there was an interesting artical in one of the sundays, written by one of Diana’s close friends, Rosa Monkton. She suggests that the taking of the articles was his reaction to the actions of Diana’s mother and sister (who were executors of her will) who were destroying papers and suppressing letters detailing how personal effects were to be distributed to friends/godchildren (the will did not detail these but did say that any bequests detailed in letters or notes should be distributed within two years of her death) the implication was that the Spencers were keen to get their hands on everything of value and suppress anything embarrassing to them.
She suggest Burrell was devestated by Diana’s death - in many ways he was closer to her than anyone, and certainly knew more of her secrets, feelings etc. It would seem he removed the items to stop the Spencers scavenging them (particularly since she was not on the best of terms with most of them before her death). Perhaps he has not yet really come to terms with her death and didn’t want to deal with sorting through the items before returning them to their rightful owners?
Presumably he could keep them until their rightful owners asked for them back. That of course begs the question who owns what.
Andy You are right, of course. I didn’t really mean that, though. I should probably have said that he may still be guilty - and it would make sense to continue the trial.
I see your point APB however I’m still not buying it.
Either Burrell sold some items or he didn’t. If he didn’t sell any items then he would (obviously) know that and he would have told his solicitors that. His solicitors would therefore know that the prosecution weren’t going to be able to come up with any evidence of sale. They would therefore have to assume that the prosecution were going to build the bulk of their case around the dishonesty issue.
Since they would know that the dishonesty issue was going to be the focus of the trial (since their client had told them that he didn’t sell any items) then they would have looked for ways to prove his honesty. The conversation with the Queen would seem to be mighty important in this regard and his lawyers would have grilled him on it.
If, on the other hand, he did sell some items then the prosecution case would still stand regardless of the conversation with the Queen and there was no need for the trial to collapse.
I don’t doubt that a conversation took place between Burrell and the Queen. The question is what did they talk about in that conversation. Were there any witnesses, I wonder.
Seems to me the whole trial hung on the fact that Burrell was allegedly taking items without anyone knowing. If the Queen in fact knew he was taking items then that would have been the very first thing he would have said when taken into police custody:
“But the Queen knew I was taking things because we had a 3 hour conversation during which I told her”
There’s a difference. Burrell is now in control of what the tabloids find out because he’s the one telling the tale - he won’t say anything damaging about the Queen or the royal family (especially since she just helped him out).
In court, however, it would have been a different ball game entirely. Burrell and the other witnesses would not have control over what comes out, they would just have to answer truthfully whatever questions were put to them by the lawyers (whether the answers were damaging or not).
One of the features about the case which seems to have passed by largely unremarked is that the defence lawyers, no less than the prosecution, overlooked the significance of the fact that Burrell had already mentioned his meeting with the Queen. They were as surprised as everyone else when it was finally pointed out. That was perhaps, in the circumstances, an easy mistake for them to make - Burrell had never mentioned it to them (because of his butler’s sense of discretion or because he’s a bit thick?) and his comment to the police was one detail in a mound of paperwork. Even top lawyers can miss such things. As you say, they were presumably going to rest the defence on the honesty/dishonesty issue, but, unaware of the killer fact, they were going to do so by producing a string of glossy character witness. Given the unimpressive performance by the prosecution, that would probably have done the trick.
Sure, it’s to Burrell’s advantage to make his revelations in the papers rather than in court. However, he wasn’t the person who stopped the trial. The real question is whether it was to the Queen’s advantage to do so and did she think about it in those terms. Consider it from her point of view. There was no certainty that Burrell would now wish to return the favour. He could equally well have been indignant that she hadn’t intervened earlier. Moreover, unlike in court, public interest immunity certificates can’t be used to get newspapers to skirt round anything vaguely embarassing. (In tactical terms, any legal action against the Mirror is unthinkable. Not even the Spencers will dare to sue.) At best, the Queen is now at the mercy of what Burrell believes to be her best interests, a thought which probably doesn’t give her much reassurance.
