Focus: Diana her true story

As a biographer of the Princess of Wales, the author thought she knew her subject well. But the Burrell revelations have changed all our perceptions. And the portrait of the Diana we now know is a shocking indictment of Britain's first family

Do we need to know more? Of course, the answer is yes, yes, yes. The riveting chronicle of Diana, Princess of Wales, is a case study in the use and abuse of personal and public power. Everybody is implicated – including Diana herself – in the drama of domination and subordination. We've learnt this week about the Princess throwing fur coats out of cars, making the butler stuff lovers in the boot, allowing staff to grovel and kiss her feet – it's all so humiliating. That's what the monarchy does to you.

Every morsel, every cameo, scandal and chapter in the story of the Spencers, the Windsors, their servants, their scribes and us, confirms the case for a republic. The importance of Regina vs Burrell and the collapse of the Crown's case against one of its most loyal servants lies in its inadvertent exposure of the abusive relationships inscribed in the most patriarchal institution in the country, the monarchy.

Whatever we might think of Paul Burrell, not least that his abject royalism is the source of his suffering, the servant is felicitous: he helps us to understand the visceral lore of loyalty to a greater power.

"It is unthinkable to recount any conversation with Her Majesty," he explained last week. "My own barrister thought I was nuts," he said – for failing to mobilise the monarch to corroborate his motives. The barrister was not alone; many of us might think the same. But Mr Burrell helps us to understand his place in the system and its fortifications: the monarchy works by demanding that people give themselves away. That's not about deference, nor is it about respect. It is – though Mr Burrell's self-esteem would no doubt balk at this – about deep self-denial that is rewarded by proximity to power. And it is worse than that. He has reminded us how these powerful people, so rich and resourceful, have stripped mutuality, not to mention democracy, from their most intimate relationships. That would make tyrants of us all.

His tactical revelations remind us that the monarchy, as an institution, is simultaneously estranged from the way we all live and yet is supposed to express our way of life. Instead of animating the debate about the monarchy, the contradictions inherent in its authoritarianism, in the very idea of the social relationship between sovereign and subject, are suppressed.

A misty royalism becalms British politics and yields such risible populism as the Prime Minister's description of Diamond Liz as the "Best of British". The paradox is that during our entire history as a modern democracy, an epoch scarcely lasting a century, the meaning, the rewards and the horrors of that public performance of spectacular sovereignty and subordination have been viewed with almost total indifference by the progressive portion of society.

A culture that requires people to stand in your presence, while you are bathing your bunions or watching Morecambe and Wise, demanding that the servants keep your secrets or tell your lies even as they are on the way to Calvary, may seem normal to those who are sustained by it, but for the rest of us there is no way round the truth: it's an abusive way to live.

Is there anyone in Britain, apart from the royals themselves, who doesn't think that to keep a person standing for between an hour and a half and three hours – depending on who you believe – during an intense and intimate conversation, is not weird?

It matters not that the Queen made herself stand, too. She had the choice. What is important about that vignette is that even during the maelstrom between Diana's death and her burial nothing mattered more than maintaining the etiquette of monarchy. Is there anyone who doesn't think that the Queen's summons to her former footman during those days was not self-interested? Is there anyone who does not suspect that the Queen's recovered memory of that conversation was not strategic?

By providing corroboration of that conversation, wasn't Mr Burrell simultaneously released to speak and yet silenced? Wasn't she saving her dynasty's secrets by saving him from the dock?

That conversation – including those parts of it that, we're told, will never be shared with the people – supports the sense that everything, from the flicker of an eye and the flying of flags, to who sits where, who will be sacked and who will be saved, is all about the performance of power. The servant is supposed to read the royal mind.

Mr Burrell tells us forcefully that he knew the Queen was saying something of the gravest importance when she stared at him. He comments: "I knew all her secrets and I knew how she liked to handle people. I knew what her stares meant." His survival as a servant no doubt depended upon it. His subordination to that stare is traduced, however, with Diamond Liz's seductive conceit: "No one, Paul, has been as close to a member of my family as you ..." Really, nobody?

The seduction infected his relationship with Diana: her dependence on him, day and night – the poor man could be called in at any time to attend to what he describes as deeply personal matters – is invoked both by Mr Burrell and by the Princess's closest friends as a sign of his importance.

