Breaking--Butler found Not Guilty after Queen says she remembers he told her he had Diana's things for safekeeping [WOW!]

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More here than meets the eye. Wonder why she didn't say this before???

-- Anonymous, November 01, 2002

Answers

Friday, 1 November, 2002, 12:35 GMT

Royal butler trial collapses

The trial of Paul Burrell, former butler to the Princess of Wales, has sensationally collapsed after it was revealed he had told the Queen he was keeping some of Diana's possessions.

Mr Burrell was found not guilty of three charges of stealing from the estate of Diana, Princess of Wales, the Prince of Wales and Prince William.

Mr Burrell sobbed in the arms of his defence lawyer, Lord Carlile, as the decision was announced.

Later, Mr Burrell left the court saying: "I am thrilled, I am thrilled."

The Queen has come through for me

Paul Burrell

Visibly emotional, he said: "The Queen has come through for me."

Prosecutor William Boyce QC had told the Old Bailey there was no longer a realistic prospect of conviction and no further evidence against Mr Burrell would be produced.

Speaking outside the Old Bailey, Mr Burrell's solicitor Andrew Shaw said his client was happy and relieved to be acquitted of all charges, and that the police case had been based on numerous errors.

He said the inquiry had never taken into account that he was the princess's most loyal confidant as well as her servant.

'Credit and dignity'

He said the police had been too quick to press charges after Mr Burrell had made a 39-page statement to them.

Mr Shaw said: "In that statement Mr Burrell had referred to a private audience with the Queen and it was surprising no inquires had been made into this meeting."

"Mr Burrell remains totally loyal to Diana, Princess of Wales, and the Queen, who he served in a personal capacity for 10 years."

Mr Burrell (r) sobbed on the shoulder of his QC Lord Carlile (l)

He added : "It is to his utmost credit and dignity that it was only this week that he instructed his lawyers as to the full terms of the conversation. These terms were confirmed by the Queen this morning."

In a statement, Buckingham Palace said: "The decision to drop the case against Mr Burrell was entirely a decision for the prosecution.

"As a prosecution statement to the court made clear this morning, the Queen was not briefed on either Mr Burrell's defence case or on the prosecution case against him."

A friend of Diana's, Rosa Monckton, said: "He always acted as a protector in her life and he strongly feels that should continue after her death.

"I do not think he had any idea what was in those boxes.

"They could not have been in more right hands than his." The former butler, 44, of Farndon, Cheshire, denied stealing 310 items from Diana, Princess of Wales, the Prince of Wales and Prince William.

The jury is expected to be officially told of the developments later on Friday.

-- Anonymous, November 01, 2002


good news!

I never thought the butler did it.

-- Anonymous, November 01, 2002


Poor, weak Burrell - another casualty of the cult of Diana By Tom Utley (Filed: 02/11/2002)

Paul Burrell is the very antithesis of Bertie Wooster's manservant, Jeeves. Where Jeeves had a vast brain, nourished by fish, Burrell's is clearly no bigger than a baked bean. Where Jeeves betrayed his strongest emotions by a millimetre's raising of an eyebrow, Burrell registers his, as he did at the Old Bailey yesterday, by burying his head in his QC's shoulder and shaking with sobs.

While Jeeves kept his master out of trouble by his sage advice, Burrell stood by helplessly as his mistress careered from catastrophe to catastrophe. Oh, if only she had had a butler like Jeeves to guide her, rather than yesterday's quivering blob of jelly whom she called her rock!

One of the most appealing characteristics of Diana, Princess of Wales was that she was instinctively drawn to misfits and underdogs. Like John Betjeman's silken Myfanwy, she was "ring-leader, tomboy and chum to the weak". Many of the actors who played bit-parts in her life were, to some degree or other, grotesques.

There was James Hewitt, with his prissy little voice; Will "Bum-Chin" Carling, the rugger player; Dodi Fayed, that walking parody of a medallion-chested playboy … But none of these was more of an oddball than her utterly devoted, utterly wet butler, Burrell.

