Hacked off: The press and the Burrell trial

When the Burrell trial collapsed, the media turned on the Crown and the police. John Walsh, who was in the press gallery, thinks he knows why

It would be wrong to treat the due process of law as a form of entertainment, but that was how it somehow seemed during the Burrell trial. The combination of behind-the-scenes royal gossip, butler's-pantry secrets and the prospect of seeing several querulous aristocrats in the dock was irresistible. No wonder the New York-based Vanity Fair magazine sent its most distinguished reporter, Dominick Dunne, to cover the trial. By the second week, all the seats in the press gallery were full. Nicholas Witchell, the BBC's Royal correspondent had been there from day one. Picture-desk cameramen were on red alert as rumours grew that Princess Diana's snow-haired dragon-mother Mrs Shand Kydd would soon be called to testify.

There was much to amuse or amaze in Court No 1. You could not sit for long without finding something oddly tragic about the back of Paul Burrell's head. He looked heartbreakingly solitary and abandoned, a lonesome figure in his immaculate grey suit, his lilac shirts, his short-back-and-sides. Occasionally he would glance round at the assembled hacks, as if searching their faces for sympathy. The judge, Mrs Justice Rafferty, was pert, occasionally correcting the grammar or vocabulary of the prosecuting counsel with a benign smile. Sharp-nosed and precise of movement, she reminded me of a woodland creature with a potentially nasty nip. The prosecution and defence counsels were marvellously Rumpolesque figures. They weren't averse to a few displays of who-the-devil-are-the Beatles cultural superiority. When grilling DCI de Brunner about the search of Burrell's property, Lord Carlile for the defence asked her: "Have you seen the television programme Through the Keyhole?". "No," said Ms de Brunner. "No, nor have I," said Lord Carlile hurriedly, lest anyone imagine he stayed up nights listening to Loyd Grossman's strangled vowels. "I have," said Mrs Justice Rafferty, putting them all in their place.

The testimony of the Princess's mother and sisters was riveting, for the strange behaviour that the Spencer family seemed to think was normal. Like using a shredding machine to get rid of your dead daughter's (apparently innocuous) letters and photographs. Or thinking that, when things have got so bad that your children send back your letters unopened, that counts as "normal family behaviour".

But when the trial was over, after the Queen's controversial intervention, did you wonder why the newspapers became so comprehensively riled up by the supposed arrogance of the Crown, the culpability of the police and the ineptness of the legal process itself. Perhaps you thought they were expressing anxiety about the constitutional position of the monarch vis-à-vis the judiciary. Maybe they were. But there's a much more personal explanation for the animus felt by the Press in this case.

I was lucky enough to be in Court No.1 of the Old Bailey on day four of the trial. The morning session was taken up by a long reading by the prosecuting counsel of two vital documents: a long, self-exculpatory statement from Burrell about his service to the Princess of Wales, his loyalty to her, his stricken state of mind after her death, and his scrupulous husbanding of her possessions; and an exhaustive inventory of the 310 belongings that he was charged with falsely appropriating, together with Burrell's explanation of how he came by them.

The reading of these documents, directed at the senior police detective in the case, went on through the morning, in an extraordinary litany of acquisition and disposal. At times it sounded as if Mr Willliam Boyce, QC, was reading the contents of a dizzyingly grand mail-order catalogue of fancy goods. But there was a strange atmosphere in the hacks' gallery that day, a sound in Court No. 1 that cast a pall over Mr Boyce's reading-out of statements. It was the sound of silence. Because of the workings of the immunity laws, some paragraphs of Burrell's statement were deemed too sensitive – too private or incendiary – for the ears of the the outside world. So we witnessed the spectacle of the jury being told to read those paragraphs to themselves, while the prosecuting counsel waited silently for them to finish.

You could almost hear the frustration of the press, as they sat in silence, excluded from (presumably) some of the most vital evidence in the case. Sorry boys, the silence implied, this is classified stuff. It's not for the likes of you to know about.

That afternoon, things took a more dramatic turn. During Lord Carlile's cross-examination of the senior cop, DS Roger Milburn, it was revealed that the Princess had a special wooden box, a chamber of secrets, that had come into Burrell's hands and that Diana's sister, Lady McCorquodale, wanted back. We were agog to know the contents. DS Milburn told Lord Carlile it had contained "an item of jewellery". Pressed for details, he said the item in question was "a sensitive matter", and that he'd rather write down what it was than say it out loud. His scrap of paper was passed to the Judge, who refused to reveal its contents. Interest rose to fever pitch. What could it be, this shocking bijou? A diamanté vibrator? Some kind of pudenda-piercing emerald stud? As we now know, it turned out to be merely James Hewitt's signet ring, but the damage was done, I think, that day. The press had grown tired of being treated as underlings, unfit to hear the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, whenever it suited the Crown. In the ultimate tribunal of a democracy – the court of law, where sworn testimony is supposed to make a full disclosure of the facts – we had witnessed two different levels of imposed secrecy. A basic tenet of a supposedly transparent society had been flouted – and, worse, the press and broadcast media had been mucked about once too often.

So when Mrs Justice Rafferty was approached early last week by the prosecution and asked for a further public immunity certificate could be procured to stop the disclosure of evidence about the Queen's meeting with Burrell, it was the last straw. The judge spent three days wrestling with the problem before deciding that she would not oppose disclosure. It was the right and proper decision – but why did it take three days? Because the court was evidently more concerned about upsetting or embarrassing the Queen than in getting the truth out into the open. For all the journalists covering the case, whether sitting in the court or not, it was outrageous to feel once more the strategic application of silence, gagging order, veto and immunity clause to stop the reporting of information just to spare the blushes of the monarch. No wonder the post-trial analysis went so noisily over the top. It was the revenge of the fourth estate for being so rudely kept in the dark.