Serving-up Diana's secrets

"No, I don't think that," says Burrell. "It's insane. But it wasn't insane for the princess to think that. She felt she was being watched all the time. I am sure the new inquest [by Royal Coroner Michael Burgess] into her death will unearth the truth." But, yet again, what does Burrell think the truth is? "I'm not saying," he says, coming over all prim and proper. "I never have and I never will."

Why not? He has been so outspoken on everything else. Why stop now? "I'll never tell about the princess's personal relationships," he says. "What happened in her boudoir was between herself and whoever else was involved."

But surely he has to keep finding new things to peddle? In a new chapter for the paperback release, he concentrates on why he thinks he is being monitored by "dark forces".

"MI5," he says, looking nervously around him. How he nearly drank himself to death - "one bottle of scotch a day" - and how he is furious about the public campaign to make Camilla acceptable to the public.

He, naturally, hates Charles and Camilla. "Charles never loved Diana," he says. "He told her that when they were arguing one time, and she told me. I don't think he's capable of love. Charles never took responsibility for their marriage. He had choices. He didn't have to marry her. He was fond of Diana but that was it."

Burrell also can't bear the Spencer family. "Terrible, selfish people," he says. "Lady Sarah McCorquodale [Diana's sister] only came to see her when Diana was chucking out her old clothes. And Charlie Althorp [the current Lord Spencer and Diana's brother] refused to let her stay on the family estate and demanded a tiara back that he'd lent her. What was he going to do? Wear it round the house?"

Burrell is also angry about how Diana's name and body were appropriated by the Spencer family after her death. "Why did they take her body and bury her on that lonely island where no one can go and grieve for her? I think it's unfair to leave her there all on her own."

Burrell, now 46, obviously still adores Diana. He calls her The Boss. He can talk about her for hours; how close they were, how their children played together, how he devoted his life to her, how his wife, Maria, whom he has been married to for 20 years and has two teenage sons with, found it all rather difficult.

"Maria loved the princess," says Burrell. "She did so much for us, she got our sons into the best schools in London. But I was very selfish with my family whereas I was selfless with Diana. I'd leave her at about midnight and she'd call up most nights and say, 'Oh, Paul, I've forgotten this' and I'd go back. I think it made her feel wanted."

Sometimes, he talks about her in the present tense, as in "Diana always makes people happy". He loves her so much, he says, that he cannot see why anyone should mind about his book. "It's a book of love," he says. "Okay, I always said I'd never write a book and then I did, but I always said I'd never give away her secrets and I still haven't done that and I won't."

Maybe it's the cashing-in part that upsets people most. Burrell admits that he's made a lot of money, perhaps £2 million, from the book, and that is partly why he wrote it.

"After Diana died," he says, "I had no job, no money and nowhere to live. We moved back to Farndon in Cheshire to be near my wife's family and started running a small flower shop.

Then, after Scotland Yard raided my home and I was taken to court charged with stealing Diana's possessions, I became suicidal. I had the police, the media, the royal family and the Spencers all after me. The pressure was unbearable. Maria and I had nothing. We were going to lose the house. Wouldn't you do something to make money so that your children could have a decent life?"

But it seems terribly disloyal to proclaim you love someone and sell them out. "But I'm the person who isn't selling her out!" he says. "The only person who doesn't come out well is Charles and, let's face it, I nailed my colours to Diana's mast years ago."

What about her sons, William and Harry, who have continually condemned him for his actions? "I'll meet them any time to explain," he says. "I was very close to them but they have been influenced by other people.

I'm not going to the opening of the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain because I know the princes will be there and if I turn up it will be a media circus. I am respecting their best interests but now I've been damned for not going. I can't win."

But maybe the key to all this is not just his obsessive and possessive love for his former mistress, but also his smarting at his fall from grace. After Diana's death, after he'd flown unasked to France to dress her poor battered body, he took on the mantle of the keeper of Diana's flame.

In that capacity, he was offered a job as part of the Princess Diana Memorial Fund. But then he flew to Hollywood for a fund-raising dinner and started giving speeches about "his Diana, her real story".

"That was my mistake," he says. "I got too popular. I would have been happy just to lick envelopes to be part of something, but once people started recognising me and asking me to speak, I was done for. Lady Sarah saw it and didn't like it. I mean, I was merely a butler! What did I think I was doing? I was officially made redundant but really I was ousted in a most cruel fashion."

Then, of course, there was the aforementioned trial, where he was charged with stealing 370 items of the late Princess's personal belongings, and its spectacular breakdown when the Queen suddenly remembered Burrell had told her he was keeping some of Diana's stuff for safety and that she had agreed.

"I never wanted to be asked, on oath, personal things about the Queen and Prince Charles so, yes, I was relieved when it all ended." He is not totally left out in the cold, though. He says a high-up member of the royal family keeps in touch and sends him messages of support.

However, at the time, no one from the royal household contacted him. Is that when he turned on them? After all, he likes to portray himself as the loyal servant. He claims most of the book is not really about Diana or himself at all, but about a world in which etiquette is everything.

"The staff have to walk down the edge of corridors," he says. "Only the royals are allowed to walk in the middle." This, he tells me, is because the maids spend most of their time brushing the carpets with wire brushes to get the pile to stand to attention. "If a servant walked down the carpet, it would leave footprints and that would be most presumptuous."

I imagine, I say, that he loved being a royal servant. After being brought up in Chesterfield the son of a lorry driver, he left school at 16 armed with six O-levels and spent 11 years as the Queen's footman and 10 as Diana's butler. He was probably the perfect servant, revelling in all the gossip and goings on. "I do like to serve," he says, pouring out a perfect cup of tea for me.

It seems, though, that Burrell has got the usual lines that delineate all our lives somewhat blurred. He obviously needs to be needed and no one needed him more than Princess Diana. Now he wants the public to need him. He has even just done a one-off show at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, all about his relationship with Diana. But surely, at some point, it has to stop.

In many ways, I am sure he is only preaching to those committed Diana worshippers and no more than that. The hardback sold more than a million. The paperback is predicted to sell half of that. Yes, there were 32 people queuing at the book shop in Leicester but, by his own admission, Burrell says there was hardly anyone waiting for him at Milton Keynes.

"Why should I stop?" he says angrily. "Other authors keep on writing the same old things about her. Look at Andrew Morton. Diana didn't even meet him but here he is with his third book out just repeating stuff that I have already covered! What has he revealed that is new? That she was going to move abroad? That was in my book. That she feared she was being bugged? Ditto! How can he outdo me?"

No one, of course, can outdo him. He spent 10 years devoted to this woman. "She kept everyone in boxes," he tells me. "Her friends were kept separately and she'd tell one lot one thing and one lot another. I was the only person who knew everything."

Ah, but did he? She was, in his own words, a famously complicated woman. Maybe there's stuff that even he didn't know. "Never!" he says. "I won't have that. I still weep for her. She was my best friend. Diana haunts the royal family and while there is breath left in me, I shall make sure she carries on doing so."

But doesn't he want to move on? "Diana was my life," he says quietly. And I have a feeling that he likes it just like that.

A Royal Duty by Paul Burrell is published by Penguin, £6.99