Princess Diana’s trusted butler Paul Burrell did not tell the truth at the inquest into her death, the presiding judge told the jury today.
“All in all, you may think Mr Burrell’s behaviour has been pretty shabby,” Lord Justice Scott Baker told the jury as he concluded the official inquiry into the death of Diana and her lover Dodi al-Fayed in a Paris car crash in 1997.
Mr Burrell, who called himself Diana’s Rock, faced a three-day grilling from lawyers when he appeared at the inquest in January to be repeatedly asked how much he really knew about secrets he was supposed to have held for the princess.
In February, Scott Baker asked Mr Burrell to return to court to explain discrepancies between his evidence and comments attributed to him in a tabloid newspaper but he refused.
“It was blindingly obvious wasn’t it, that the evidence that he gave in this courtroom was not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” Lord Justice Scott Baker said today.
In a scathing reference to Mr Burrell’s emotionally charged testimony, he told the jury: “I advise you to proceed with caution especially when and if you are left with the impression that he only told you what he wanted you to hear.”
The coroner was summing up to the jury after they had heard more than 250 witnesses over the past six months in an inquest that has attracted worldwide media attention.
On Monday, the opening day of his presentation to the jury, the judge dismissed conspiracy theories of Mohamed al-Fayed, father of Dodi. Harrods owner Fayed had claimed Diana and Dodi were killed by British security services on the orders of Prince Philip, because the royal family did not want the mother of the future king to have a child with Mr Fayed’s son.
The inquest was delayed for 10 years because Britain had to wait for the French legal process and then a British police investigation to run their course before it could begin.
Both police inquiries decided it was a tragic accident because chauffeur Henri Paul was drunk and driving too fast when their Mercedes limousine crashed in a Paris road tunnel while being pursued by paparazzi.
The jury, due to be sent out on tomorrow morning to consider their decision, have five verdicts to choose from.
They can opt for unlawful killing through gross negligence by the chauffeur, by “following vehicles” or by both.
The other two alternatives are accidental death or an open verdict if the 11-member jury felt there was not enough evidence to support any substantive verdict.
The judge is initially seeking unanimity from the jury but, failing that, will accept a majority verdict.
At Cafe Diana, theories of princess’s death die hard
Ten years after she died, and with an estimated $20 million spent trying to establish what led to her death, there are those who will always believe what they want to believe about Princess Diana.
“Somebody was behind it, I tell you,” murmurs Abbas Ali, an Iraqi who has lived in London for nearly 30 years, fixing his questioner with a steely gaze as he sipped coffee in Cafe Diana, a sandwich-bar-cum-temple to the late princess (picture).
“There are powers that do these sorts of things. She was killed, I tell you. Wait another 20 years and maybe we’ll finally know the truth. Somebody was behind it.”
His friend nods and breaks off a telephone conversation to throw his opinion into the ring.
“It’s like the Iraq war,” he says, shrugging his shoulders as if the connection were obvious. “They tell you there are weapons of mass destruction and then there are no weapons of mass destruction. The same with Diana. How do we know for sure?”
And yet, it seems, the conspiracies will not so readily be stamped out.
“Of course someone killed her,” says Dalilur Choudhury, a waiter at the Mahal Indian restaurant, which sits next door to Cafe Diana opposite Kensington Palace, Diana’s old residence on the edge of London’s Hyde Park.
“There was jealously because she had a lover and so they had her killed –
everybody knows that.”
In the years since her death, Cafe Diana – its walls plastered with photographs of the princess and letters from her to the proud owner – has become a pilgrimage spot for tourists who hanker after the “queen of hearts”.
Waiter Fouad Fattah has seen them come and go for more than a decade and wearily heard them expound all their theories.
“We get French, British, Americans, Germans – they all come and they all have their opinions,” he says. “Most of those who come in believe the conspiracies.”
On Monday a few tourists sat staring at the pictures on the walls, but mostly the cafe was full of construction workers and taxi drivers getting stuck in to plates of fried bacon, eggs and chips.
Owner Abdul Basit, an Iraqi who opened the cafe in 1989 and decided to name it after Diana – rather than Abdul’s – after spotting her crossing the road, became a friend of the princess’s and was hugely saddened by her death.
But when it comes to digging in to how she died and whether anything nefarious might lie behind it, he is adamant:
“It was just an accident,” he says, answering a question he’s clearly been asked a thousand times before.
“It was misfortune – the driver was drunk, was going too fast and crashed. That’s all there is to it.