Trivial palace pursuits

The best bits in this book are those that could only have been written by the butler, and which are, on one level, completely trivial. The Queen Mother makes her first visit to Highgrove. A special five o'clock tea, a repast of which the Prince of Wales never normally partook, was prepared - smoked salmon, ham and cucumber sandwiches were cut into squares with the crusts removed, and there were also "jam pennies", a circular sandwich popular in the royal nursery. Queen Elizabeth did not eat any of them, confiding, when offered a smoked-salmon sandwich: "No thank you, Paul. Do you know, these are my least favourite." When the old lady left, a ritual was performed which was obviously always observed when she parted from Prince Charles: she waved her cream chiffon headscarf out of the car window, and he waved his breast handkerchief, almost in tears.

Or again, we are at Balmoral. The servants are specifically forbidden to watch the television set in the castle drawing room, but since the Royals are all out having a picnic supper in their log cabin, the servants, of course, disobey this. When the party returns, Princess Margaret goes up to the set, feels its warmth and exclaims indignantly: "Lilibet, someone has been watching TV."

Princess Margaret, whose "temper was as sharp as her wit", thinks nothing of upbraiding servants. Prince Philip, who is polite to housemaids, reserves his naval explosions of wrath for his male underlings. The Queen, by contrast, never complains, and comes out as much the strongest and most interesting figure in this story. Long after some of the more "sensational" episodes in the story have been forgotten, one will remember her solitude, toying with solitary suppers too unpleasant to eat, watching Morecambe and Wise or Torvill and Dean. When Paul Burrell leaves her service as a footman, he wonders how she will say goodbye to him as, for the last time, he tucks her up in the back of a car with the lady-in-waiting, Lady Susan Hussey. The answer is, she doesn't. "Paul," explains Lady Susan, "she just couldn't look at you. It wasn't easy for the Queen either."

The shocking stuff comes in the second half of the book when Burrell becomes the butler at Highgrove. Here are the sensational quotations from private letters sent by the Duke of Edinburgh to Princess Diana, saying that no one in their right mind would leave her for Camilla Parker Bowles. Here are the hysterical rows, the slurred and insulting calls from Mrs Shand Kydd, the offer of refuge at Althorp given by Lord Spencer and then withdrawn. Here, too, is a too long account of the events leading up to Burrell's trial at the Old Bailey, and his acquittal, on charges of stealing.

The cool way in which Burrell quotes from private correspondence which is evidently neither his property nor meant for his eyes is breathtakingly cheeky. "1995 was the year the princess trusted me to handle her correspondence," he writes, adding: "My eyes became used to witnessing important correspondence from the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prime Minister John Major, Elton John and numerous other people."

We have to take Mr Burrell's word for this strange claim, since Diana isn't here to confirm it. She did have a secretary - was he polishing the silver and serving the meals while the butler did the letters?

The book is not improved by the somewhat menacing suggestions about items such as the "rape tape", detailing an incident in which a royal servant suffered a homosexual assault, and the strange stuff about Diana foretelling the manner of her end. One sees why the publishers wanted this material to go in, but, oddly enough, it does not add very much. We had all formed our impressions, both from the public demeanour of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and from The Housekeeper's Diary by Wendy Berry, of the stormy atmosphere at Highgrove and Kensington Palace. All very unlike the home life of our own dear Queen. What I cannot understand is why anyone should suppose that this book will damage the monarchy. Like that other work of a disloyal servant, The Little Princesses, by Marion Crawford, this book is sycophantic and sugary in its praise of the monarch, and of the institution of monarchy. It confirms, with written evidence, that Diana was herself a convinced monarchist who much preferred her parents-in-law to her own "blood family". "I just long to hug my mother-in-law and tell her how deeply I understand what goes on inside her," she wrote. This was an odd claim. We finish the book rather bored by some of its noisier characters, including the author, but absolutely baffled, as always, by what is going on inside the Queen.