BRITAIN:Paul Burrell, Princess Diana's former butler, was forced to admit yesterday at the inquests into the deaths of the princess and her companion, Dodi Fayed, that a book he wrote about his relationship with his former employer contained inaccuracies. He accepted that some of the incidents recounted in his book, The Way We Were, had not taken place as he described them.
The lesson would appear to be: never agree to a ghost-written book purporting to reveal intimacies. At one point under cross-examination, with Mohamed Al Fayed (Dodi Fayed's father) and his employees grinning in the seats behind him, Mr Burrell, who had returned from his home in Florida to give evidence, exclaimed: "Quite frankly, it's been horrid. It's been quite disgraceful, actually . . . I didn't expect it to be so ghastly."
He must have regretted calling for the inquests to be held.
Mr Burrell underwent a humiliating hour in the high court after an overnight 380-mile dash to his home in Cheshire and back to retrieve documents about his service with the princess which he had hoped to keep confidential but which the court had ordered him to produce. He was told brusquely by the coroner, Lord Scott Baker, they contained no secrets and would be disclosed.
His secret documents turned out to be a couple of notebooks, one of which was a history of royal servants, a book of psychology, six letters from the princess, holiday photographs and 10 pages of typed draft notes about the princess's relationships with men. He told the inquest a further note from the princess which he had been asked to produce must be at his home in the US.
A letter from the princess, which was disclosed at the end of his other book, A Royal Duty, which spoke of a secret which he said he would never reveal, particularly aroused the coroner's exasperation: "[ There is] not in fact one secret but two secrets . . . having examined the matter it doesn't seem to me that they are secrets at all.
"Both pieces of information are fairly and squarely in the public domain one way or another and one of them indeed appears in your book, The Way We Were."
Michael Mansfield QC, Mr Fayed's counsel, told Mr Burrell: "You are all over the place. First you say you know a secret, then it could be a number of secrets, then you say there are different timescales. People might question your book, mightn't they?"
The butler replied that he had written in good faith: "I didn't think there were any errors, until you remind me otherwise."
Earlier, David Veness, the former assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, rejected Mr Mansfield's accusations that he had kept secret a note shown to him by the princess's former solicitor Lord Mishcon following her death, in which in 1995 she expressed fears that she would be "got rid of" in a car accident.
Mr Burrell faces several more hours of questioning this morning.