LOYALTY in the world of politics is an elastic quality and Britain=s Conservative leader Ian Duncan Smith was yesterday the latest party leader to put it to the test. As senior ministers have publicly professed their loyalty to their former leader they have been busy jostling for position in the next round. Others are getting ready to profess their loyalty to whoever is next in line.
Politicians and parties demand loyalty, and rightly so B the elastic bit comes when it=s stretched too far and factors such as the next election and poor opinion poll ratings out it under great strain. Then preserving both the party and oneself in order to keep or win power become paramount. The most famous example of how loyalty can and must be sacrificed on the political altar came when the men in grey suits, realising that Margaret Thatcher had become an electoral liability, led her away to pasture. Everybody declared their loyalty to John Major and he went on to win the general election.
That is the nature of the game. But the word >loyalty= is currently taking on a whole new meaning in Britain as former royal butler Paul Burrell does the rounds of chat shows to promote his book on the late Princess of Wales. On TV, he puts himself across as a charming, misunderstood man whose only motivation in writing the book was Ato put the record straight@ and pay tribute to Diana. He describes himself as completely loyal to her memory B and to the royal family B but proceeds to reveal her most intimate secrets.
What sort of loyalty is it that encouraged him to collect Diana=s possessions and letters, to become material for his book? What value did he place on being Diana=s confidant, her Arock@, only to use the privilege which that role accorded him for his own ends? He reveals that Diana had nine secret boyfriends whom she graded B yet he describes the book as >a loving tribute=.
If Burrell cannot see that his actions cannot be construed as loyalty, he also misunderstands the word Arevenge@. In one breath he declares that the book is not about revenge, although he was highly miffed over the failed court case alleging that he stole items from Diana=s estate and that no one tried to halt the proceedings until the Queen=s late intervention or phoned him after the trial collapsed. One call would have been enough to stop the book, he said. That remark makes a mockery of all his arguments about the book having to be published because of the public interest and is just one of the contradictions that have littered his interviews.
If the former butler sees himself as the guardian of Diana=s memory, he does himself little credit for not previously revealing that she wrote to him ten months before she died, predicting almost exactly the circumstances of her demise. While this does not prove that she was murdered, the letter ought to have been made available to the French authorities at the time of the investigation, and Burrell=s claim that he was keeping it for a British inquest is lame, to say the least.
One motivation for the book, of course, was money B Burrell is not the first of Diana=s >trusties= to cash in on her life and he may not be the last. There is no way these days that the lid can be kept on royal goings-on B indeed, some of the disclosures are in the public interest B but what is so nauseating about his opening this particular jar of worms is the way he insists that his motives have always been and are entirely honourable B a hypocritical stance if ever there was one.
