“All in all, you may think Burrell’s behaviour has been pretty shabby,” Lord Justice Scott Baker told the jury at the conclusion of the official inquiry into the death of Diana and her lover Dodi al-Fayed in a Paris car crash in 1997.
Burrell, who called himself “Diana’s Rock”, faced a three-day grilling from lawyers when he appeared at the inquest in January to be repeatedly asked how much he really knew about secrets he was supposed to have held for the princess.
Princess Diana’s trusted butler Paul Burrell did not tell the truth at the inquest into her death, the presiding judge told the jury on Tuesday.
In February, Scott Baker asked Burrell to return to court to explain discrepancies between his evidence and comments attributed to him in a tabloid newspaper but he refused.
“It was blindingly obvious wasn’t it, that the evidence that he gave in this courtroom was not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” Scott Baker said on Tuesday.
In a scathing reference to Burrell’s emotionally charged testimony, he told the jury: “I advise you to proceed with caution especially when and if you are left with the impression that he only told you what he wanted you to hear.”
The coroner was summing up to the jury after they had heard more than 250 witnesses over the past six months in an inquest that has attracted worldwide media attention.
On the opening day of his presentation to the jury, the judge on Monday dismissed conspiracy theories of Mohamed al-Fayed, father of Dodi.