There is obviously an awful lot more to the collapse of the case against Burrell than meets the eye, and I do not pretend to have the faintest idea what it is. We may never know in our lifetimes exactly what went on behind the scenes, before or after the Queen remembered his telling her that he was looking after some of the dead Princess's documents.

It must surely be fair to say, however, that it was very convenient for the Royal Family that the Queen suddenly remembered her conversation with Burrell, just before he was due to give evidence that his lawyers said would be "long, detailed and extremely interesting". What would be "extremely interesting" to you and me might well be extremely embarrassing to the Royal Family.

I am not suggesting for a moment that anybody made up the account of the Queen's conversation with Burrell, in order to stop the trial. The Queen has had her mind on a great many other things lately, and it is perfectly plausible that nothing happened until last week, as the trial hotted up, to jog her memory.

It is clear, too, that Prince Charles behaved entirely properly by passing on the Queen's recollection to the police before the trial could proceed any further. Because of his intervention, justice was done.

All that I am saying is that he must have seized on his mother's evidence with enormous relief, and there must have been great rejoicing at St James's Palace, where the prince's advisers had been against proceeding against Burrell from the start. Although I do not doubt that the bones of it are true, there is something a little too pat about the account given in court yesterday to be entirely convincing.

Another great mystery is why the police told Prince Charles at Highgrove that Burrell had been selling the Princess's belongings, when it now emerges that they had not a shred of evidence to support that claim. When they told him that Burrell was cashing in, the Prince had no alternative but to stand back and allow the prosecution to go ahead. So why didn't the police tell him, before the trial began, that they had no evidence for what they had told him earlier at Highgrove?

But the greatest mystery of all about Burrell's prosecution is why the police and the Crown Prosecution Service pressed ahead with it, having found no evidence that he had disposed of any of the Princess's belongings, and knowing that the trial was likely to be acutely embarrassing to the Royal Family.

Ten minutes in the butler's company should have been enough to persuade the police that they were not dealing here with a serious criminal, but rather with a weak-minded bunny-rabbit, caught in the headlights. It must surely have been clear from the start that Burrell was besotted with the Princess, and had not a clue what to do when she died.

I have some sympathy with him. The Princess had planted the idea in his mind that he was her closest confidant, the man upon whom she relied most - and perhaps he was. No doubt he felt a responsibility to protect her reputation after her death, and that may explain why he gathered up so many of her sensitive papers and took them to his house.

I am still a little puzzled as to why he took so many of her other possessions. Perhaps she gave some of them to him while she was still alive; perhaps he took others because he did not know to whom he should return them. Not having been allowed to hear his evidence in court, we cannot know his full explanation.

It is clearly questionable for a butler to help himself to his mistress's possessions after her death. But the proper way of dealing with this very special case would surely have been to have had a quiet word in Burrell's ear, instructing him to return everything that he had taken to the executors of the Princess's estate.

I have not the slightest doubt that Burrell would have done meekly what he was told (he is nothing if not meek). That would have spared a huge amount of embarrassment to everybody concerned - not to mention an estimated £1.5 million of public money. It is certainly what Jeeves would have advised. But then, there are far too few like him these days - clever, stuffy and discreet - advising the police and the Royal Family on how to behave

-- Anonymous, November 01, 2002


Snitched this from TB2k. Loved the part about Princess Di trying to poison Camilla :)

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002...6027090890.html

Did Her Majesty panic over what butler saw?

By Eddie Fitzmaurice November 3 2002 The Sun-Herald

The Queen was facing a barrage of increasingly uncomfortable questions yesterday following the sensational collapse of the theft trial of former royal butler Paul Burrell.

British newspapers demanded to know why she had waited until the ninth day of Mr Burrell's trial to reveal key information that was to destroy the prosecution case.

Labour MP Paul Flynn suggested the Queen's intervention may have been calculated to prevent Mr Burrell from giving evidence that would be damaging to the Royal Family.

Defence counsel Lord Alex Carlile, QC, was interrupted several times during the trial when he was apparently about to reveal intimate details about the late Diana, Princess of Wales, or her sons.

