The room on the first floor of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris was unbearably hot. It was the last day of August 1997, one of the hottest days of that summer, and someone had hung hospital blankets over the windows. Photographers had climbed onto rooftops across the street with long lenses, hoping to capture a single image of the woman lying on the bed. With the glass covered, the heat had nowhere to go, so a man turned on some fans.
That man was Colin Tebbutt, a former royal protection officer who had driven the Princess of Wales for more than two years and called her "the Boss." He has described what happened next many times since. He turned from the fans and saw her eyelids and the strands of hair at her forehead move. For almost a moment, he thought she was alive. Then he realized it was only the air from the fans, and he had to turn away and compose himself because there was work to be done before her former husband arrived from Scotland.
Standing beside him was a short, neat man of 39 with a Derbyshire accent, carrying a bag he had packed at Kensington Palace. The two had taken the first British Airways flight to Paris that morning. His name was Paul Burrell. He had been her personal servant for 10 years, and she called him her rock. In interviews, he has said that when he entered that room, he could not accept that she was dead. To him, she looked as though she were sleeping.
He had brought items from her private apartments. One was a rosary, a string of beads given to her by Mother Teresa of Calcutta, which Diana kept resting on a small statue of the Virgin Mary. Colin Tebbutt handed it to a nurse and asked her to place it between her hands. Burrell helped prepare her body for the journey home. She was wearing a black dress by Walker, the designer who had made her clothes since the first year of her marriage. That rosary was buried with her six days later, along with a photograph of her two sons.
Paul Burrell is now 68. It has been 29 years since that event in Paris, and during those years he has done everything a man can do with a secret except keep it. He has written five books. He sold his story to a tabloid newspaper for a sum reported to be 300,000 pounds. He stood on a Broadway stage, ate insects in an Australian jungle, and was told by two princes that he had betrayed their mother. He was arrested and charged with theft, then acquitted at the Old Bailey because the Queen remembered a conversation in a car. He gave three days of testimony under oath at the inquiry into Diana's death, then was filmed in a New York hotel room saying he had not told the whole truth.
Through all of it, he keeps returning to the same room, where blankets cover the glass and fans turn, and a face looked as though it might wake up. In his latest book, "The Royal Insider," published in Britain in September 2025 and in America last January, he wrote that he shared the lives of the Queen and Princess Diana for 21 years, and that now, after their passing, his duty is to protect their legacy.
Many people who worked alongside him would laugh at that sentence. Diana's mother, Frances Shand Kydd, described him as a parasite clinging to her daughter's fame. Her two sons issued a statement against him. The coroner spent part of his summary dismantling his testimony.
There is one detail in Paul Burrell's story that almost no one discusses, and it changes how the rest of the story reads. In December 2022, at the High Court in London, a lawyer for Mirror Group Newspapers stood and apologized to him. The company that publishes the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, and The People admitted that private investigators working on its behalf had targeted Paul Burrell and that his voicemail messages had been accessed. His lawyer, Frances Leonard, told the court this had continued between 1995 and 2008.
She told the court something else as well. While Diana was still alive, stories built on that stolen information damaged her relationship with her butler, because she wrongly believed he was the one leaking details of her private life to the press. Read that again slowly. In the last two years of her life, a woman who trusted almost no one looked at the man who ran her household and wondered whether he was selling her news. According to what his lawyer told the judge, he was not. Someone was listening to his phone. And the newspaper group that made that apology is the same group that paid him for his story in November 2002, days after he walked out of the Old Bailey a free man.
The same pages that had been feeding on his intercepted messages published his account of a private conversation with the Queen. That conversation is the second thing he saw and could never forget. In December 1997, four months after the funeral, Paul Burrell requested a meeting with the Queen. He went to Buckingham Palace and was shown into her private sitting room. How long he stayed there depends on whom you believe. Burrell said the meeting lasted three hours and that he stood the entire time. The palace timeline, published years later on the royal family's website, says it lasted about an hour and a half. Both accounts agree that at some point he told her he had taken some of the Princess's papers for safekeeping.
The palace says no response was requested from the Queen and none was given. Burrell remembers something else. He says the Queen looked at him over her glasses near the end and warned him that there were forces at work in this country of which we know nothing. He later said he had no idea whom she meant. There were plenty of people she could have been referring to. He took it as a warning to be careful. He was not careful enough.