This is the bit I don’t get. The Queen is the ex-mother-in-law of his deceased employer. If I take a car from my dead boss, and tell his ex’s mother, how does that put the information into the public domain? Why should the fact that it’s the Queen make it any different from the car-taking scenario?
A better parallel would be if you take a car from your dead boss and then tell his ex’s mother that you’re only borrowing it. This would make it easier for your defence to argue that you had indeed only been borrowing it and that everything was just an innocent misunderstanding. OK, so it’s not a perfect defence but it might be the truth and it might convince the jury. It might also, if you were nevertheless convicted, make a difference to the sentence you received, as it could be argued that you were guilty of theft but that your motives were not dishonest.
Of course, if you had not later returned the car, that conversation could instead be used by the prosecution against you. Moreover, if you had also gone on to sell the car, it wouldn’t matter much what you thought you were doing at the time you took it.
The only way in which the fact that the third party was the Queen made any difference was that, in your case, the ex’s mother could be called as a witness to be questioned about the contents and context of the conversation. The jury could not be expected just to take your word for it. This is the one respect in which the Burrell case did raise issues about the Queen’s legal status. There seems little doubt that one of the reasons why the prosecution decided to drop the case was that it would almost certainly have become bogged down over this very arcane issue that no one had foreseen and which no one much wanted to pursue. Both sides wanted the case to be about the guilt or innocence of Paul Burrell, not about what to do if the Queen is a key witness in a court case. It was therefore easier for the prosecution to cut their losses.
I would like to believe you, APB, really I would. I would like to believe you because I actually believe Burrell’s story, I think he really was just protecting the items and ultimately intended to give them back.
However just when I start to believe you my cynical side rears up and says “hold on a minute”.
You’re saying that Burrell never mentioned the meeting with the Queen to his lawyers and that’s why they didn’t know about it? If you are a solicitor and you have a client accused of theft, one of the first things you do is you ask the police a huge long list of questions about what your client has said and what evidence they have etc.
The police are obliged to tell you everything (ok sometimes they try to hold things back but they aren’t supposed to). If Burrell were my client I would have been asking him “Did you tell anyone, anyone at all. about these items you took?”.
I would have explained to him very clearly why he needed to tell me and what the consequences would be if he didn’t tell me. But as well as that, I would have searched through the documentation I had received from the police looking for any evidence that he had told somebody else. In fact I would have probably written to all the relevant parties involved - Diana’s relatives, the Queen, Palace staff, anyone I could think of asking whether they knew that he was taking things.
I would have done all this because I specifically knew that the prosecution were going to bring the case based on the dishonesty aspect.
Maybe you’re right and it was just a matter of Burrell having shit lawyers (never mind shit, downright negligent more like) but the fact is Burrells lawyers wouldn’t have been the only lawyers looking at this.
The Queen’s lawyers (Farrer & Co.) will also have been following the trial very closely and they will have been in correspondence with the Queen asking her for details. Farrers are an extremely highly-regarded law firm with exceedingly good lawyers, some of the best in fact.
So you’re saying that not only did Burrells lawyers and the prosecution lawyers miss this but the CPS missed it and the Queen’s lawyers missed it!
Jesus, these lawyers are rubbish. I think I should go back into law, I can’t be any worse than these clowns.
APB, you said the above in reply to jjimm. I agree with your reply generally but just a minor nitpick:
You said " it could be argued that you were guilty of theft but that your motives were not dishonest." Not sure how you could argue this - dishonesty is an integral part of the offence of theft, without dishonesty it’s not theft (see my quote from the Theft Act above).
In answer to jjimm’s question I would say:
The fact it was the Queen is irrelevant to the theft charge (apart from the constitutional problems raised by calling the Queen as a witness as APB mentioned).
The fact that Burrell told a member of the deceased’s family that he was taking things mitigates against dishonesty, the fact it was the Queen he told is just incidental. It would be the same in any case of someone allegedly stealing from a deceased’s estate.
With theft, the question you ask yourself is always the same:
Did he dishonestly appropriate property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving?