The calamity Charles feared had materialised. Despite his generous pay-off, George Smith sold his story to the News of the World, waiving his right to anonymity. For the first time, the media could explain some of the background to the royal machinations over the previous years. One week after the Burrell trial, the News of the World published Smith’s allegation that an unnamed man, an employee of the royal family, had raped him. Referring to the mahogany-box tapes, Smith also revealed that he had recorded a secret about a family member so devastating it could destroy the monarchy. The newspaper described the ‘rape tape’ and allegations of a cover-up by Charles. The headlines ensured that five years of hard labour to restore the public’s trust in the Prince of Wales disintegrated.
With Charles’s financial help, Michael Fawcett sought an injunction to protect his identity, while simultaneously denouncing Smith through an expensive firm of solicitors as an ‘unreliable alcoholic’ whose allegations included ‘demonstrable discrepancies’ about when and where he was raped. In retaliation, Smith claimed that there had been a second rape. Constrained by the threat of an injunction and the laws of defamation, the media could still not reveal the full story behind Smith’s confession – and that ignorance was precisely what Charles was relying on.
Pressed to explain the outcome of inquiries into Smith’s original rape allegation, Scotland Yard issued an unconvincing reply. After a ‘full’ investigation, it declared, the investigating officer had submitted a report to the CPS recommending that no prosecution be brought. That explanation would be contradicted by a subsequent admission that Hounslow police had in fact abandoned their review after Smith refused to make a complaint. Neither statement was accurate; the truth had been buried. (In 2016 Detective Superintendent Steve Gwilliam would say that he could not recall the case, and a similar memory loss affected the CPS lawyer responsible for the file.)
In the same issue of the News of the World that featured Smith’s allegations, the paper revealed for the first time that Paul Burrell was gay. The comedian Michael Barrymore, who was known to have had homosexual affairs, described how the butler had attempted to seduce him three days after Diana’s death by showing him three of her diamond rings then lunging at him. Burrell denied the story. His wife did not comment. Amid more revelations about his sexuality, Burrell had flown to America to sell some of his secrets to all three major TV networks for huge fees. ‘Telling my story was never about money,’ he said, omitting to mention that he had previously pledged not to betray Diana’s privacy. ‘It was only about truth and justice and telling it honestly and properly.’ He left behind a furore about Michael Fawcett’s conduct.
At the very moment that Burrell was making his announcement on American television, Fawcett was supervising arrangements for a dinner at Windsor Castle for Charles’s American Foundation. By then, his hold over the prince was well known. Although George Smith did not name Fawcett, media allegations linking him to the misuse of Charles’s property under the headline ‘Fawcett the Fence’ had surfaced. Before the end of the day, Charles was forced to condemn his trusted employee to ‘indefinite leave’ and exile from the castle. In a foul mood, he now had no one on whom he could rely to rebut the consequent gossip about his paying Fawcett off, or dampen the speculation about whether his valet would be forced to give up his rent-free home in Richmond.
For very different reasons, three men – Burrell, Fawcett and Smith – were all creating major problems for Charles. The combination of adultery, alleged gay rape, drugs, sex orgies, thefts and the unprecedented end of a criminal trial was no longer a soap opera, but had escalated into a real crisis. Charles considered appearing on TV to deny that Smith had been raped, then abandoned the idea, not least because Fawcett obtained an injunction to prevent anyone linking his name with Smith’s allegations. ‘It is impossible to exaggerate the devastation wreaked on the House of Windsor in the last week,’ wrote Trevor Kavanagh in the Sun, adding ridicule by revealing that one of Fawcett’s responsibilities was to squeeze the toothpaste onto Charles’s brush. ‘There is a cesspit of intrigue at the heart of the realm.’
The thunder of derision heaped upon the royal family appeared to bemuse Peat. Asked if Charles was shocked by the uproar, he replied, ‘Yes, I suppose so, to the extent that you can believe it.’ He added that Fawcett, despite the public accusation of taking commissions both on the sale of gifts to the royals and from suppliers, ‘is here and is working’.
Peat’s air of nonchalance angered Whitehall. A senior official suggested to him that only an inquiry could end the frenzy. The appointment of a High Court judge was instantly discounted as dangerous. Instead, Peat announced on television, on the advice of Lord Stevens, the Scotland Yard commissioner, that he personally would conduct an inquiry. Four issues required investigation: whether Smith’s allegation of being raped had been covered up; whether Charles had sabotaged Burrell’s trial; whether official gifts to Charles and his family had been sold by his staff; and whether Charles’s staff had received improper payments.
