardy, she ended up: ‘It’s disgusting and unjust. Why couldn’t they have seen it through? At least Burrell wouldn’t have sold his story.’ But despite her fury, no evidence existed that Bolland, by then a consultant to Charles, had been involved in the ‘recollection’ or in any strategic discussions that fateful weekend. Moreover, he denied any participation.
Days later, during the opening ceremony of the Field of Remembrance in Westminster Abbey, the queen looked unusually morose. At the Cenotaph later that week, Charles barely spoke to his mother, and avoided lunch with his family. Palace officials warned them both that there was much worse to come. For once they were right.
* Edmund Lawson mistakenly states in Peat’s Report (para 2.80, p.69) that the note was made on 19 December, whereas it was made on the 12th, the same day that Milburn and McCorquodale met. Gibbins would subsequently deny that he was at the meeting on 11 September, deny that he signed the statement, and deny that he was questioned by Lawson. The evidence suggests that his memory was mistaken.