Paul Burrell, who worked for then-Prince Charles and Princess Diana for a decade, is sharing a bizarre memory from his time in royal service. In his new book, The Royal Insider: My Life with the Queen, the King and Princess Diana, the former butler recalls the moment he found Charles on the floor in a silk dressing gown covered in salad dressing.
Burrell, 67, told The Mirror that the incident occurred during Charles’ marriage to Diana, which lasted from 1981 until their 1996 divorce. “He tried to make an excuse and say, ‘Well, I’m terribly sorry. I seem to have caught my sleeve on the card table and up it went.’”
“Of course, I knew that wasn’t the real truth,” Burrell explained. “That was his way of saying, ‘I’m so embarrassed about what’s happening and what’s happened to this, this beautiful dinner, which you’ve set out for me. I don’t know any other way to explain it.’”
According to Burrell, the reality was that Charles and Diana had been fighting, and Diana had upended the card table before storming upstairs.
“The true story is that they had an almighty row,” he explained. “The rows happened on most weekends they were together—plate-smashing arguments, storming out of rooms, both by both the Prince and the Princess.”
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Burrell, who first joined the royal household in 1987 as a butler at Highgrove House before moving to Kensington Palace, served Lady Di until she died in a Paris car crash in August 1997.
He also claimed Charles and Diana were “bouncing off each other in a very negative way” by the time he came into their lives, adding, “They both knew the marriage was over but were trying desperately to hold it together.”
Still, Burrell emphasized that despite the explosive arguments, no physical violence ever took place. “Nobody was ever hurt,” he said. “But Diana was so frustrated by Charles’ manner and the fact that he was seeing Camilla Parker Bowles, our future queen, and that she just could not get through to him.”