Tabloids pounce as the butler spills it

Depending on which British tabloid you prefer with your morning coffee, the butler to the late Princess Diana was either privy to the most intimate details of her love life -- quite busy, it turns out -- or a completely barmy employee now peddling exaggerated tales about the royal family and those in its orbit for the basest of motives: big money.

In either version, dignity has gone missing.

One week after 44-year-old Paul Burrell walked free from a London court where he had faced charges of stealing a trove of the princess’ possessions, he has rocked Britain with his butler’s-eye view of the royal family and its tempestuous in-laws, Diana’s Spencer family, all told breathlessly to the Daily Mirror tabloid.

Burrell breaks confidences with the queen. He settles personal scores with the Spencers, declaring that Diana died deeply estranged from her family. And in the process, he tramples the memory of the princess he claims to revere, exposing her deepest secrets -- such as her wish to marry London surgeon Hasnat Khan -- to anyone with 30 cents to plunk down for paper.

He is taking quite a kicking in return. A tabloid shunned is a vicious beast, and the papers Burrell turned down to take the Mirror’s cash have a stake in discrediting the butler. “The Ramblings of a Madman,” hollered the Sun in revenge.

Indeed, Burrell’s tale is a surreal account of life behind the royal moat. He tells of lovers smuggled in the trunks of cars into Diana’s Kensington Palace home; of her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, screaming a “hate-filled tirade” at her daughter for dating Muslim men; and of Queen Elizabeth’s bizarre warning to him after Diana’s death that there are “powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge.”

Perhaps most seriously, his revelations triggered a revival of old whispers about a homosexual rape in Prince Charles’ household by a senior courtier in the late 1980s. This time around, even the mainstream media gave prominent coverage to the allegations, accompanied by speculation over whether Prince Charles’ staff -- “a gay mafia,” according to the avowedly monarchist Spectator magazine -- covered up the rape by paying off the victim, whose name was not disclosed.

Unable to duck the questions, Prince Charles’ office issued a statement late Thursday night saying his staff investigated those claims in 1996 but found no evidence to support them. Nor did police, when they conducted their investigation last year.

The alleged victim did receive a lump payment when he left the royal household, Charles acknowledged. “But it was not unusual for the Prince of Wales to make termination payments to employees,” according to the statement from his office.

All of this seems to go beyond the usual level of delicious royal gossip, and it seemed to overwhelm the 76-year-old queen. Normally stoic, she was photographed Thursday with tears running down her cheeks at Westminster Abbey during a moment’s silence for Britain’s war dead.

The tabloid deluge began Nov. 1, when Burrell’s theft case was thrown out of court after the queen intervened. The monarch said she remembered a 5-year-old private conversation with Burrell -- who had once been her footman -- during which he told her he was guarding some of Diana’s papers. With that bit of evidence, his trial collapsed -- a bit suspiciously for some who suggested the monarch’s sudden recall was a convenient way of keeping Burrell’s potentially messy testimony out of court.

But if the queen’s intention was to silence the drip of scandal, the ploy failed. The hyper-competitive British press fell ravenously on the carcass of the case, and by early this week, Burrell had signed a deal to tell his story to the Daily Mirror. Throughout his legal ordeal, Burrell cast himself as a loyal servant to Diana, explaining that his attic was stuffed with the princess’ personal items because it was his “duty to keep them safe.”

But discretion, apparently, has its price. Burrell’s turns out to be a reported $500,000 for the newspaper version and $150,000 for a television interview.

The first tabloid installment, published Wednesday, recounted Burrell’s now-infamous meeting with the queen, held on a November afternoon after Diana’s August 1997 death. Their talk lasted three hours, he said. Buckingham Palace sources scoff at the notion that the queen would grant anyone less than a head of state more than 20 minutes. Three minutes at most, they say.

His aim in keeping Diana’s things, Burrell said he told the queen, was to prevent the princess’ shredder-happy family from destroying her letters and “erasing part of the princess’ life.”

It was, he recounted, “like talking to my mum.”

Nine or 10 corgis “were strewn around the room,” Burrell recalled, when the queen made her mysterious statement he roughly translated as: Beware the dark forces. The queen “looked at me over her half-rimmed spectacles as if she expected me to know the rest. She fixed me with her eye and made sure I knew she was being deadly serious ... clearly warning me to be vigilant. I had no idea what she was talking about,” he told the Mirror.

Burrell went on to skewer the Spencer family on Thursday. “The Spencers found Diana unacceptable in life,” he declared. “But after her death, they found her very acceptable at 10.50 pounds [$15] a ticket.” A not-very-nice reference to the Spencer family having turned Diana’s burial plot on its estate into a tourist destination.

But the butler saved his harshest opinions for Diana’s mother and sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale (he calls her “McCrocodile”), whom he blames for pushing the prosecution against him. He took his revenge by revealing that six months before her death, Diana allowed him to listen in on a phone conversation with her mother during which a “slurring” Shand Kydd uncorked a “hate-filled personal attack on the type of men the princess surrounded herself with and their religious beliefs.”

A sobbing Diana, “contorted by hurt, vowed she would never speak to her mother again,” Burrell told the Mirror. “And she never did.”