Royal biographer Anthony Holden called for the monarch to be charged with wasting police time.

"The Queen has known about the case for two years," Mr Holden said.

"She knew that all along, so why did she not say something earlier?"

The case was halted dramatically at London's Old Bailey on Friday when prosecutor William Boyce, QC, stunned the packed courtroom by saying he would offer no further evidence.

The move came after it emerged Mr Burrell had informed the Queen, shortly after Diana died, that he had taken some of her possessions for safekeeping. The main plank of the prosecution case was that Mr Burrell, 44, had possession of 310 items belonging to the princess, Prince Charles and Prince William without telling anybody.

The Queen had kept quiet about the meeting for five years and only blurted out the bombshell news to Prince Charles and Prince Philip last week.

British tabloid The Sun said the unprecedented development raised far more questions than it answered.

Chief among these was why the Queen had failed to realise months ago that she alone held the very key to the case against Mr Burrell. The newspaper said it was also puzzling that Mr Burrell himself had not revealed in detail to either the prosecution or his defence what he had told the Queen.

"With £1.5 million of taxpayers' money down the drain after two aborted trials, and confidence in the justice system and the Crown shaken these are all matters of legitimate concern," The Sun said.

"But don't expect too many answers. The Royal Family has been seriously embarrassed by some of the evidence the public was graciously allowed to hear - and feared what more might come out."

Another British tabloid, The Daily Star, claimed Mr Burrell was set to reveal from the witness box details of an attempt by Diana to poison Camilla Parker Bowles.

It said he would have told how Diana, crushed sleeping pills and antidepressants into a glass of champagne and urged Camilla to drink it.

Meanwhile, royal expert Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke's Peerage, said a constitutional crisis had been avoided by the trial's collapse. "A small incident involving the monarch or the heir to the throne can weaken or seriously damage the monarchy and even pave the way for a republic," Mr Brooks-Baker said.

Mr Burrell's father, Graham Burrell, said his son "had been put through hell", but would take the secrets learnt during his 21 years of royal service to his grave.

"It's two years of his life gone, just wasted," he said. "He told me, 'Now I've got to start picking up where I left off two years ago'."

-- Anonymous, November 02, 2002


Gets curiouser and curiouser, doesn't it? First time I've heard the poisoning story.

-- Anonymous, November 02, 2002


I'm sure more dark tales will surface as the years roll by. No happy ending this time.

-- Anonymous, November 02, 2002

I bet Jerry Springer would pay millions to have the butler on his show. I wonder if they could persuade Charles to be a surprise guest?

-- Anonymous, November 02, 2002

This sounds a lot closer to any truth than the other reports.]

Telegraph

Burrell: 'It was between myself and Her Majesty'

By Andrew Alderson, Chief Reporter (Filed: 03/11/2002)

Paul Burrell, the former butler to Diana, Princess of Wales, in an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, spoke of his gratitude and "huge admiration" for the Queen after her personal intervention led to the collapse of his trial for theft.

Mr Burrell said that he had done his best for almost five years to safeguard the confidentiality of his private conversation with the Queen. "I did not tell my legal team until a couple of days ago exactly what happened. It was between myself and Her Majesty," said Mr Burrell, whose Old Bailey trial collapsed on Friday after 12 days.

"Words are inadequate to say how I feel. I have always had a huge admiration for the Queen. What she has done for me, to intervene like this, is absolutely unprecedented. I'm so happy." Mr Burrell is to write a letter of thanks to the Queen.

The £1.5 million trial collapsed after three days of private discussions between Mrs Justice Rafferty, the judge, and William Boyce, QC, the prosecution counsel, about the Queen's intervention.

It followed a discussion nine days ago as the Queen was being driven to a memorial service at St Paul's Cathedral for victims of the Bali bombing. She told the Prince of Wales about a private conversation she had with Mr Burrell early in 1998 at Buckingham Palace in which he had told her of his plans to safeguard some of the late Princess's possessions. Prince Charles's private office relayed the information to the police and, after complex legal arguments, it was decided that the trial could not proceed.