But this is where the upper classes are in such a muddle. If their primary quest is power, then they are inevitably estranged from the part of themselves that is powerless. Mr Burrell was, of course, important to Diana – but only because she was so deprived. He was important to the royals not because they thought he was really important, but because they are so dependent. In their hidden, intimate, distraught and even desperate moments they are dependent on hired help or members of their own class who spend their lives "in waiting" – the class of courtiers who are also servants, keepers of secrets, and whose reward, likewise, is to be close to power.

Perhaps the most chilling details to have emerged during this sado-masochist duet between Mr Burrell and the Crown illuminate the life and death of Diana herself. We already knew that the Princess's brother Charles refused to offer her sanctuary at Althorp – her home, after all – during the dangerous days of her separation from the heir to the throne. Remember, dear reader: in a patriarchal system, fathers and brothers take all. The world was watching while Diana's life was falling apart, and her brother wanted rent. Then he did not want his sister around at all, drawing attention to Althorp, making life difficult for his wife and children. Lest we forget, Charles Spencer himself was also making life difficult for his wife and children. His father had been a charming old buffer and wife-beater. Young Charles also used his power oppressively, reportedly bullying his wife.

Diana's difficulties, her "eating disorders" and her distress derived from her horrible experiences as a neglected child, cruelly treated, whose mother was beaten and then expelled by her father, who was handed over to a similarly cruel and entirely functionalist family, and who was left wandering the corridors, lost for company.

Her sister Sarah was expelled from school for drinking. She, too, suffered from an eating disorder. We already knew the Spencer dynasty had a reputation as mad, bad and dangerous to know. What we don't quite know is what it was that Sarah "McCrocodile" was seeking when she and Mr Burrell searched for the key to Diana's box of secrets. Was she quarrying for something worse? What did Mr Burrell share with the Queen when they stood together all those hours? And why did she not dissent when he said that he was holding on to Diana's stuff for safekeeping?

No doubt the royals will be dismayed by Mr Burrell's accounts of the discarded Diana's trysts with her lovers, gigolos who adored her and bored her, men who had to be smuggled into her palace-prison, men of substance who had to be bundled into the boot of a car, men before whom she became a beggar, bleating for love: the beautiful heart surgeon who said "No" – no wonder.

That she had affairs is irrelevant. That her sexual life was so disappointing, or perhaps dangerous, that she had no judgement about men, that her relationship to her body was defined by such self-hatred is absolutely relevant to the problem of power.

She didn't know how to wield it, whether with dutiful servants or beautiful surgeons. She didn't know how to respond to it; and worst of all, she didn't know how to protect herself from it.

But she had learnt something vital about sex and power during her time with the Windsors. When she, as reported, secretly recorded a servant's rape allegations against one of Charles's favoured aides she seemed to have understood that the royal family, like the Catholic church, like public schools and omnipotent adults, can overwhelm the testimony of victims by their own awesome power. We're told that Charles, who originally dismissed the allegations as "below-stairs tittle-tattle", used his power to go straight to the top: to Sir John Stevens at the Met. Now we know that Diana used her own power to place the allegations on record. She knew that it was important. And she knew what would happen: nothing.

No doubt the police, whose interest in the "rape tape" seems to have driven their raid on Mr Burrell's home, and their search for that elusive box, were as damned by deference as most of the rest of the world seems to be when it encounters the royals.

As Mr Burrell also shows us, Diana became an expert in surveillance. Her dread of the Establishment, her enemy, and the secret services was deemed advanced paranoia by Prince Charles's bloated advocate Nicholas Soames. But it seems that Diamond Liz shared her daughter-in-law's worries about an "enemy within". She cautioned Mr Burrell to watch out for "powers at work in this country which we have no knowledge about". Well, she of all people would know. And so should we.

In the last decade it is the domestic details of life with the Windsors that have done more than anything else to fissure the royals' reputation and reinvigorate republicanism. But republicanism itself hasn't known how to engage with the sexual politics that is at the core of the monarchy's crisis. That is because the notion of "the personal" has such a flaky and precarious place in our political culture. We can almost catch the complaints among royalists and some republicans alike that all this lumber from Mr Burrell's loft is merely upstairs tittle-tattle. Indeed, the determination to maintain the imaginary polarisation between public and private has led some republicans to entirely misread the significance of Diana's disastrous life and death. Feminist republicans are accused of being star-struck. And thus of being royalists. We are not. We are interested in power and in her life as a prism through which we witness shards of our society's malaise.

Like Diana, Mr Burrell has chosen to tell his story. His knowledge is the only power he's got. Why is he important? Why do we need to know more? Because his evidence is not merely his defence, it is the evidence in chief for the prosecution of the monarchy.