In January 2001, police officers arrived at his home in Cheshire and searched it. They seized hundreds of items. In August of that year, he was charged with stealing 342 items belonging to Diana, Prince Charles, and Prince William, including signed photographs, letters, clothing, a silver tray, a pepper mill, and a whip. He spent more than a year and a half awaiting trial with his name filling every newspaper in the country.
The trial began at the Old Bailey in October 2002. On the 25th of that month, the Queen, Prince Philip, and Prince Charles were on their way to St Paul's Cathedral for a memorial service for the British victims of the Bali bombings. In the car, they discussed the case. The Queen mentioned that meeting with Burrell five years earlier and what he had said about taking the papers. Within days, the prosecution case collapsed. On 1 November 2002, Paul Burrell walked out of court without conviction and with a story no one else in Britain could tell.
The road to that hospital room began in a coal-mining village in Derbyshire, passed through the Queen's household during the worst years of the Waleses' marriage, and ended with a lone butler at Kensington Palace listening to his employer cry over the telephone. What followed passed through the island of Althorp, where Diana was buried, a police raid, a courtroom, the Australian jungle, and an inquest where a lawyer told him to his face that he had been all over the place. At every stop, there is what Burrell saw, what he said about it, and the official record, and those three things do not always match. Some of his account has held up, and some of it has collapsed under oath, as he himself admitted to a hidden camera.
In January 2008, he traveled from Los Angeles to testify at the inquest into Diana's death. Weeks later, a Sun journalist recorded him in a New York hotel room saying he had been a "mischief-maker" on the witness stand and that he had thrown in some lies to mislead the course of justice. He never returned to clarify his position. The coroner had no power to compel him.
It would be easy to stop there and dismiss him as a man who turned a dead woman into a livelihood. Many have done so. The problem is that the people who were with him in that room in Paris do not describe a man maneuvering for advantage. Colin Tebbutt describes two exhausted men from London performing the last practical tasks anyone could perform for her in a room like an oven, with strangers on the rooftops. He was the only person outside her family who stood at her grave. Whatever he sold, he could never sell the memories of that evening. That room in Paris is the part of the story no one could take from him, and it is where every version of Paul Burrell eventually ends.
Paul Burrell was born on 6 June 1958 in Grassmoor, a coal-mining village a few miles from Chesterfield. His father, Graham, drove trucks. His mother was named Beryl. In a village like that, the obvious future for a boy was work in the mine, and for a while that was the future everyone assumed he would end up in. Then, when he was eight, his family took him to London. He watched the Changing of the Guard outside Buckingham Palace, the scarlet tunics and bearskins and the marching band, and decided in that moment that he would work behind those railings.
The facts of this story are true and confirmed. He attended William Rhodes Secondary School in Chesterfield, then High Peak College in Buxton, where he studied hotel management, which was about as close as a boy from Grassmoor could get to a course in royal household service. At 18, he entered royal service as a footman at Buckingham Palace. Within a year, he became the Queen's personal footman. There was already a member of staff named Paul, a tall one named Paul Whybrew, so the staff did what staff usually do and gave them nicknames. Whybrew was Tall Paul. Burrell was Small Paul.
The Queen's personal footman in the late 1970s lived close to her daily routine in a way very few people ever knew. His days were filled with carrying trays, walking the corgis, and standing for long hours in corridors waiting to be called, which is most of what palace work is. Burrell wrote about those years with an affection that never faded, and his stories from that period were gentle. The Queen correcting a young footman's mistakes without embarrassing him. Small kindnesses in a building that ran on rules no one had written down. In his book "The Royal Insider," he describes her guiding an 18-year-old to get used to palace life. Whatever people think of his later books, the loyalty to the Queen in them seems genuine. He also met his wife inside that building. Maria Cosgrove was working at Buckingham Palace, and they married in 1983. They had two sons.
In 1987, Burrell moved from the Queen's court to the court of the Prince and Princess of Wales at Highgrove House, their country home in Gloucestershire. He was 29. The marriage he was entering had been deteriorating for years, though no one outside the family knew how bad it was. Charles had bought Highgrove before the wedding and loved the gardens with a devotion his wife never shared. By the time Burrell arrived, the couple were living largely separate lives under one roof. Charles had resumed his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, and Diana knew it.
