Rebel Prince by Tom Bower

Author:Tom Bower
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

15

The Queen’s Recollection

On Monday, 14 October 2002, Paul Burrell, forty-four years old, stood in the dock of Court Number One at the Old Bailey, accused of stealing 310 items together worth £4.5 million. To be acquitted, he would need to show the jury that, from the outset and during the three years he possessed the items, he never intended to steal them.

Nearly a dozen famous people had been listed to testify on his behalf. The celebrities would enhance his reputation as Diana’s ‘rock’, praised for his seventeen years’ loyal service and for his public pledge to preserve her memory ‘as decently and as respectfully as possible’. None of Burrell’s witnesses was aware that he had planned to resign from Diana’s service and move to the United States.

After the first jury was discharged because one member was the wife of a policeman, a second jury was addressed by William Boyce. The prosecutor was competent, but with questionable self-confidence, and his unusual unwillingness to discuss the case with other lawyers suggested that he did not fully appreciate Burrell’s threats, nor understand the implications of Alex Carlile’s accusation of police deception, nor Burrell’s unproveable ‘sales’ in America. Apparently unaware of what had been going on behind the scenes, he did not anticipate the traps that Carlile would spring during his cross-examinations of Maxine de Brunner and Roger Milburn. Both officers assumed that Boyce would protect them; they were wrong.

In his opening statement, Boyce told the jury that the prosecution would seek to prove that Burrell had not informed anyone that he was holding property belonging to the executors of Diana, the Prince of Wales, or Prince William. Before the police arrived at his home, no one knew about the hundreds of items he had taken from Kensington Palace. Further, after his arrest he had refused to return them. His subsequent letters to Charles and William about ‘safekeeping’ proved only that he had been holding their property without permission.

The prosecution’s case rested on the evidence of Sarah McCorquodale, Frances Shand Kydd and the main police officers in the inquiry, particularly Milburn, whose most important piece of testimony was recounting his first question to Burrell after arriving early in the morning at the butler’s home in Cheshire.

‘Do you have any items from Kensington Palace in this house?’ Milburn had asked.

‘No,’ was the reply.

Burrell’s lie, and his obstructive answers during two subsequent police interviews, were crucial, yet Boyce chose not to ask Milburn for any details about those exchanges. The officer was puzzled. After all, in each of the interviews Burrell had said that he was unwilling to return Diana’s property, even those items that he later told William he held for safekeeping. Equally bewildering was Boyce’s silence during Carlile’s cross-examination of Milburn.

Towards the end of the day, Burrell’s counsel produced into court Diana’s large mahogany box. Burrell would subsequently write in his autobiography that, according to the police, the box’s lock had been ‘forced and broken’. That was untrue, as both de Brunner and Milburn insisted after the trial.

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