Former butler of the late Princess Diana, Paul Burrell has been called as the royal’s “closest confidante” and her “keeper of secrets.” Burrell first became Queen Elizabeth II‘s footman at the age of 18, later going to Highgrove in 1987 to serve Prince Charles and Princess Diana. He afterward joined Princess Diana in Kensington Palace after the royal marriage terminated. They eventually formed a close relationship, and Diana one time even said that Burrell is ”her rock.” But everything changed after Diana’s death in 1997.
In 2002, he supposedly traded his “story” to British magazine the Daily Mirror for around between £250,000 and £500,000. He’s also composed two memoirs, A Royal Duty and The Way We Were: Remembering Diana, conducted a one-man show dropping even more mysteries, and revealed yet more telltale while attending the reality show I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!
Here are some secrets shared by this butler.
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Prostitutes and Princess Diana
In November 2002, Paul Burrell was vindicated on charges that he traded hundreds of Princess Diana’s belongings. In an article headlined “Di’s Whore-Able Secret,” the New York Post picked up one of its most disgraceful allegations: Burrell supposedly would accompany Princess Diana to Paddington Station so she could hang out with prostitutes. In her book The Fortune Hunters, author Charlotte Hays declared the women would respectfully hang out with Princess Diana outside her BMW: “Hi, Princess Di. How are you?” She would supposedly answer with something like, “I’m fine. Have you been busy?” As stated by Burrell, she even took out “two crisp fifty-pound notes” on the occurrence, saying, “Look, girls, have the night off on me. Go home to your children.”
Princess Diana supposedly tried pacifying Burrell on those nights, saying, “Oh, Paul, lighten up. Those girls need help.”
Princess Diana though Prince Charles wanted to kill her
January 2004, British magazine the Daily Mirror printed an atomic front-page story that claimed that Diana had speculated her ex-husband, Prince Charles, had desired to kill her.
Paul Burrell insisted Princess Diana wrote the troubling letter in October 1996, ten months before she was killed in a lethal car accident in Paris, France. The letter allegedly said, “My husband is planning ‘an accident’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury … to make the path clear for him to marry.”
Burrel helped Diana to cause vomiting
Quickly after hearing of her husband’s romance with Camilla Parker Bowles, Princess Diana said she formed bulimia. “Everyone in the family knew about the bulimia,” she declared, “and everyone blamed the bulimia for the failure of the marriage.” Burrell insisted he was just “doing his duty” by permitting Princess Diana’s bulimia. “I’d get the chef to prepare a gallon of custard,” he explained to Mandy Saligari, the program’s psychologist. “And I’d buy yoghurt and lots of bananas and prepare the room to make sure she was comfortable.”
Confessing that he was arranging the scene so Princess Diana could make herself sick, Burrell admitted, “I’d make sure there was a pile of towels. I was doing my duty. I’d have done anything for Diana.”
Pregnancy tests
In the ITV documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, declared Princess Diana sent them “the rudest cards.” Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, revealed his late mother’s slogan: “You can be as naughty as you want, just don’t get caught.”
Paul Burrell declared one of Princess Diana’s all-time favorite pranks was going into her local pharmacy and buying home pregnancy tests. “She would take great delight going to the counter in Boots,” Burrell shared, “[and] picking up Predictor pregnancy kits or contraceptives.”
Her ‘first’ car crash
According to Burrell, she was also involved in a different car accident some years before her death. In a February 2018 episode of Australia’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, through a “psychic reading” by “celebrity medium” John Edward, Edward said to Burrell, “You had a friend who passed in a vehicle accident.” Burrell took the bait, responding, “Were there two car accidents?” Edward replied, “I’m feeling like there were two car accidents — almost like one was foreshadowing and one was tragic.”
An apparently disturbed Burrell shouted, “Yes! You couldn’t possibly know that.”
She thought it was her fault her mother wasn’t there
While it’s well known that she had an extremely tense relationship with her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, Burrell insisted that struggle was at the root of some of Diana’s emotional issues. “[She] always thought it was her fault that mummy had left home,” he unveiled on an episode of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!. Burrell also alleged Shand Kydd “wasn’t a very kind person. Not very motherly.” Burrell stated that Shand Kydd’s approach to Princess Diana acquainted her eating disorder, saying that she “blamed herself” for her mother’s constant absence. “That’s where her anorexia started,” he stated. “She suffered with it all her life. She punished herself.”
Lovers
Paul Burrell claimed he’d have to find methods to “smuggle” Diana’s lovers into Kensington Palace, making strong efforts of romantic spying that involved hiding the men in the trunk of his car. Burrell told officers securing the gate that he was “going on an errand” and didn’t want to be stopped when he comes back. “I would then flash my lights and they would open the barrier and let me in,” he said.
Dr. Kahn was Diana’s soulmate
After her divorce from Prince Charles in 1996, she hid her relationship with heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan for 18 months, as stated by Tina Brown’s book, The Diana Chronicles. In the meantime, Paul Burrell insisted Dr. Khan was the love of her life. “The Princess loved many of her male friends,” he said, “but she was in love with Hasnat Khan”
Her last words
“I do have a dream of me sitting alone with the Princess crossed legged on the floor and she is wearing a blue dress,” Burrell admitted. “It’s the last dress I saw her in.” Burrell confessed he originally believed Diana was simply “playing a trick” and wasn’t actually gone at all. He supposedly even “sat with her” after she died, attempting to understand the situation: “I held her hand and I said to her, ‘Wake up, wake up, you’re not really dead, are you?”
“The last things she said to me were on the phone,” he explained. “She was in Paris and the very last words were, ‘Promise me you will always be there.'” He allegedly answered, “I promise I will always be there.”
Source: Nicki Swift
