The publication of Paul Burrell’s book A Royal Duty on 20 October 2003 caused an even greater earthquake than expected. The Mirror’s ten-day serialisation started with Diana’s handwritten letter to Burrell in 1993 predicting that there was a plot by Prince Philip to kill her in a car crash, possibly ‘by brake failure … in order to make the path clear for Charles to marry’. The image of the unloved princess isolated in Kensington Palace, writing that she was ‘longing for someone to hug me and encourage me to keep strong’, was a devastating indictment of the royal family. Charles was portrayed as a heartless schemer who had married a twenty-year-old virgin in order for her to bear him an heir while he continued his affair with Camilla.
In her letter, Diana accused Charles of putting her ‘through such hell’ with the ‘cruel things’ he had done to her. ‘I have been battered, bruised and abused mentally by a system for fifteen years now,’ she wrote, and as a result had ‘cried more than anyone will ever know’. Suddenly, Mohamed Fayed’s ludicrous conspiracy theory about an Establishment plot masterminded by Prince Philip to prevent the pregnant princess marrying his Muslim son by arranging the fatal car crash in Paris gained credibility. By the end of the first day of serialisation, Burrell’s eyewitness account of Diana’s battle was generally accepted as truthful. But no one could explain why Diana would commit such thoughts in a note to her butler. Her close friend Lucia Flecha de Lima believed all the letters were fake. Burrell, she would say, was ‘perfectly capable of imitating’ Diana’s handwriting, a charge that Burrell would deny.
The following day, the Mirror published Philip’s letters to Diana. In one, he reflected that Charles would not be ‘in his right mind’ to leave Diana for Camilla. In another, he denied that he had encouraged Charles to return to Camilla should the marriage to his young wife fail after five years. Diana had written back, ‘That made me feel like being offered to your family on a sale-or-return basis.’ The correspondence between the two, described in detail by Burrell, included Diana’s comment: ‘I have a husband who does not love me any more and by his own admission never has. And he resumed his relationship with Camilla rather sooner than you might have imagined. He was never emotionally divorced from her.’ Quoting intimate letters between Charles and Diana, Burrell reported in Diana’s own words her despair and her fears about Charles’s demand for a divorce. Painted as a traitor to Diana, Charles was once again accused of being unfaithful first. Overall, the serialised material cast Charles and Camilla as ruthlessly selfish plotters against a vulnerable young mother.
‘I do not have in my possession the letters Prince Philip wrote to the Princess,’ Burrell claimed. But Sarah McCorquodale had always suspected that he had taken those letters from the mahogany box and made copies. He would later admit that he had indeed done so, and had then sent the letters to America for ‘safekeeping’. He clearly did not ‘possess’ Diana’s original letters, and Philip’s were never recovered.
By any measure, Burrell’s book was a catastrophe for Charles. Citing the worst ever opinion polls for the royal family, Bolland wrote in his News of the World column: ‘I warned Charles that the Burrell trial would lead to disaster and revelations and I urged him to stop the trial.’ Had Bolland not been dismissed, St James’s Palace could have made further attempts to negotiate an arrangement with Burrell, a possibility apparently not considered by Peat.
Burrell’s own hypocrisy was plain. Although his book was presented as a tribute to his beloved princess, he betrayed her secrets for about £4 million, the amount he would have received from the book’s global sales, newspaper serial rights, and interviews. In his account, he ridiculed the police for failing to understand that ‘gifts were an unwritten perk of the job’ and ‘sentimental symbols of time spent working for a senior royal’. But the negatives of intimate family photographs, the photo albums and Diana’s letters to William were not proven to be gifts, nor had they been handed over to Burrell for safekeeping. He never adequately dealt with those inconvenient truths, while his assertion that ‘twenty telephone lines of my closest family and friends were bugged, as documentation later proved’ was denied by the police, and never substantiated.
