As he prepares for prostate cancer surgery, Paul Burrell is haunted by the memory of private moments he shared with Princess Diana when she confided in him some of her deepest secrets.
And now the man Diana referred to as her “rock” is terrified that he may take those secrets to his grave, never getting the chance to tell the late princess’s sons William and Harry what he knows about their mother.
He said: “I know some of it isn’t pretty, but if I leave this place and go somewhere else they’ll never know.
“I think they should know.”
In an interview with the Mirror at his home in Cheshire, the former royal servant said: “My illness has focused my attention on telling the boys things before it’s too late – telling them what they really should know.
“I think Diana would say to me, ‘Paul, you must make this a priority. You must go and see my boys’.”
He revealed last month that he had prostate cancer and said his diagnosis had left him fearing he will run out of time to “tell them the truth”.
Paul, 64, who was Diana’s butler for 10 years up until her death in 1997, said: “I spent many hours with Diana, during her happiest times as well as her darkest times.
“She confided in me and there are many things I have never spoken about, but now I feel the time is right.
“I think what I have to say could bring the boys back together, which Diana would have desperately wanted. I will only tell them the truth, that is all. I am not looking for anything in return.”
The princes have become increasingly estranged since Harry moved to the US with wife Meghan in 2020.
Paul said he would like to “try and do my bit” to see them reconciled. He said: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see the boys repair their relationship and to be back where they should be back. The public would love that. I’d applaud that.
“I’d love to see William put his arm around his brother, but I don’t think we’re going to see that because there are too many obstacles in the way.”
But he said his dearest wish was to have the chance to sit down with William and “fill in the gaps of those years that are missing in his mind”.
Paul said: “While he was away at school, he could ask me any question, and I will be able to answer. I want just to say the truth. Some of the truth may be difficult, but if he doesn’t know, he’s not informed.
“I’d like to tell them the truth.
“There are things that happened in their mother’s world, which they may not have knowledge of. And I think it just might fill in some blanks.”
In the past, Paul has described himself as Diana’s “best friend” and claimed she said he was “the only man she ever trusted”. The trust she placed in him led him to protect her secrets, but now he wants to share what he knows with her sons, hoping it will bring them closer together.
He said: “If we ever sat down, I would say to William, ‘This is within these walls and will never come out’.”
In his biography Spare, Harry dismisses Paul as “mummy’s butler”.
Paul said: “He has discarded me, but he hasn’t thought about all of those years that I spent with his mother, in private, loving her, caring for her, watching out for her. I’ve been dismissed and I’m sad about that.”
As we discussed the brothers’ bitter rift, Paul said: “You look at Harry and William as an 11-year-old and 14-year-old walking behind their mother’s coffin, the nation saw that, the nation witnessed that, and our hearts broke for those two boys.
“That path should have been the same path from then on. That’s what Diana would have wanted. For the two boys to be stuck side by side for the rest of their lives.
“Her death should have glued them together forever, but it didn’t.”
Paul had two sons Alexander and Nicholas with his wife Maria Cosgrove before he came out as gay and they divorced. In 2017, he married Graham Cooper, who he now lives with in the village of Tarporley in Cheshire.
Sitting beside a painting showing the Queen on a Zoom call during the first Covid lockdown, Paul flicks through scrapbooks from his 21 years serving the royals, first as a footman for Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace and then as Diana’s butler at Highgrove and Kensington Palace.
Pausing at photos of his sons and Harry and William as children playing in the gardens of Highgrove and another showing then seven-year-old Alexander with Prince Charles at Christmas, Paul broke down.
Weeping, he said: “I love Christmas, and wrapping Christmas presents and giving is part of who I am. Wrapping them last year, I was in floods of tears, thinking, ‘Will I do this again?’
“And I hope I will be. But none of us know, do we? We don’t know.” A routine medical last summer showed an unusual prostate-specific antigen (PSA) reading in his blood.
An MRI showed he had prostate cancer. His treatment has included HRT and he will have surgery this month before radiation known as brachytherapy. While looking forward to celebrating his fifth wedding anniversary in April with husband “Coop”, Paul admits his illness and heartache over the Queen’s death has taken a “tremendous toll”.
He said: “The Queen’s death did affect me. I went to Buckingham Palace when I was 18 years old and the Queen became my surrogate mother.
“The Queen was the beating heart of our country.
“She’d been there for all of us all her life and it was inconceivable to think that she wouldn’t be there. A chapter closed when she died and a new era began. Charles will take pages from his mother’s book, but it can never be the same.”
As he prepares for the next stage of his cancer treatment, Paul said he wanted to warn men over 50 to go for a check-up, which could save their life.
He said: “I must be one of millions of men who have never heard of PSA. So, now that you do, listen to what I say – your loved ones would want you to take a blood test. You owe it to them to live longer and be there for them.”
- Paul Burrell did not receive payment for this interview.
