LONDON, Oct 27: Princess Diana’s former butler ignored an unprecedented plea from Britain’s two young princes and went ahead on Monday with publication of an intimate book about their dead mother.
As stores began selling “A Royal Duty”, the butler-turned-author Paul Burrell welcomed a request to meet Princes William and Harry, vowing to give them “a piece of my mind”.
With an initial 95,000 copies on sale in Britain and 700,000 in the United States, the book’s most sensational revelation is that Diana predicted her own death in a car crash just 10 months before she died in a Paris road tunnel in 1997.
It is also packed with personal letters and details around the famous infidelities of Diana and ex-husband Prince Charles, Britain’s heir to the throne, before their break-up.
“We cannot believe Paul, who was entrusted with so much, could abuse his position in such a cold and overt betrayal,” the angry princes said at the weekend. They urged him to halt the revelations and meet them.
Burrell responded positively, but said he too was hurt — by the boys’ failure to contact him when he was on trial a year ago for theft of Diana’s goods. The trial collapsed, unleashing a tide of embarrassing revelations for the House of Windsor.
“They offered to see me and I said ‘yes please’. I am very happy to sit in front of them and explain the process of writing this book and why I did it,” Burrell told BBC radio.—Reuters