His job placed him at the center of that house. A butler in a place like Highgrove receives guests, manages the dining room, supervises staff, and knows who is expected and who is not expected and who showed up anyway. He sees what is left on the table after an argument, and who does not come down for breakfast the next morning. In a digital interview on Fox News to promote "The Royal Insider," Burrell described exactly that. He said the couple argued, and he was there. He stood and watched them shout and scream, and afterward he cleaned up. He collected the debris of broken china. In the book, he describes a quarrel in which a table was turned over and Charles's clothes ended up stained with salad dressing. He is careful about one thing. He says Charles never physically harmed Diana. What he describes is a woman he says was psychologically tormented by the collapse of a marriage she entered at 20, expecting an entirely different life. And he is blunt about the man he served. He writes that the King is not a man inclined toward reconciliation.
Here the value of Paul Burrell to a biographer and to the tabloids becomes clear. There were plenty of people at Highgrove who saw the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales from the outside. Private secretaries saw it in briefing papers. Protection officers saw it from the passenger seat. A servant in the kitchen saw it at midnight after the guests had gone, when the Princess came down in her nightclothes because she could not sleep and needed someone to talk to. Diana found that person in him.
The reasons are not hard to see. He was only three years older than her, and his background was not tied to the aristocracy she was raised among or the court she entered by marriage. Burrell appears in almost every account as a cheerful man who was very good at his job. Above all, he was personally loyal to her at a time when she believed most of the staff around Charles were carrying news to him. That belief was not a form of paranoia. The two households of the Prince and Princess of Wales were at war by the early 1990s, with counter-briefings exchanged to friendly journalists on both sides. Staff were expected to choose. Burrell chose to stand with her. It cost him a great deal.
When the couple formally separated in December 1992, the Highgrove staff were divided along with everything else. Burrell went with Diana to Kensington Palace, which meant leaving the side of the family that would one day carry the crown. In royal service, where careers are measured in decades and pensions depend on staying in favor, that was a real gamble. He made it.
At Kensington Palace, the household was smaller and the hours longer. Diana lived in Apartments 8 and 9, a set of rooms on the north side of the palace, and Burrell had a small pantry under the main staircase. He has described sitting in that pantry and hearing her move through the building. He was present at the time of Andrew Morton's 1992 book and its aftermath, at the separation, at Charles's televised admission of adultery in 1994, and at the Panorama interview in November 1995, which Diana recorded in her sitting room. By then, his role had gone far beyond anything in a butler's job description. He carried messages, drove her to meetings that kept her off the official schedule, and brought visitors in through side entrances when she did not want anyone to know they were coming. She called him her rock, and in those years the description came close to being literal.
And in those years too, according to his lawyer's statement at the High Court in 2022, someone working for the Mirror group began hacking his voicemail. The Kensington Palace years are the part of Burrell's story he has returned to repeatedly in his books, on stage, and from the witness stand. They are also the years when the gap widens between what he claims and what anyone can verify, because for long stretches he was the only adult in the building with her.
Some of it can be verified. Diana's relationship with the heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, which lasted about two years from 1995, is well documented. Burrell was one of the people who made that relationship possible. Khan did not want his private life in the newspapers, so his visits to Kensington Palace had to be managed. Burrell managed them. At the inquest in January 2008, he told the court that Diana had asked him to find out whether a Catholic priest would marry her to Khan in secret. He said he contacted a priest about it. This is an extraordinary thing for a princess to be exploring, and Burrell was the man she sent to explore it.
He says he was also present during the telephone call that ended Diana's relationship with her mother. Frances Shand Kydd had strong views about the men her daughter dated. In a Smithsonian documentary, Burrell described sitting in his pantry under the main staircase and hearing sobbing from upstairs, then Diana shouting for him to come quickly. He says he found her collapsed on the floor of her room with the phone to her ear, and that her mother had insulted her in the harshest terms over her relationships with Muslim men. Burrell says Diana never spoke to her mother again. No one alive can confirm or deny the words he says were used, and Frances Shand Kydd, who died in 2004, despised Burrell. Both things are true at once, and the viewer has to weigh them.