Burrell’s defence of Diana’s reputation appeared self-interested to anyone who recalled his pledge in a letter to William: ‘I will never betray you. My middle name is loyalty.’ In a published comment after the serialisation started, William castigated Burrell: ‘We cannot believe that Paul, who was entrusted with so much, could abuse his position in such a cold overt betrayal. It is not only deeply painful for the two of us … it would mortify our mother if she were alive today.’ His statement ended with a plea to Burrell to stop his revelations, a request to the public to boycott the book, and a suggestion that he and Burrell might meet. ‘The princes can’t take any more,’ Richard Kay was told by Colleen Harris, who had drafted William’s declaration. The meeting never happened.
To Burrell’s good fortune, the general public ignored his sophistry amid the renewed ridicule of Charles. The prince told friends of his fear that his visits to the theatre with Camilla would no longer be greeted with affection. A fundraiser at Holyrood organised by Higdon attracted fewer Americans than before the trial.
Mark Bolland echoed the public’s distaste with the royal family: ‘They did nothing to help [Burrell] after his arrest and many who work for them actively sought his prosecution.’
The consultant turned columnist blamed ‘forces’ among the courtiers for preventing Burrell and Charles from meeting to resolve the fate of Diana’s property. Their ‘reward’, wrote Bolland, was now to read about the royal family’s cruelty towards Diana: ‘Their treatment of Burrell was an own goal of astonishing proportions.’ Damaged and hurt, Charles and Camilla avoided meeting the queen and Philip when they next stayed at Birkhall, two miles from Balmoral, and they also stayed away from Sandringham.
Even Charles Spencer joined in the reproaches. Prince Charles employed incompetent or dishonest staff, he told a journalist, also claiming that during the first days after Diana’s death, while Kensington Palace reeled in anguish, Burrell was searching for valuable items to sell.
Burrell’s book had sparked a new frenzy. In return for payment, George Smith too was persuaded to extend his allegations. The former junior butler was angry about the Peat Report, especially its protection of ‘a much more powerful member of the Royal Household than I was’. Under the headline ‘Charles and His Valet: The True Story’, Smith claimed in the Mail on Sunday to have witnessed a ‘shocking incident’ between Charles and another unnamed royal servant while he served Charles his breakfast in bed. His account was not credible, not least because Charles did not eat breakfast in bed.
One week earlier, travelling in the Gulf, Charles accepted questionable advice from aggressive solicitors that Michael Fawcett should try to prevent the publication of Smith’s new allegations in any more detail. Fawcett’s lawyers, paid for by Charles, obtained an injunction and, to preserve their client’s anonymity, also obtained an order forbidding the media from reporting that the injunction existed. As a libel injunction the court would have needed to be persuaded that it was likely, based on all the evidence, that there was no truth in Smith’s allegations. This ‘super’ injunction provided another reason for the media to inundate Charles with questions. His spokesman, as expected, denied Smith’s story, but since Charles’s office had also denied Andrew Morton’s accurate description of his marriage in Diana: Her True Story, and had also ridiculed so much more that eventually proved true, the new denial was generally disbelieved.
Instead, the credibility of Smith’s allegation was given fresh life by Bolland, who described how Peat had telephoned him on holiday to ask whether Charles could be bisexual: ‘I was astonished at the question. I told him the prince was emphatically not gay or bisexual.’ Peat reportedly denied ever having asked the question, but the additional slur stuck – Bolland’s denial had raised the possibility of the heir to the throne being bisexual, and that was enough. Amid talk of a witch-hunt and a vendetta by critics and the media against every cast member – Charles, Fawcett, Smith and Diana – the monarchy’s future was again brought into question.
Fawcett’s super injunction riled supporters of media freedom. Applying to another judge, the Guardian had the ban overturned. That enabled the newspaper to reveal that Fawcett had won the injunction. However, at 6.50 p.m. the same day, Mr Justice Henriques, sitting in a traffic jam on London Bridge, reinstated the injunction without allowing the Guardian the opportunity to argue its case. In the familiar madness of British justice, Henriques’s ruling was overturned the following day by Mr Justice Tugendhat. With the super injunction removed, Fawcett was not only named, but was linked to a sex incident with Charles. Once again, the prince had brought on himself the worst of all outcomes.
