Michael Peat published his report about Prince Charles and the Burrell trial on 13 March 2003, the eve of the invasion of Iraq. With luck, Charles’s advisers calculated, media interest would disappear within a day. People’s expectations were muted. Announcing his inquiry four months earlier, Peat had promised that there would be ‘no whitewash’. That assurance was challenged within his report’s first pages.
In a joint conclusion, Peat and Edmund Lawson declared that they would not ‘express any view about the truth’ of George Smith’s allegation that he had been raped by Michael Fawcett. The report summary, however, judged: ‘No one believed Mr Smith’s rape allegation,’ and because Smith ‘declined to pursue his complaint’ with the police, he was therefore lying. That conclusion was clearly questionable. Victims of sexual abuse often fear confessing an attack to officials, and Smith’s own explanation about avoiding embarrassment in front of his children was credible. Moreover, some in Highgrove did believe Smith, as had Diana and her staff at Kensington Palace, but the report minimised Diana’s involvement.
Interpreting Fiona Shackleton’s expression of remorse at the meeting with the police on 30 August 2001 was another potential trap for Peat. Shackleton’s comment, ‘I’ll tell [George Smith] that if he brings it into the open, then we look v heavily into his background etc. ruin chances of getting another job,’ incriminated Charles. Peat took an opposite line. In his report, he simply denied that there could have been ‘an improper motive (that is, to suppress the truth)’ about Charles’s £38,000 payment to Smith. But he gave no credible explanation for that denial.
On the question of whether it was Shackleton or McCorquodale who first said ‘rape’ at the meeting with the police, Peat and Lawson decided, based on Michael O’Kane’s notes, that it was McCorquodale, and rejected the two police officers’ testimony that Shackleton broke the silence. Either way, it was immaterial. Their forensic examination of that unimportant question obscured the relevance of Shackleton’s outburst: ‘I was given written instructions by my boss to make the whole business go away, which I did, but it was one of the lowest points of my twenty-two-year legal career.’ This appeared to imply that Charles had ordered her to suppress Smith’s allegation, a serious matter. That was the interpretation made by Michael O’Kane after the meeting. But for obvious reasons he decided to take it no further.
Peat and Lawson dismissed O’Kane’s straightforward conclusion. Instead they wrote that they were ‘puzzled’ how the reference to Charles could be misinterpreted – and said nothing more. Except, they pushed the blame onto Shackleton, who, they wrote, could not make ‘an admission of impropriety’ because that would be untrue, since Charles was indisputably innocent. From that circular argument they concluded that the issue ‘remains something of a mystery’. Charles was exonerated and Shackleton portrayed as unreliable, a judgement that she regarded as a betrayal of her selfless devotion to Charles’s cause and a personal insult by Peat, an old family friend. Distortion, Peat’s critics said, had suffocated fidelity.
Moving on, the report considered the allegation that Charles had improperly influenced the aborting of Paul Burrell’s trial. Since Peat had been involved in those discussions, he asked Edmund Lawson QC to investigate that accusation without his participation. His conclusions were incorporated into the report.
Lawson, well-known at the Bar as a chain-smoking bully, was an unfortunate choice. He lacked both the skill and the reputation to produce a convincingly independent result. As it was, he relied on a memorandum from Stephen Lamport to Charles following the first police briefing about Burrell and Brown, on 3 April 2001: ‘There is no alternative but for formal charges now to be made against both men.’ Charles, wrote Lawson, ‘accepted that advice for the time being’, but still wanted to explore ‘whether a prosecution could be properly avoided’.
Lawson’s premise was deliberately misleading. On several occasions either Lamport or Shackleton, acting on Charles’s behalf, sought to prevent a prosecution. Before 3 April, Lamport had told the police that Charles was keen to stop Brown being charged. On 2 May, Shackleton’s message to the police and prosecutor was emphatic: ‘The Prince of Wales is distraught. He does not want it going any further and is determined.’ Three months later, before the police briefing at Highgrove, Charles had tried through Bolland and Shackleton to bring proceedings to a halt. Lawson ignored Shackleton’s messages. Instead, he concluded that Charles considered it ‘inappropriate for there to be interference in the prosecution process’.