What is recorded and established is how isolated Diana had become by 1996. The divorce was finalized on 28 August of that year. She lost the title Her Royal Highness. She cut her charity patronages from about 100 to a handful. Her relationships with her staff went through cycles of warmth and suspicion, and people who had been close to her for years found themselves pushed away without explanation. Patrick Jephson, her private secretary, resigned in early 1996. Burrell survived those cycles better than most, but he did not escape them.
Here lies the significance of the Mirror group's apology. In December 2022, his lawyer told the High Court that during Diana's life, stories drawn from his intercepted voicemail caused her to believe he was leaking her secrets, damaging their relationship. The court heard that this targeting continued for more than a decade. It also heard that Mirror Group Newspapers deliberately destroyed documents, meaning Burrell will never know the full extent of what was stolen from him. For a man whose entire identity rests on being the one person she trusted, that is a hard thing to absorb 25 years after her death. Whatever private doubts Diana had about him in those final months, some of them were planted by people who were listening to his phone.
In October 1996, she sat down and wrote him a letter. Burrell published part of it in 2003. In it, Diana wrote that she feared there was a plan to stage a crash involving her car so that her husband would be free to marry again. That letter was examined in detail at the inquest, and the jury heard it in full. What matters here is whom she chose to send it to. Of all the people in her life in the autumn of 1996, the person she entrusted with that fear was her butler.
The summer of 1997 was the busiest, and in some ways the happiest, of her final years. In January, she walked through a minefield in Angola wearing a body shield and a face mask. In June, she sold 79 of her dresses at Christie's in New York and raised more than 3 million pounds for AIDS and cancer charities. That same month, she met Mother Teresa in the Bronx. The two women walked hand in hand in the street and prayed together. It was the last time they saw each other. The relationship with Hasnat Khan had ended. In July, she went on holiday with Dodi Fayed, the son of Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed, and by August, photographs of the two of them on a yacht in the Mediterranean were on the front pages of every newspaper in Europe.
Burrell spoke with her by phone during those weeks. At the inquest, he told the court she was in a phase of getting over a long relationship with someone she had cared about deeply, and that she had met a man who was kind and attentive and generous. He also relayed to the court a phrase he says she used by phone from France when the subject of marrying Dodi came up. She told him she had as much desire to marry again as she had to catch a bad rash. Lady Annabel Goldsmith, a close friend, gave the inquiry a very similar account of the same remark.
On 30 August, Diana and Dodi traveled from Sardinia to Paris. That evening, they dined at the Ritz hotel. Shortly after midnight, they left by a rear entrance in a black Mercedes driven by Henri Paul, the hotel's deputy head of security, with bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones in the front passenger seat. At about 12:20, the car struck the thirteenth pillar of the Alma tunnel. Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul died at the scene. Trevor Rees-Jones survived with horrific facial injuries. Diana was taken to the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, where surgeons worked on her for hours. She was pronounced dead at about 4 a.m. Paris time.
The call reached Kensington Palace in the middle of the night, and Paul Burrell was told that the woman he had worked for since he was 29 had died. He went to her apartment. Someone had to decide what she would wear when her family saw her for the last time, and there was no one else in the building who knew her wardrobe the way he did. He gathered her clothes and personal items, including Mother Teresa's rosary, which had been hanging over a small statue of the Virgin Mary. Then he and Colin Tebbutt took the first British Airways flight that morning. When they landed, they were taken to the British Embassy and from there to the hospital.
Tebbutt has described this part more clearly than Burrell ever has. He said that as a former police officer, he expected to find her in a morgue. Instead, the British consul general asked him whether he wished to see Her Royal Highness, and he was shown into an ordinary hospital room where his boss was lying on the bed. The room was full of people all morning, doctors and nurses and officials, and at one point President Jacques Chirac came to pay his respects. Photographers on the surrounding rooftops were trying to shoot through the windows. Tebbutt hung blankets to cover the windows. He summoned a local undertaker to do her hair and makeup before Prince Charles arrived. When he returned to the room, he later said, she looked much better, but the room was like an oven.
Burrell's role in the next few hours is the most questioned and the least willingly described in detail. He has always maintained that he helped dress her. He said the black Catherine Walker dress was chosen because she would be, in his phrase, "wrapped in love." He has never gone beyond that publicly, and given everything he has published over the years, that reticence means a great deal.