‘I, and more importantly the Prince of Wales,’ said Peat, ‘are totally committed to openness and accountability.’ He did not trouble to explain how he, as Charles’s private secretary, could be truly independent when conducting an inquiry into the conduct of his employer and his own staff, including himself. ‘Anyone who says it is going to be a complete whitewash doesn’t know me very well,’ was his glib justification. Hours later, he undermined his own independence. ‘I don’t think any of us are going to take [the rape allegation] seriously,’ he said. ‘What can one do, except to laugh?’ He added, ‘I can give you my 100 per cent assurance that there was no interference in the trial.’ Similarly, the allegations against ‘Fawcett the Fence’ were dismissed by Peat before his inquiry began. ‘We have absolutely no evidence of it,’ he declared. ‘I think it’s very unlikely.What people have told the press that he has done, no one told us. We have no allegations at all about Mr Fawcett’s behaviour.’
Peat also displayed his prejudice against the police. At the same time as the inquiry was being announced, Burrell was claiming that he had not been charged with the theft of the hundreds of items belonging to Diana that had been left in his house by de Brunner after his arrest. The police, said Burrell, accepted that they had been genuine gifts to him. At that moment the police were so overcome by criticisms of their conduct that Burrell’s assertion passed unchallenged, but eventually Maxine de Brunner explained that her priority had been to seize everything that might embarrass the royal family, and that she would have removed more, but ten hours after their arrival at Burrell’s home the police could not load any more items onto the lorry sent from London after the local police truculently refused de Brunner’s request to provide a truck. Her mistake, she and Yates would later admit, was not to seal off the house as a crime scene.
Peat immediately exploited that error in an interview with the Evening Standard: ‘The police well know that high-value presents had been given to Paul Burrell because they didn’t charge him with stealing a large number of items of considerable value, because they accepted that they had been given to him by the Princess of Wales … It was totally clear to everybody that the Prince and Princess of Wales gave gifts, and valuable gifts, to their staff.’
Peat was dancing on a pinhead. In the end, the CPS and not the police had decided to charge Burrell. Moreover, some of the alleged thefts had not been listed because the items belonged to either Charles or William. To link either of the princes with allegedly stolen property would have required them to give evidence at a trial, and that had been ruled out. Peat appeared to be spreading confusion.
In a lengthy interview with the media, he angrily complained that the police had failed to listen to a long briefing about the gifts donated to Burrell. The law officers said that was not true. ‘The denial,’ said Peat, ‘is difficult to understand … There is no question of the CPS having been misled.’ Scotland Yard had heard enough. While Peat was proving to be protective of Charles, the Yard’s chief showed his robust support for de Brunner: she was heading for promotion to deputy assistant commissioner.
In that retaliatory atmosphere, William Boyce made another announcement in court: the charge against Harold Brown had been dropped. Once again, the police were surprised. There was clear evidence that Brown had sold the dhow after Diana’s death, had lied in his statements, and that the money from the sale had disappeared. Those facts were not mentioned in Boyce’s court declaration. Brown, the lawyer explained, possessed a note from Charles which read: ‘There is a very good gold wedding ring here which someone in the office might find useful.’ The valet had then sold the ring. Although that piece and the dhow were unconnected, Boyce said that Brown could have relied on Burrell giving him permission to sell the dhow in ‘good faith’. Brown was also formally acquitted by the court over the sale of Diana’s earrings in January 1998, and his offering for sale of her emerald-and-diamond bangle and a diamond brooch.
The most vulnerable person was still Charles, approaching his fifty-fourth birthday. His defencelessness was increased by his separation from Bolland, who told a friend, ‘Peat never misses an opportunity to trash me. He wants to destroy my relationship with Charles.’ The prince’s two foremost henchmen now openly detested each other.
The final breach between them took place in the wake of Burrell’s acquittal. Peat received a warning from a trouble-seeking lawyer that the News of the World was planning a honey trap for Charles’s younger son in what had become an unceasing quest. Using a girl to forge a relationship with Prince Harry, the newspaper hoped to obtain a sample of his hair. According to the lawyer, the hair’s DNA would be tested to establish whether Harry’s father was not Charles but James Hewitt. Peat’s solution was to alert the police and call Rebekah Wade at the News of the World.