Adjusting the evidence to suit his narrative, the lawyer duly reached his inevitable conclusion. Charles, he admitted, was ‘concerned’ and ‘worried’ about revelations. His mention of the defence’s ‘threats’ would offend Andrew Shaw and Alex Carlile – ‘It’s drivel and defamatory,’ Carlile would later say, insisting that the defence was seeking only to protect the royal family and was certainly not threatening Charles. Pertinently, Carlile was not asked personally about his ‘threat’ by Lawson, who instead focused on justifying Charles’s concern.
To avoid the intense media interest, Lawson wrote, Charles had asked Peat to summon the meeting on 11 September 2002, the eve of the trial. Lawson admitted that the private secretary’s task had been to persuade McCorquodale and Gibbins to withdraw their complaint, but what followed was fiction. To disguise the pressure that Peat unsuccessfully exerted on both executors, Lawson distorted their statements to the police and dismissed their criticism of Peat. The executors’ accounts, he wrote, were ‘consistent’ with Shackleton and Seabrook’s descriptions of the same meeting, and ‘generally with Sir Michael’s recollection’. That again was not true.
To seal his apparent intention of acquitting Charles of any blame, Lawson quoted Carlile, who had spent many hours warning the prince’s advisers to stop the prosecution: ‘The suggestion that there was any attempt to interfere in the prosecution [by Charles] is absurd.’ Lawson failed to elicit a similar quotation from Shackleton, Lamport, Bolland or others who, unlike Carlile, were in actual contact with Charles.
That left the most important mystery – the queen’s ‘recollection’. To demolish the account that the queen had enquired about the crowds outside the Old Bailey as she was being driven towards St Paul’s, Lawson described how, before they set off from Buckingham Palace, Philip had allegedly told Charles that the queen’s recollection had been triggered a few hours earlier by the publicity about the trial. Apparently, it was only on that morning, eleven days after the trial had started, that she considered the relevance of her conversation with Burrell. Lawson did not adequately explain why she had not revealed the meeting earlier (he mentioned a conversation between the queen and Philip before they drove to St Paul’s), or why Charles had never spoken to her about Burrell or the trial.
Lawson’s description of what followed the queen’s recollection made little sense to the police or to some of the lawyers involved. He wrote that Charles had told Peat about the recollection only on Saturday, 26 October, the day after the St Paul’s service. This timeline was inaccurate. Robert Seabrook had been told about the recollection the previous day, and had immediately gone to Clarence House with Shackleton to advise Peat to inform the prosecution as a matter of urgency. Yet William Boyce was told only on Monday, three days later. Lawson also reported that Shackleton had given the news to Commander Yates, despite being told by Yates that it was Peat who had telephoned him with the news, and that he was ‘100 per cent certain of that’. The effect of Lawson’s apparent distortion was to impugn Shackleton.
Towards those suffering ‘cynical suspicion’ that the queen’s recollection had been invented in order to prevent the royal family’s embarrassment, or was in any way improper, Lawson was witheringly dismissive. Their suspicion, he concluded, ‘finds no support in the available evidence’ because ‘there is simply none’. At no stage, he wrote, did Charles or anyone on his behalf try to stop the prosecution.