Prince Charles arrived in the afternoon with Diana's sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes. That evening, the coffin, draped in the royal standard, was taken from the hospital to the airport, then flown to RAF Northolt in west London, where Prime Minister Tony Blair waited on the tarmac.
The following week in Britain has been written about more than any other week of the late 20th century. Flowers piled up outside Kensington Palace until they reached knee height and then higher. The Queen remained at Balmoral with her grandsons and was criticized in the press for it. She then returned to London and addressed the nation in a live television broadcast on the eve of the funeral. Mother Teresa died in Calcutta on 5 September, one day before Diana was buried. On the 6th, the funeral was held at Westminster Abbey. The hearse then traveled about 75 miles north to Althorp in Northamptonshire, the Spencer family seat, along roads lined with people throwing flowers at the windshield.
The burial itself was private. Diana was laid to rest on an island in the middle of an ornamental lake known as the Round Oval. Her family was there. Apart from them, one other person stood beside the grave. Paul Burrell has never hesitated to mention it, and he has every right to point it out. The Spencer family did not invite him merely out of courtesy. They invited him because, whatever her brother and mother later came to think of him, in September 1997 he was regarded as the person closest to her who was not a relative.
In November 1997, the Queen awarded him the Royal Victorian Medal for his service to the royal family. He took a role with the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, which was set up to handle the donations pouring in from around the world. At that stage, he was one of the most trusted former servants in the country. Newspapers praised him for his commitment to silence. He was offered money to talk, and by his account it was a large sum, but he refused. Then, in December, he requested a meeting with the Queen.
Everything we know about what was said in that room comes from two sources, and neither is neutral. The first is the palace's short timeline, which records the length of the meeting, about an hour and a half, and one fact, that he mentioned taking some of the Princess's papers for safekeeping. The second is the account Burrell gave to the Daily Mirror five years later, after he was paid for it.
In the Mirror account, the Queen told him that no one had been as close to a member of her family as he had been. She told him she had written to Diana many times over the years trying to reach her. Burrell says he told her he had seen those letters, then said something no servant in her palace would have dreamed of saying 20 years earlier. He told the Queen that the problem was that Her Majesty spoke in black and white while the Princess spoke in color. Then came the warning about forces at work in the country that no one knew anything about.
It is the line from that meeting that has been quoted ever since, often by people who believe it proves something about how Diana died. Burrell himself said he did not know whom she meant. Read carefully, it is a warning to a servant who suddenly carried a great many secrets that people would come looking for them. The people did come looking, though not the ones Burrell expected.
In January 2001, officers from the Metropolitan Police arrived at Burrell's home near Chester with a search warrant. They were investigating allegations of the sale of royal property, and a trail had led them to him. What they found in the house was far more than they expected. There were boxes of letters, photographs, clothing, papers, and personal items that had belonged to Diana, and some that belonged to Prince Charles and Prince William. He was arrested on suspicion of theft. That same year, he opened a flower shop in the village of Farndon in Cheshire while awaiting the police decision on his case.
In August 2001, at West End Central police station in London, he was charged with three counts of theft, one each for property belonging to Diana, Charles, and William. The total number of items was 342. Among the items listed from Charles's property were an engraved silver tray, a white metal pepper mill, and a book from the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours. Police described one item simply as an "Indiana Jones" whip. His lawyer, Andrew Shaw, read a statement on the steps of the police station insisting that Burrell denied the charges categorically. His position from the start was simple. Diana had given him some of these things. The rest he had taken from Kensington Palace after her death to preserve them, because the apartments were being cleared and he did not trust what might happen to her private papers once others began going through them.
For nearly two years, the story dominated front pages. Burrell's lawyers later disclosed to the High Court what had been happening behind those headlines. Private investigators hired by the Mirror group of newspapers had been working against him on at least three occasions between 2001 and 2002. Information obtained illegally was turning up in print. His lawyer said this damaged his relationship with his legal team as he prepared for trial. He stated that the relentless media coverage wrecked Burrell's relationship with his wife and children, caused him significant psychological harm, and that he spent a short period in hospital because of the pressure.
The trial began at the Old Bailey in October 2002 in Court One before Mrs Justice Rafferty. Lady Sarah McCorquodale, Diana's sister and one of the executors of her will, gave evidence for the prosecution. The prosecution case rested heavily on one point. If Burrell had indeed taken these things for safekeeping, there should be evidence that he told someone so, and the prosecution said there was none.
