The Windsors fear the release of a tape thought to be in the custody of Paul Burrell, made by Princess Diana, which contains details of the alleged gay rape of ex-palace valet Greg Smith and a serious "incident" which he witnessed, involving a member of the royal family and a palace servant. It could bring down the monarchy, unless of course, the butler is 'silenced.'

By telling their stories they (Diana & Paul) have dared to challenge the absolute power invested in that dangerous political cult, the Royal Family, to determine what we are permitted to know about it.

No other person or party in our political firmament has risked throwing the light of public scrutiny on the malevolent matrix that is the monarchy - the institution par excellence in which class, sex, property and power meet. The royals are not the "best of British", and it is to be hoped that the Prime Minister and his court didn't mean it when they came up with that line: they're the worst. The royals were prepared to see poor Paul Burrell destroyed, and stopped themselves at the eleventh hour only so that they could stop him from sharing the secrets he kept. Clearly, these were important enough to do damage. They confirmed either cruelty or corruption in the family firm.

Those who complain that Diana should be left dead and buried are either royal sycophants or smuggies who sniff that the revelations about royal domestic life are, well, domestic. But the histories of royal families blur the polarisation between public and private. Royal lives are always lived in public.

For a start, these people can't take care of themselves, which places them in a precarious position of simultaneous dependence and dominance. That is a dialectic that works only if the servants really believe in their supremacy. More importantly, their very purpose is to embody personal sovereignty, an anti-democratic dominion that compromises the domestic as well as the national landscape. The Windsors are about nothing if not the personal performance of power. Which is why, in the absence of a parliamentary political critique of the royal regime, the revelations of spouses and servants are so dangerous.

Who cares if Burrell emerges a little richer from his revelations? They enrich our collective knowledge about a system that deserves to die. Burrell's saga is supported by other royal commentators and confidants: Simone Simmons, a healer, was invited by Diana to listen in to a call made to Kensington Palace by someone described to her as "one of Charles's men". This was just after the Princess had returned from Angola as an envoy for the international movement against landmines.

To the rage of the establishment, and against the advice of the ailing Conservative government, she had accepted an invitation by the Red Cross to lend herself to the coalition campaigning against landmines. According to Simmons, one of Charles's men with "a really plummy voice" warned the Princess early in 1997, "you don't know what you're meddling with" and "if you carry on, anything could happen ... accidents happen".

So, we discover that in 1996 she felt most vulnerable when at her most powerful and political. She felt most endangered when she was engaged in real politics; just when she was finding a radical voice beyond her class and coterie. She found purpose by lending herself to philanthropy, but by now philanthropy had been politicised; good works were often dangerous works. Servicing the poor was radical; affirming people with Aids took guts, and campaigning against landmines took on the warmongers, the arms trade, and, of course, the Government itself.

Full Story:  http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=457339