The resulting burst of derision spurred Peat, with Charles’s approval, to re-enter the fray to deny the unspecified allegation against Fawcett. He proceeded to produce an artless own-goal by arousing the public’s curiosity about an allegation that until then had been unexposed. ‘The story,’ said Peat to TV cameras, without explaining what he meant by ‘story’, ‘is totally untrue and without a shred of evidence.’ He named three reasons for discrediting the calumny. ‘Firstly, because the Prince of Wales has told me it’s untrue and I believe him implicitly. Second, anyone who knows the Prince of Wales at all would appreciate that the allegation is totally ludicrous and indeed, risible.’ Third, the man who made the allegation had ‘suffered from health problems’, and his other allegations had been investigated by the police and found to be unsubstantiated.
Singlehandedly, Peat inspired a major crisis. Across the world, the super injunction had never been obeyed. Beyond Britain, Charles was being explicitly linked to a homosexual act with a named member of his staff. The salacious rumours and outlandish conspiracy theories started by Diana’s death now extended to her ex-husband, portrayed as a scandalous adulterer surrounded by perverted men. Charles, always an easy target, had been stripped bare by his consiglieri.
‘He poured a tanker-full of petrol on to the embers,’ commented the Daily Mail. By choosing a policy of concealment, ‘at every stage the royals have made a bad situation worse’. Echoing the opinions of its readers, the newspaper blamed the royal family’s ‘barbaric treatment of Princess Diana … that reduced this vulnerable woman to the state where she tape-recorded lurid allegations by one of her husband’s servants about goings-on in the royal household’. Peat’s attempts at ending all the speculation had brought his employer’s slow resurrection to a grinding halt. Charles returned home from the Gulf and India (his first visit to Delhi since Diana sat alone on a bench in front of the Taj Mahal for the cameras) to find all the old feuds and past indiscretions once more dominating the news cycle.
None of the principal participants could stop themselves. Peat’s ally the Daily Telegraph criticised Bolland for meeting Burrell, and mocked his recent comments as sour grapes for failing to receive an honour or even a farewell party. Bolland duly replied in the Guardian, depicting Peat as a crank, spendthrift and meddler. In the Daily Mail he said that Peat represented the ‘faceless, antediluvian, snooty men in suits’ responsible for the Burrell debacle and the shipwreck of Charles’s reputation. To underline his anger at Charles’s attack on him, he described Clarence House as ‘a very medieval environment full of jealousies and intrigues and backstabbing and plots’. Readers may have wondered why he needed to point that out – it was how the public at large now viewed Charles’s world.
To capitalise on the renewed warfare, Burrell joined in, writing in the Mirror that his book was but ‘the tip of the iceberg’, and that if the ‘dark forces’ threatened him or his family he would publish more revelations. ‘There are many, many more secrets I have not written about,’ he hinted. ‘Very personal, very damaging … not very pleasant.’ As he had told Richard Kay before the end of the trial, ‘It’s not what I put into the book, but it’s what I keep out to protect Diana’s reputation.’ Much more, Kay knew, could be included in another book, including revelations about incidents during Burrell’s twelve years’ work for the queen at Buckingham Palace. That fertile area was off-limits, but only for the moment.
Bereft of substantial allies in the media, Charles adopted Bolland’s tactics. Since Burrell was writing for the Mirror, it made sense for Peat to approach Rebekah Wade, later to become Rebekah Brooks, and newly moved from the News of the World to become the Sun’s editor. Peat explained that Charles was open for business, and over the following months the Sun’s journalists enjoyed an easy relationship with the heir to the throne. In particular, Arthur Edwards, the paper’s royal photographer, became the emissary to promote a positive profile of the prince. Charles was praised for supporting the police bravery awards and endorsing ‘Help for Heroes’, the Sun’s embrace of the armed forces. And it would be the Sun that produced a secret video of Burrell admitting that he lied at the Diana crash inquest. ‘I didn’t tell the whole truth,’ he was heard saying. ‘Perjury is not a very nice thing to contemplate.’
Disenchanted by the doubts cast on his credibility in Britain, he then snapped, ‘Quite frankly, Britain can fuck off.’ ‘A plague on all your houses’ was Britain’s riposte. Charles’s popularity fell back to the dismal levels reported in the days after Diana’s death.