On 22 October, the case took its first hit. According to the palace timeline, it emerged in court that, contrary to earlier police advice, there was no evidence that Burrell had been selling any of those items. Three days later, the Queen got into a car with her husband and eldest son to attend the memorial service for the Bali bombing victims at St Paul's Cathedral. The case came up for discussion. The Queen mentioned her December 1997 meeting, and that Burrell had told her he had taken some papers for safekeeping. The palace says that given how central that issue was to the prosecution, the significance of what she said was recognized and the police were informed. The palace also adds that the decision whether to continue the trial was entirely a matter for the Crown Prosecution Service.
On 1 November 2002, the prosecution offered no further evidence and Paul Burrell was formally acquitted. He left the Old Bailey in tears. Questions began immediately and have never entirely stopped since. People wanted to know how 14 months had passed since the charge was laid without the Queen mentioning this conversation to anyone. They wanted to know how it surfaced in the same week Burrell was due to give evidence, when he would have been asked under oath about everything he had seen at Kensington Palace. Members of Parliament criticized the way the Queen's evidence had come to light. The palace's position was that she had not realized its significance until that conversation in the car. What Burrell might have said from the witness stand remained untold. And some people around the royal family felt considerable relief about that.
Within weeks, a second trial also collapsed. Harold Brown, who had been a servant to Charles and Diana and later to Princess Margaret, was accused of selling alleged royal gifts. His case was dropped in December, and his lawyers said the Queen's intervention in Burrell's case was one of the reasons. In the days after Burrell's acquittal, a former royal servant named George Smith gave a newspaper interview in which he alleged he had been raped in 1989 by a member of Prince Charles's staff. Prince Charles ordered an internal review led by his private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, into specific allegations about his office and how it had handled the Burrell case. The Queen said she supported the move. For a few weeks at the end of 2002, it looked as though Peat and Windsor were losing control of the story of their servants. And the man at the center of it all had just signed a newspaper deal.
Within days of his acquittal, Burrell sold his story to the Daily Mirror for a reported 300,000 pounds. His account of the Queen's warning about hidden forces, her letters to Diana, and his line about black and white and color appeared in that paper in November of that year. The other tabloids, furious at being left out, attacked him with everything they had. Twenty years later, a court heard that the Mirror group had been hacking his voicemail throughout that period. In 2002, no one outside that company knew.
In October 2003, he published "A Royal Duty," his full memoir of his years with the Queen and Diana. The Mirror serialized extracts in the week before publication. The extracts included letters Prince Philip wrote to Diana in 1992 as the marriage collapsed, and part of the October 1996 letter in which Diana wrote about her fear of a staged car crash. Before the book reached the shops, William and Harry issued a joint statement. They said they could not believe that Paul, who had been entrusted with so much, could abuse his position in such a cold and overt betrayal. William was 21, and Harry was 19.
Burrell responded on television. He said a single phone call from either of them would have stopped him from publishing. In the same interview, he asked the princes to grow up. The book topped bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. The following summer, he took a one-man show, "Paul Burrell in His Own Words," from the Royal Drury Lane theatre to Broadway for one night. On American television, he said he did not apologize for making money from the book, and that he thought Diana might be laughing about it from above.
In November 2004, he entered the Australian jungle for the fourth season of "I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!" He lasted 18 days and finished second. Two years later, a second book about Diana was published, titled "The Way We Were." By the time the inquest into Diana's death opened in October 2007, Paul Burrell had spent a decade turning his years at Kensington Palace into books, radio programs, and stage shows. The inquest was the first time he had to answer questions about them under oath.
He flew in from Los Angeles and gave his evidence over three days in January 2008. He told the court about Hasnat Khan and about contacting the priest. He said Diana had not been planning to marry Dodi Fayed, which put him in direct conflict with Mohamed Al Fayed, who believed the couple were about to announce an engagement and had been killed because of it. He was questioned about the 1996 letter, and about why he had kept copies of so many of her letters at all. He did not emerge from the experience looking good.