That was plainly untrue. Bolland, Shackleton, McCorquodale and Gibbins all described various such attempts, as did Lamport, O’Kane and the police officers. McCorquodale’s conversation with de Brunner after the trial drew a direct link between the meeting on 11 September – when Peat failed to persuade McCorquodale and Gibbins to withdraw their complaint – and the manoeuvres by Charles and his officials to end the proceedings.*
The police’s investigation and subsequent conduct were criticised by Lawson’s report, but consistent with the whole exercise, Scotland Yard would successfully persuade the Guardian to write, wrongly, that neither Peat nor Lawson had criticised its officers. To achieve what many royals considered the police’s own ‘whitewash’, Scotland Yard produced a thirteen-page report by William Taylor, a former commissioner of the City of London police, which cleared de Brunner of having misled Charles and William at the meeting in Highgrove. ‘It’s water under the bridge,’ Taylor said on the day his report was published. ‘Nothing radical or unexpected was found.’ Regarding the briefing at Highgrove, he reported that he had ‘no opinion … because that issue was not addressed by me’. He blamed his inability to interview Charles for that omission. Taylor’s faintest criticism was confined to the comment, ‘some issues arising from the investigation remain unresolved’. Sir John Stevens, Scotland Yard’s chief, added, ‘The officers concerned in the inquiry have my full support … I suspect that a lot of people are looking for blood on the carpet. But I’m afraid that sometimes the facts are things that have to be accepted.’ Charles and William were reported to be ‘very disappointed’. Burrell described the report as ‘scandalous’, because it ‘ignores appalling blunders … Everyone wants the fiasco of my court case to be forgotten about.’
Lawson’s fee for compiling his report was never disclosed. He died six years later, without receiving an honour, which he could normally have had expected. The next section of the report, an investigation into the sale of gifts to Charles, was completed by Peat. He described his inquiry as ‘comprehensive’.
The rumours about ‘Fawcett the Fence’ were denounced by Peat, who stated that none of Charles’s staff, especially Fawcett, had ‘received improper payments or other benefits’. Although he revealed that Fawcett had been given valuable ‘benefits’ by suppliers – including a Rolex watch worth £2,500, membership of Mosimann’s Dining Club worth £3,000 per annum, a Tiffany watch, a Pasha pen and several consignments of champagne, as well as other unknown gifts – he blamed such errors on a few officials’ casual understanding of the lax rules in Kensington and St James’s. Those had been ‘infringed’, he conceded, but Fawcett had sold official gifts only with Charles’s authorisation. Any mismanagement was ‘limited’. The headlines about Fawcett had been inflamed by rumours caused by ‘jealousy and friction’, and not by any hard evidence.
The report was handed out at a press conference for fifty journalists at St James’s Palace. Those present were given no time to examine the dense text about an intricate saga before Peat pleaded mea culpa on his employer’s behalf. Lessons would be learnt, he said, and the management of Clarence House was changing. Charles’s household was ‘under-resourced’ for an executive that raised millions of pounds every year, and employed seven hundred people in the Prince’s Trust. Charles was ‘incredibly busy’, and to improve the management Peat would hire more people, to be financed from the duchy’s income. He linked the reorganisation to the exit of Bolland and the imminent resignation of Fawcett. To those journalists who connected the departure of the two men to Peat’s revenge against those close to Camilla, Peat scoffed, ‘Ridiculous.’ Instead he blamed Bolland for disturbing relationships among the royal family, and censured Fawcett for organising extravagant parties. That was all.
In his own statement, Charles, who was visiting Bulgaria on the day of the report’s publication, declared: ‘The review does not make comfortable reading in some parts but I accept full responsibility for all the recommendations.’
Peat could congratulate himself. Ignorant of the many intricacies of the saga, the media overlooked Charles’s culpability. The ‘whitewash’ was masterful. As intended, journalists focused on the alleged rape of Smith. Most news stories included the ‘allegations of a cover-up of a homosexual rape’ and Fawcett’s departure after twenty-two years in royal employment.
By the time Charles returned to London, the worst was over. The only unfortunate repercussion, for Charles in particular, was Fawcett’s departure. His one-time valet was irreplaceable – and in truth unsackable. More even than Burrell, Fawcett knew secrets that might endanger Charles’s succession. Accordingly, his exit package was sufficiently generous to avoid any temptation for him to sell his story. He received £500,000, the right to remain in his grace-and-favour home in Richmond, and a three-year contract for his company, Premier Mode Events, to work for Charles from a newly decorated office in Clarence House. The first commissions were for William’s twenty-first birthday party for three hundred people at Windsor, and a contract to supervise the rebuilding of Clarence House. No one at Fawcett’s farewell party in St James’s Palace doubted Charles’s intention to keep his fixer close.
* Peat’s Report states (para 2.80, p.69) that Lawson did interview Gibbins, but Gibbins denies that.