Mr Burrell was found not guilty of three charges of theft involving 310 items belonging to the estate of the Princess, the Prince of Wales and Prince William.

On Thursday Mr Burrell's defence team was independently made aware of the details of the conversation between the defendant and the Queen. It happened in the chambers of Lord Carlile, QC, the counsel for Mr Burrell, as his lawyers were reviewing their defence with the late Princess's butler. They began discussing the meeting that Mr Burrell had with the Queen at which, he said, she had given him "comfort and solace" over his concerns that some of the Princess's belongings were being destroyed by the estate's executors, her mother and her elder sister.

Mr Burrell, 44, said: "There is something else I said to the Queen that maybe you should know." His legal team fell silent. "I told her I had taken some of Princess Diana's possessions and documents and I also told her the reason for this was that McCrocodile [his nickname for Lady Sarah McCorquodale, Diana's elder sister] and Mrs Shand Kydd [Diana's mother] had been shredding history."

Lord Carlile intended to use the sensational new evidence when Mr Burrell went into the witness box. The collapse of the trial the next day made this unnecessary.

Buckingham Palace and St James's Palace dismissed speculation last night that the recollections of the Queen were too well timed to be a coincidence: Mr Burrell had been about to give his evidence which could have been damaging for the Royal Family.

A senior Palace official said: "The $64,000 question is, after Mr Burrell referred to a meeting with the Queen in his statement, why didn't the police ask the Queen about it and find out what he meant? It beggars belief. The conspiracy theories are unmitigated nonsense."

Senior prosecution officials have disclosed that Mr Burrell would have spent five days in the witness box and would, inevitably, have been forced to reveal secrets the Royal Family did not want made public.

"The intention was to keep any embarrassment to a minimum, but the trouble was he knew everything," said a defence lawyer. "He had not just worked for the Princess and Prince Charles, but he had worked as a footman to the Queen for many years. The potential from the Royal Family's point of view was that a neutron bomb would have been detonated."

Defence lawyers said the Royal Family would have been particularly unhappy with the allegations from Mr Burrell about how the late Princess had been left isolated and depressed after her separation from the Prince of Wales.

The Telegraph can also reveal that the prosecution kept crucial aspects of the case from the Prince because they feared that his aides would leak information to the defence team. Prosecution lawyers decided not to inform the Prince that they had no evidence of Mr Burrell selling the Princess's possessions, even though it had previously told him that this was the key to its case, said a Crown Prosecution Service official.

The failure to tell the Prince of the change in the case will raise questions over whether the trial could have been avoided altogether if the prosecution had decided to be more open with the Royal Family.

The Queen had not realised that her evidence would be relevant to the trial because - thanks to the secrecy of the prosecution team - the Royal Family was still under the impression that the case hinged on Mr Burrell allegedly selling, rather than merely storing, the property.

A senior CPS officer close to the case said: "Why didn't we keep Charles up to speed on the details of the investigation as it developed, in particular that we hadn't succeeded in proving that Burrell had sold stuff from Diana? Because Charles's aides would have taken it to the defence immediately. That was the basic reason why Charles wasn't kept in the loop."

Prince Charles and Princes William and Harry were told by the police in August 2001 that Mr Burrell was selling some of the Princess's possessions to foreign collectors.

The Queen was told that this was the key to the prosecution case and it is now claimed this is why she had originally thought that her conversation with Mr Burrell, which was merely about him storing some private papers, was irrelevant.

As the police investigation progressed, however, officers were unable to produce evidence that Mr Burrell had sold any items. The defence team believes that if the Royal Family had been made aware of this, the Queen might have realised the relevance of her evidence much earlier.

Scotland Yard said yesterday that it had "not been resolved yet" what would happen to the 310 items taken when they raided Mr Burrell's home and which are now tagged and in police storage. Most of them belonged to the Princess before her death in August 1997.

Mr Burrell was yesterday at a secret location with his wife and two sons. He has told friends he hopes to receive 40 items back and will fight for them in court.



