A Royal Duty by Paul Burrell

Author:Paul Burrell [Burrell, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141905846
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

The thorough inquiry was emphatic that there was no truth whatsoever in these allegations. Indeed, Robert Fellowes attached his own personal note to his sister-in-law to emphasize how wrong she was: ‘This letter is sent from one who really believes that you’ve got this whole thing dreadfully wrong, and that you must realize it – please.’

With hindsight, and on any objective assessment of the fact, the princess could simply never have been right.

By the end of 1995, the princess’s own private secretary was drafting a letter. Patrick Jephson had decided to quit KP. Another member of staff who leaped before he was pushed. All lines of effective communication had been cut between him and the princess. It was sad to witness the demise of that relationship because not only had he been expert at his job, he had been close to the princess. I was once dispatched to Asprey & Gerrard, the Crown jewellers, to choose a pair of gold links for him, bearing his initials. The princess also allowed him to leave the office early on Friday and not return until Monday so that he could spend more time with his family in Devon. But by 1995 he felt snubbed by every private decision she had taken, and was blind to the correspondence she had diverted through my fax machine. There is no future for an unhearing, unseeing employee in a royal household. The Panorama interview and the Tiggy Legge-Bourke incident had been the final straws. His curt resignation letter, which dropped into KP one day, summed up his bitterness: he told the princess that she had denied him all normal means of communication with her, leaving him to feel unwanted.

‘The rats always jump ship, Paul,’ she mused. ‘Looks like you’ll have to be butler, lady-in-waiting and private secretary rolled into one. You’re at the helm now!’

The Herculean task of managing the princess’s PR was, thankfully, not my responsibility. That burden fell to a new recruit, Jane Atkinson. She was charged with handling the continued fall-out from the Tiggy Legge-Bourke incident. Prince Charles’s assistant demanded an apology but the princess refused to back down. By then, her mind was elsewhere. She had received her own bombshell, hand-delivered by a uniformed orderly. The Queen and Prince Charles had fired a double salvo into KP just before Christmas. A divorce was demanded by both the sovereign and the heir to the throne.

Divorce was a word and not a prospect to the princess. It was something she had often used to threaten Prince Charles during the latter years of their marriage. She had screamed it to get his attention, to wound, like a child in a tantrum threatening a dismissive parent that she was going to run away, knowing she didn’t really mean it. In getting to know and understand the princess, I talked with her about how misunderstood she felt, how much pain she had endured, how she felt her ‘personal torture’ – because that was what she called it – had helped her grow into a stronger person.

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