Bolland opposed both calls. ‘Let’s find out first,’ he told Peat. ‘I just don’t believe it.’ He said that Hewitt and Diana had not seen each other for a full year before Harry’s birth, and that to date the media had abided by the strict guidelines that forbade any breach of Harry’s privacy: the News of the World, he was convinced, would not publish such allegations. Peat ignored the advice, and called Wade anyway. In a heated exchange, he warned her that publication would result in dire repercussions, and despite her advice not to put anything in writing, he sent her a formal letter of complaint.
Inevitably, under the headline ‘St James’s Palace Goes Mad’, a full account of the conversation appeared in Wade’s paper, along with a quotation from ‘a senior palace aide’ that Charles was ‘furious … to have been bothered by such a ludicrous story’. Peat assumed the ‘senior palace aide’ was Bolland, and encouraged Charles to reprimand him.
For more than a year Charles had been under pressure from his private secretary to fire Bolland. That had been one of Peat’s priorities on arriving at St James’s Palace. He had resisted because he needed Bolland’s special talents, but now, utterly dependent on Peat to save him from the Burrell and Fawcett calamities, he felt he had no choice. Charles called Bolland at the adviser’s Clerkenwell home at lunchtime that Sunday, 15 December. After listening to the complaints, Bolland replied, ‘This man [meaning Peat] is destroying everything. It’s ridiculous.’
‘How do you know it’s ridiculous?’ asked Charles.
‘Because I’m having lunch here with Rebekah Wade, and she tells me it’s ridiculous.’
‘We can’t go on like this,’ said Charles after a pause. ‘You have other consultancies. It’s time for you to go.’
The call ended on a sour note, and a productive six-year relationship was over. The following day, Bolland formally resigned. ‘To survive and thrive you need to be there to see the knives coming out,’ he mused, ‘so the part-time consultancy had to end.’
Over the following days, he reflected that Peat had never wanted their extraordinary relationship to work. He knew better than most how vicious the palace could be, but even he was unprepared for what appeared in the Daily Telegraph that Friday, and two days later in the Mail on Sunday. First, the papers published a story that he was disgruntled not to have succeeded Stephen Lamport as Charles’s private secretary. He blamed Peat for that piece of untrue mischief. The Mail on Sunday also quoted Charles – his words relayed to the journalist, Bolland assumed by Peat – dismissing Bolland’s work for himself and Camilla as ‘dirty deeds’. ‘Their betrayal,’ said Bolland, ‘upset me.’ He knew all too well that few left the Prince of Wales’s employ happily. ‘There’s an absurdity about him,’ said the dismissed retainer. ‘Charles cares about no one other than himself.’
Not for the first time with an employee, Charles mismanaged Bolland’s exit. In their irritation, neither he nor Camilla bothered to show any gratitude. Charles did not host a farewell party, nor did he recommend Bolland for any honour. He never even said goodbye. Nor did Camilla, who, as a friend explained regretfully, ‘did what she was told’.
Stung, Bolland agreed to write a regular column for the News of the World. Under the pseudonym ‘Blackadder’, for many months he vented his spleen against the courtiers in the three palaces, Princes Andrew and Harry, and above all Peat and Charles. In retaliation, and to prove that Bolland’s services were not missed, Charles attempted to win over the Daily Mail by giving the newspaper an interview, and inviting its editor to a state dinner at Buckingham Palace.
One week later, he invited Tony Blair for lunch. The scene at Clarence House was surreal. The host was struggling in a swamp of sleaze, while the prime minister was in the midst of his own scandal: his wife Cherie had been exposed as having lied when she denied a financial relationship with an Australian conman who had arranged her purchase of two flats in Bristol. Blair was also under pressure to explain his relationship with Carole Caplin, his ‘lifestyle’ adviser. In that familiar predicament, he could hope only that his accusers would eventually give up.
Charles could hope only for the same respite. But there was no relief. In a poll by BBC’s Radio 4, listeners were asked which British personality they would most like to deport. Charles ranked fourth. He had had enough. At a dinner party, he hurled a plate to the floor, complaining that everything had gone wrong. But now he had only Peat to protect him.