-- Anonymous, November 03, 2002


A shambles, not a plot (Filed: 03/11/2002)

The collapse of the trial of Paul Burrell has already inspired a feast of conspiracy theories.

For those minded to detect such plots in the affairs of the nation, the circumstances in which the prosecution case fell apart - the involvement of the Queen, the late hour of her intervention, the inevitability that Mr Burrell's testimony would embarrass the Royal Family - have provided rich pickings.

But, as so often, careful consideration of the facts reveals not conspiracy, but cock-up.

It is undeniably fortunate that the nature of the Queen's meeting with Mr Burrell in 1998, in which he informed her that he had taken some papers belonging to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, came to light when it did - and not only because that disclosure caused the collapse of an obviously flawed prosecution case, and prevented a breach of natural justice.

Had the trial proceeded, the Queen would have been called as a material witness (or not, depending on which "constitutional expert" is to be believed), and one who had allegedly withheld information vital to the defence. The embarrassment which now adheres to the Crown is paltry compared to what the institution might have had to endure.

Nonetheless, the charge that the Queen revealed what Mr Burrell had told her simply to save the Royal Family from imminent humiliation simply does not stand up to scrutiny. What happened was a chapter of accidents. The prosecution, with remarkable sloppiness, did not grasp the potential significance of Mr Burrell's scarcely accidental mention in the defence documents that he had had a private meeting with the Queen.

Had the prosecution team done so, it could conceivably have constructed a completely different case - Mr Burrell's conversation with the Queen seems only to have related to documents rather than other forms of property - but instead it forged gormlessly ahead with a line of attack that was doomed to failure.

Mr Burrell, with the discretion which was his trademark, and from honourable motives, did not alert his own legal team to the nature of his meeting with Her Majesty until last week. It was evidently his intention, as an ardent servant of the Monarch, to spare the Queen embarrassment, and his hope that he would never have to answer questions about the meeting in the witness box, under oath.

The consequence was that the lawyers on both sides - for quite separate reasons - only understood the full facts of the case at the eleventh hour. Crucially, there was no intrinsic reason for the Queen to grasp, at least in the early stages of the trial, how germane her conversation with Mr Burrell was to the proceedings. The bedrock of the prosecution case was the belief that he had not told anyone that he had taken some of Diana's belongings; the essence of its claim was that his actions were a monstrous breach of trust.

In fact, he had told the Sovereign herself. But it is entirely plausible that the significance of Mr Burrell's conversation with her was not brought home to the Queen until she discussed it with the Prince of Wales - who had taken a much closer interest in the case - nine days ago. As soon as they learned what had been discussed at the meeting, Prince Charles and the Queen's officials acted with commendable speed to ensure that matters were brought to a swift and fair resolution.

The problem was certainly not that the Royal Family intervened too much. In his statement to the court on Friday, William Boyce QC, the prosecuting counsel, noted that "because of concerns to avoid any suggestion that Buckingham Palace was trying to interfere with the investigation of this case, the Queen was not briefed on the way in which the case against Mr Burrell was being prepared."

At an earlier stage, St James's Palace had taken advice from two leading QCs to ensure that its cooperation in the case could not be construed as meddlesome, or an attempt to pervert the course of justice. Both palaces were desperate, for understandable reasons, to be seen to be staying out of this most sensitive of trials.

The last thing, in other words, that either palace wanted was for the impression to arise that the Queen or Prince Charles had intervened. It is not surprising that the Queen's most senior courtiers feel so exasperated by the failure of the prosecution to alert them earlier to the likely centrality to the defence case of Mr Burrell's meeting with her.

This episode certainly lays bare once more what has been known about the Royal Family for many years: that its members communicate poorly and infrequently with one another. It was a complaint often levelled by the late Princess of Wales herself. But this is in itself no surprise, and scarcely the stuff of "constitutional crisis", as some have luridly suggested.

Those who look for Machiavellian intrigue at the heart of this affair do so in vain. There was no plot: only a legal shambles which, thankfully, has been brought to a conclusion before more harm could be done.

-- Anonymous, November 03, 2002


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