Daily Mail, November 11 2002

This is all now getting completely out of hand.

When Paul Burrell was accused of stealing the possessions of Diana, Princess of Wales, it seemed odd but not earth-shattering. When his trial was abruptly halted following the Queen’s sensational intervention, the implications still seemed to be limited to a distinctly peculiar episode.

But now, the affair has taken on a life of its own. It threatens to do serious damage to the monarchy, engulfing the Royal Family in a tidal wave of sordid and lurid allegations.

Last week was bad enough, when the Queen and the Prince of Wales were accused of halting the Burrell trial in order to prevent him from making damaging revelations from the witness box. But now, after claims made in yesterday’s papers, the Prince of Wales stands accused of effectively perverting the course of justice to protect a favourite courtier from allegations of homosexual rape – with the Prince’s ex-wife haunting him from beyond the grave with a smoking tape-recording.

The claim has been made by the alleged victim, George Smith, who worked for the Prince of Wales as a valet after being badly traumatised by serving in the Falklands war. Mr Smith claims he was brutally assaulted in the courtier’s home after getting drunk and falling asleep on a sofa. While unconscious, he claims, he was raped, a fact he discovered only when he woke up. The same courtier, he says, made another attempt to assault him six years later on a Royal tour of Egypt.

He told this story to the Princess who, he says, first surreptitiously and then openly made a tape-recording of his account. This is the tape that allegedly went missing from a box of the Princess’s most sensitive possessions which her sister gave to Mr Burrell. It is this tape, we are led to believe, whose explosive contents the Royal Family was so determined to prevent Mr Burrell from airing in court.

Mr Smith claims that the Prince of Wales covered up his allegation at the time. But St James’s Palace, which says it conducted an inquiry, maintains that Mr Smith refused to discuss it. He says now he was never asked to do so. But why then didn’t he ever come forward of his own accord?

By his own admission, he didn’t even tell his psychiatrists what had happened because he felt too ‘dirty’. But surely a heterosexual man who is brutally assaulted in this way would tell someone, if only his doctors?

And is it really likely that he would have known nothing about it until he later woke up? Wouldn’t such a violent assault that left him injured have roused him from his drunken stupor?

The fact is that by his own admission, Mr Smith is deeply unstable. He has been convicted three times of drink-driving and once of being drunk and disorderly, and has had several spells of psychiatric treatment. The police investigated his claim but the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was no evidence to support a case, which was hardly surprising given his unreliability as a witness.

It is possible that he was indeed raped as he says. But it is also possible that the Prince of Wales, whose loyalty to devoted servants reaches epic proportions, was not trying to cover anything up but was doggedly determined to defend the reputation of a man he believed to be innocent – whether or not that belief was well-founded.

Mr Smith, though, has gone even further. He has made another, far more explosive claim about behaviour he witnessed between a courtier and an unnamed royal. He says he told this to the Princess of Wales, and this is included on the missing tape.

But why should we believe him on this, as on anything else? And if the Princess of Wales had believed him, wouldn’t that tortured and scheming soul have made sure this seeped out into the public domain?

The Burrell fiasco seems to have opened the floodgates for disloyal Royal servants to fling mud which is sticking, even though some of their claims sound too silly for words. Mr Burrell, for example, has said the Queen told him: ‘There are powers at work in this country of which we have no knowledge’. But can anyone imagine the Queen, of all people, saying something which makes her sound like Mohamed Fayed having a bad hair day?

Beneath this orgy of mud-flinging, there is a fetid swamp of rival agendas. Poisonous factions are pitted against each other both within and between the Royal palaces.

There are those still determined to avenge the martyred Diana and bring down the Prince of Wales. There is the Spencer family, hating and hated. There are the police, trying to shift the blame from themselves for the débâcle of the Burrell prosecution.

All of these people are briefing against each other to the media. It is a truly lamentable state of affairs, and one that threatens to bring all the institutions involved, including the monarchy, into disrepute.

So who is to be believed? All one can do is apply some common sense. Is Mr Smith a reliable witness? No. Is Mr Burrell, the man who has now sold his Royal secrets, to be trusted? No. Is it likely that the Queen is so inept a conspirator that she would have left the suppression of Mr Burrell’s trial to the very last minute, thus provoking the paroxysm of conspiracy theories now swirling round her throne? No.

Yet the mud is sticking because people have become deeply, shockingly credulous. They believed the Princess of Wales’s carefully manipulated version of the breakdown of her marriage. Yet she was a deeply unstable character who -- we now learn -- went round taping conversations; and who despite Mr Smith’s serious alcohol problem, plied him with champagne at Kensington Palace as she mused with him over victimhood into the early hours.

Following the mistakes made after her death, the Royal Family and in particular the Prince of Wales did much to restore the monarchy to high public esteem.

But now, every hanger-on who has a grievance or is after fame or fortune may feel emboldened to poison the Royal well with either secrets or lies. However questionable or disloyal each revelation may be, public approval of the Royal Family is taking a dive. And the republicans, scenting blood, are sharpening their axes and preparing to strike.

This crisis is not something that can be stitched up between courtiers behind closed doors. However preposterous they may think the allegations to be, these claims must be addressed openly and transparently. Concerns about further embarrassment should be set aside. The Queen and the Prince of Wales should tell us exactly what has been going on. If they took the public into their confidence in this way, they would be believed.

This is a moment of great danger for the monarchy. If the mud is swept under the Royal carpet, all the patient work of recent years will be quite undone – and public approval, on which the monarchy depends, will float away faster than one of the Prince of Wales’s feathers.

Posted by admin at November 11, 2002