Prince Harry is the image of James Hewitt. 
Posted on 11/10/2002 3:59:53 AM PST by Happygal
Diana once turned up to meet a lover naked except for a fur coat and earrings, and was on first-name terms with a number of London prostitutes. Expect more revelations as Paul Burrell's story continues to emerge, says Stephen Dodd
PAUL Burrell looks up to people for a living. He looked up to the Queen he says he still does and peered from depths of humility towards Diana's giddy summit. If deference ever became an Olympic event, Paul Burrell would be crawling for England.
Last week, the world's spotlight shifted below stairs and pointed squarely in the direction of the most famous butler since Jeeves. Exonerated in a bizarre theft case involving an attic full of Di's keepsakes and a hotly debated tete-a-tete with the Queen, Paul Burrell acted like any red-blooded modern Englishman, and sold everyone's dirty washing to the tabloids for half a million quid. A cad, perhaps. An uppity underling, doubtless. But while the nation feasts on his revelations, Burrell himself seems to have missed the point.
There is something indisputably unsettling about both the latest royal scandal and the man who revealed it. Burrell's tale holds astonishing elements a mysterious warning; a string of Palace lovers; the full horror of the arrogant Spencers but, ultimately, the butler's story attracts for a single reason. In his detail, in his behind-closed-doors accounts of affairs and desperate love, Burrell has focused attention on the one thing he vows he is seeking to protect. His proffered rationale, his wealth of reminiscence, drives a royal carriage of complexity through Diana's reputation.
Sadness now seems to be the quality that stalks a string of squalid memories. Diana, emotionally trapped in her Kensington Palace apartments by a loveless marriage, turned to anyone. In mental anguish, she turned to butler Burrell, who claims he was her "Rock". For physical solace, meanwhile, the princess ferried in a haphazard sequence of sexual suitors.
The stories tumbled from the pages of Burrell's defence statement. A trail of lovers visited Kensington Palace, he recalled, and his own duties frequently included smoothing the path to royal romance.
"The princess spent intimate time with the men to whom I am referring," Burrell says. "On some occasions I would go out in my own car and collect the person concerned and bring him to the Palace. I would provide meals, ensure that there was privacy . . . "
On one occasion, it is claimed, Diana was naked under a fur coat when she met lover Dr Hasnat Khan. The surgeon was also smuggled into the Palace in the boot of Burrell's car for an "intimate" meeting. Di's relationship with the doctor grew so intense that Burrell was despatched to find out if a secret wedding could be arranged.
There is a disturbing twist in the sudden shift of Diana's image from aloof and unapproachable icon to a woman with a sexual appetite too often thwarted. Through Burrell's disclosures, we learn of another side to the princess. At night, secretly, she visited London's red-light areas and gave handouts to prostitutes. She bought chain-store clothes for them and gave them money.
"Diana was on first-name terms with two or three of them," Burrell said in his statement.
It was Burrell's task to arrange the secret Palace sessions for Diana's lovers, and fool security guards into thinking nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
"To facilitate the arrangements in relation to the princess's male friends," he recalled, "I would say to officers at the gate when I went out that I was going out on an errand and that when I came back I did not want to be stopped."
Instead of the normal security check, Burrell would flash his headlights and the barrier would be raised.
The affair with Dr Khan went on for two years. Once Diana asked Burrell to question a Catholic priest about the possibility of a secret marriage, and he discovered it was an impossible idea. On another visit to celebrate her birthday, she met the doctor while she was wearing only a fur coat and sapphire and diamond earrings.
By any standards, it seems fair to speculate that Diana chose her men unwisely. James Hewitt is still talking to the press he said last week Burrell's disclosure was quite justified while the princess is said to have confided that the mutual attraction between herself and Dr Hasnat was a shared sense of insecurity. Dodi Fayed, the last doomed lover who died at her side in the Paris crash, was little more than a playboy. Diana herself, says Burrell, confided to him that Dodi had a drug problem. Even Charles frequently faltered. Burrell says of the Prince's social calendar: "The guests included ladies on their own. I think people can draw their own conclusions from that."
Perhaps more than Diana's own smuggled love affairs, however, it is her bizarre secret visits to prostitutes which hint at Diana's desperation. It has been speculated that she empathised, that in some measure she saw herself as a plaything for man's manipulation, and the observation seems pertinent. Certainly the Diana revealed in Paul Burrell's statement bears little relation to the popular view of the princess as an otherworldly, sexless saint.
Burrell's story, of course, has been a multilayered feast for Britain's newspapers, a millefeuille of intimate intrigue that even the quality press has found deliciously irresistible. At its core lies England's centuries-old class system. The Spencers are one of the country's oldest families, with an uninterrupted lineage stretching far beyond the arriviste Windsors who now hold court at Buckingham Palace. It is a difference that Earl Spencer, Diana's brother, has clearly neither forgotten nor forgiven, if Paul Burrell's testimony is to be believed.
Put simply, Burrell accuses the Spencers, through a series of family members, of estranging Diana in life, profiting from her death and, finally, shafting her butler.
The feud between the two families, hinted at in the Earl's criticism of the Royals during his oration at Diana's funeral, has never been as overt. Burrell tells of his horror at Spencer's "hypocrisy" in the oration at Westminster Abbey. Was this the same man, he wondered, who had decided to turn down Diana's request to live in a cottage on the Spencer estate? The same man who turned Diana's life into a theme-park experience for tourists, charging for admission to the Althorp museum?
"The Spencers found Diana unacceptable in life," said Burrell. "But after her death they found her very acceptable at £10.50 a ticket."
There is more. Burrell tells the extraordinary story of how Earl Spencer swapped the royal flag draped over Diana's coffin for a Spencer family ensign. On her funeral day, at a lunch attended by Prince Charles and Diana's two sons, and witnessed by Burrell, the earl announced: "Diana is home . . . she's a Spencer now."
Outside the banquet hall, Burrell noticed the royal standard was gone.
"The splendid blue, red and gold banner was replaced with the black-and-white Spencer flag," he recalls. "It barely covered the casket. I just thought, 'How sad."'
It was an example of almost incredible arrogance, a swaggering snub on the royal family, and it is not the only Spencer story Burrell has to tell. Admittedly, there is a hint of revenge in his account, as the butler names Lady Sarah McCorquodale, Diana's sister, as responsible for kick-starting the police investigation against him. His account, though, holds both private and public scenes, and other witnesses have also spoken of simmering rivalry between Althorp and Buck House.
Burrell tells of a vicious telephone argument between Diana and her mother, in which Frances Shand Kydd launched a volley of obscenities at her daughter over Diana's affairs with Muslim men.
"It was a hate-filled, personal attack on the type of men the princess surrounded herself with, and their religious beliefs," claimsBurrell.
Paul Burrell effectively accuses the Spencers of "diddling" Princess Diana's true heirs out of their rightful inheritance. Seventeen godchildren were due to be given a quarter of her goods, the butler says, and he claims they were instead presented with small china mementoes.
"Diana's wishes have been ignored," he says. "They swapped a legacy of millions for a few pounds. There has never been any explanation of why this happened . . . they were diddled out of a substantial inheritance."
The Spencers, Burrell says, made sure they took their slice of the pie. After Diana's death, the butler witnessed an extraordinary scene in which Diana's mother and sisters Sarah and Jane removed carloads of Diana's possessions from Kensington Palace.
"They took out belts, shoes, jeans, handbags, sweaters and were trying them on to see if they would fit," Burrell alleges. "They filled Sarah's car to the roof with rugs, curtains and the princess's clothes. It was so full she couldn't see through the rear-view mirror."
In effect, Paul Burrell's story has acted as the catalyst for a succession of individuals to boast that each cared more for Diana than his rival. Bodyguards have claimed they too were called Diana's "Rock". Earl Spencer says Burrell is lying; a family friend even alleges the butler had his own plans for a Diana Museum.
What remains indisputable, however, is the depth of deference Burrell continues to feel. One journalist even talked of Burrell assuming the princess's mannerisms, "starting to become Diana".
"He started looking up at you through the eyelashes, through Diana's eyelashes," said the hack. "It was scary."
In his own statements, Burrell comes back time and again to protestations of devotion to Diana, to the Queen, to the Palace. When he was falsely accused of theft, he says, he turned to a picture of Diana for solace.
"For a long time I just looked at the portrait I keep of her in my study," he says. "She is wearing a tiara in it and I'd just sit there, gazing into her eyes."
That is scary. So, too, is Paul Burrell's admission that at his lowest ebb he considered suicide, and longed to join his dead employer.
"This sounds so selfish and terrible, but I didn't care about anything any more," he admits. "I was going to be with the princess and I was going to be happy again."
As the story rumbles on, a runaway tank crashing through palace secrets, we should prepare for further shocks. Prince Charles now stands accused of sheltering a senior aide accused of homosexual rape. A key tape of evidence in the case has gone missing. And while the Spencers doubtless gather to prepare a suitably aristocratic riposte to Burrell's story, there is still that mystery to sort out: what did the Queen mean by warning Paul Burrell to beware of unnamed dark forces?
One man, predictably, offers answers. Dodi's dad, Mohammed al-Fayed, says the Queen's veiled hint confirms his suspicion that secret agents murdered the princess and his son. And, typically, he adds a mystery of his own.
"Two weeks after the tragedy I myself received a death threat on House of Commons notepaper, warning that my destiny had been decided," Fayed claims. "I want the world to know that if anything should happen . . . "
But the world has moved on, and there are other royal tales to tell. A fairy-tale princess, stalking the night-time streets? A blue-blood feud that strikes at the monarchy itself? As Paul Burrell's story simmered on, even Michael Barrymore's agent jumped in with tales of his client's friendship with the most famous butler in the land.
No, Mr Fayed; conspiracy has become old hat. So many skeletons have been dragged from the royal cupboard that the rattling of bones deafens all but novelty. The danger now is that in the rush of revelation, we might all forget how it began, and why the world was touched by a stark tragedy even commoners could comprehend.
A man of little honour, in my opinion.
It saddens me that more and more people are prepared to sell their souls for the cheque-book journalism of the tabloids.
My only complaint about her death is that it happened on my birthday...every August 31st I'm treated to the frenzy of let's remember!
Prince Harry is the image of James Hewitt.
We saw the danger of having "royal rule", and shed a considerable amount of blood during the Revolution, and, later, during the War of 1812, to keep the royals out; however,once the fighting was done, our society began oohing and cooing over British royalty again.
Our media is seemingly in love with royal rule, as they try to turn our (more personable) elected Presidents into wannabee "Royal Families"-going so far, during the Kennedy years, as to refer to the Kennedy White House as " Camelot ": a description I still gag on !
Princess Di DID just that : Die.Last I checked, she's STILL DEAD ; and it sure doesn't look as if that's going to change anytime soon.
What I'm saying is : If she went out and got an occassional tuneup and oil change. who in bloody Hell cares ???
Dianna sold her soul for money and fame too though. She married a man who didn't love her and then did nothing but complain about it.
ROTFLOL
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