BRITAIN:Princess Diana may have promoted her developing relationship with Dodi Fayed as a way of trying to restore her partnership with the real love of her life, the Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, her former butler, Paul Burrell, told the inquests at the High Court in London yesterday.
The princess's relationships in her final months before the fatal crash in Paris in August 1997 were unfolded like a ghastly soap opera by Burrell, who has written two books on his service with her. Even the language and the cast list were like something out of an upmarket EastEnders, or possibly a downmarket Mills and Boon. It was a case of what the butler saw - or says he saw.
Thus, for the jury's benefit, there was Burrell's visit to a Catholic priest to ask about the theoretical possibility of an unnamed Christian privately marrying a Muslim, and the surgeon's clandestine assignations at Kensington Palace, where rooms in the princess's apartment were going to be allocated for his use.
Then it all apparently ended with a secret night-time tryst in Battersea Park in July 1997, where Diana and Khan decided to end their relationship after he decided he could not put his career on hold while he plunged into the maelstrom of the princess's highly public life.
Khan, who now lives in Pakistan, told two newspapers at the weekend that he would not give evidence, which he cannot be compelled to do. He, though, was the Muslim with whom the princess wished to spend her life, not Dodi Fayed, Burrell said.
"The princess said that this was her soulmate, this was the man she loved more than any other and it was a very deep, spiritual relationship."
The highly-publicised Mediterranean holiday on the Fayeds' yacht a few weeks later could be seen as sending a message to Khan when he opened his morning paper, he said. "I don't think that a relationship that lasted 18 months was gone overnight. I think the princess was still burning a candle for Dr Khan . . . the princess was used to the world stage. She knew exactly what was happening."
She had felt indebted to the Fayeds, whose private jet she was relying on to get her home from the holiday. Dodi had deluged her with Bulgari jewellery. Burrell said he had told her in a telephone call that a ring would be next and that, to avoid misunderstanding, she should place it on her right hand, for friendship rather than to signify an engagement.
"Good idea," he said she had told him. "I need marriage like a bad rash." Sure enough, a Bulgari ring was presented a few days later, though not the ring Dodi was said to be buying from another jeweller the day of the couple's deaths a few days later.
The butler, who previously worked for the queen at Buckingham Palace, defended the frank letters that the Duke of Edinburgh sent Diana during the breakdown of her marriage to the Prince of Wales in 1992.
"Prince Philip is not known for his diplomacy, but he certainly wouldn't have written nasty notes to the princess. He was fond of her . . . I can tell you it is not Prince Philip's nature, plus the princess was mother of his grandchildren. Why would he want to harm her?"
Definitely not Mills and Boon was Burrell's evidence about Diana's final falling out with her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, two months before the princess died. Mohamed Al Fayed contends that Diana and Dodi were killed because of royal prejudice against Muslims, but while no evidence has been produced of prejudice by the royal family, the butler was pushed to disclose the princess's last telephone conversation with her mother. He said she called her daughter a whore, "messing with f***ing Muslim men". Diana never again spoke to her mother, who died in 2004.
Burrell's book, A Royal Duty, ends by quoting Diana's last letter to him in August 1997, in which she spoke of a great secret.
Michael Mansfield QC, representing Mohamed Al Fayed, asked: "What was the secret?" Burrell replied: "If I wanted anyone to know . . . I would have printed it in my book." Then he said he had forgotten what it was.
Under cross-examination, Burrell grew flustered. It transpired that notes he had referred to as "his journal", which included apparently verbatim quotes from the duke's letters, were written on scraps of paper, handed to his ghostwriter and then destroyed, although personal letters remain at his home in Cheshire. The coroner, Lord Scott Baker, sent him off to fetch them overnight - "hotfoot", he said, entering into the true Mills and Boon spirit.