LONDON, Nov 1: Princess Diana’s butler Paul Burrell was acquitted on Friday of stealing her belongings after revelations from Queen Elizabeth undermined the prosecution’s case.

Burrell, whom Diana once called “my rock”, sobbed with relief as Justice Ann Rafferty ruled he was not guilty on all three theft charges.

“I’m thrilled, so thrilled,” he told reporters after the case collapsed. “The Queen has come through for me.”

Prosecution lawyer William Boyce said the Queen, Diana’s mother-in-law, remembered she had had a conversation with Burrell, in which he told her he was keeping some of Diana’s belongings for safekeeping.

“In all the circumstances, the prosecution has concluded that the current trial is no longer viable because it has proceeded on a false premise that Mr Burrell had never told anyone that he was holding anything for safekeeping,” Boyce told the court.

The prosecution decided “there would no longer be a realistic prospect of conviction in this case”, he said as the trial ended abruptly.

A Buckingham Palace spokeswoman said: “The decision to drop the case against Mr Burrell was entirely a decision for the prosecution.... The queen was not briefed on either Mr Burrell’s defence case or on the prosecution case against him.”

But Harold Brooks-Baker, publisher of Burke’s Peerage, the bible of Britain’s aristocracy, said the collapse of the trial had prevented a constitutional crisis.

“The fact that the Queen made a statement and the prosecution was dropped indicate that a constitutional crisis has had to be averted,” he said in a statement.

Burrell had denied stealing more than 300 of the princess’s personal items after her death in a 1997 car crash in Paris.

Burrell stood silently outside the court as his defence lawyer Andrew Shaw accused the police of bungling the case.

Shaw said Burrell had told the police of “a private audience granted to him by the Queen. It is surprising that no enquiries were made of the Queen in relation to that meeting. “It is to his utmost credit, and typical of the man, that it was only this week that he instructed his lawyers as to the full terms of the conversation. Those terms were confirmed by the Queen this morning,” Shaw said.—Reuters