Michael Mansfield, the lawyer representing Mohamed Al Fayed, went through the contradictions between Burrell's books, his interviews, and his statements, and told him, in polite terms, that he had been all over the place. Burrell had written in "A Royal Duty" that there was a secret Diana had told him that he would never reveal. The coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker, made clear he did not believe that secret amounted to anything. At one point, Burrell was sent back to Cheshire, a round trip of about 400 miles, to fetch letters he said were at his home. When he brought them back, they added nothing new. During the inquest, he was mocked and described as a "porous rock" because of how much he had disclosed about her over the years.
He flew back to America. In February, The Sun published footage from a hidden camera in a New York hotel room. In it, Burrell said he had been a mischief-maker at the inquest and had thrown in some misleading information, and that he had not told the whole truth. He never returned to clarify his position. The coroner had no power to compel him.
There was also a claim from his former bodyguard, Michael Fawcett, who told the inquest that Burrell had once confessed to him that he had taken a ring from Diana's finger in Paris, and that her blood was still on it. Burrell denied it in a written statement. He said he had never told anyone he had that ring, and that he did not have it. The coroner asked him to return to give evidence again, in person or by video link. He refused, and because he was out of the country, the court could not force him.
In his summary, Lord Justice Scott Baker told the jury there was an important issue about the witness's credibility. On 7 April 2008, the jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing caused by the reckless driving of Henri Paul and the pursuing photographers, with the influence of alcohol on Henri Paul's judgment and the failure to wear seatbelts among the contributing factors. Scotland Yard later said there was insufficient evidence to justify a perjury investigation against Burrell.
After that, Paul Burrell's story became, for a time, the story of a man trying to live an ordinary life. He ran a flower shop in Farndon. He painted scenes of the village churchyard. In 2016, his marriage to Maria ended in divorce after more than 30 years. In April 2017, he married Graham Cooper, a lawyer he had known for 10 years, at Bowness-on-Windermere in the Lake District, and said he cried with happiness. In 2019, he sold the shop and retired to the village of Peckforton in Cheshire. In January 2023, he announced that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer the previous year. In November of that year, on ITV's Lorraine, he said he had received the all-clear, though he would need ongoing care. He has since used his experience to raise awareness, including taking part in a charity show called "The Real Full Monty."
A month before that cancer announcement, he had his day at the High Court. Mirror Group Newspapers admitted liability, apologized for the repeated invasion of his privacy, agreed to pay substantial damages, and promised not to do it again. His lawyer told the court he had been angry and disturbed. For the first time, a court formally heard that some of the suspicions Diana harbored toward him in her final years had been fed by people listening to his phone.
Then, in September 2025, came "The Royal Insider." Burrell presents it as the book he could only write after the Queen's death, the most comprehensive account of a story he has been circling since 1997. The book has its critics. One reader on Goodreads described it as a contradictory work and said it was the kind of book that makes you feel you need a shower afterward. The palace, asked by Fox News Digital, said it does not comment on such books.
What he describes in the book is familiar in its broad outlines, but its details are harsher. He returns to the shouting at Highgrove and the broken china he collected afterward. To a marriage he says left Diana in psychological torment. And to a man he served, now King, whom he writes about as not good at reconciliation. He writes about the grief of losing the three women he says were the most important in his life: the Queen, Diana, and Maria. Running through the book is his conviction that he was the only person who saw the whole thing from close enough to know what was real.
That conviction has been badly damaged over the years, and much of the damage was of his own making. Diana's private letters ended up in his books. The Queen's private words ended up in the Mirror for money. And the account he gave the coroner did not match the one he gave to a hidden camera. Any sensible person can listen to any of Paul Burrell's tales and wonder what he gained from telling it.
The room in Paris is different. No one has ever produced an account of 31 August 1997 in which Burrell is anywhere other than where he says he was. Colin Tebbutt, who has no reason to protect him, places him on that first flight and inside that building. The Spencer family placed him beside the grave. He helped dress her and carried the rosary from her apartment to that hospital. And he saw her lying there in the heat with the fans turning, looking as though she might open her eyes at any moment. He was 39 then. He is 68 now, with a book in the shops, a husband at home, and reassuring medical results behind him. And he still talks about that room. He has sold almost every part of his time with Diana. That afternoon in Paris is the one memory he keeps returning to, and after 29 years, he has not yet found a way to make it look like anything other than what it was.