STRANGE to see the Queen is now as sensitive to bad publicity as any TV presenter caught with a runny nose and his trousers down.
"Never complain, never explain," was once the motto of the royal family. And this haughty attitude served them well for generations.
But now the Windsors appear as concerned about news management and image manipulation as any Downing Street spin doctor.
Paul Burrell, former butler and rock to Princess Diana, is a free man today after the dramatic intervention of the Queen.
Did Her Majesty's intervention have anything at all to do with saving Burrell's skin? Or everything to do with sparing the royal family from an avalanche of dirty little secrets?
The Queen looks like a heartless coward and craven hypocrite today. The case against Burrell's trial has taken two years and hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money.
The whole lousy stack of cards came down when the Queen suddenly recalled a conversation between herself and the butler during which Burrell told Her Majesty that he was looking after many of Diana's possessions because the Spencers were not treating these quasi-religious relics with the respect they deserved.
What took her so long to remember that conversation? Why did she wait two years before speaking out? This was no trifling matter. A man was facing a jail term of seven years for theft. It beggars belief that it slipped the Queen's mind that Burrell had told her that he had taken many of Diana's possessions into his keeping.
If Burrell had taken the witness stand then the full extent of Diana's half-crazed loneliness would have been revealed.
All the delicate promotion of Camilla Parker Bowles would have been straight down the royal bog hole. Charles would have looked like a cruel, uncaring husband once more.
Diana herself would have looked like no more than an upmarket Ulrika Jonsson when details of her busy love life came out.
One anecdote that was reportedly about to be revealed if Burrell had gone into the witness box was how Prince Charles once gave a urine sample - and made his valet hold the little bottle while he was giving it. And if that had come out, how could anyone ever again sing the national anthem with a straight face? Nobody emerges from this case smelling like an English rose.
Certainly not the prosecution, who reportedly gave the royal family the impression that the case hinged on Burrell actually selling Diana's possessions, rather than merely holding on to them.
Certainly not the police, who have wasted their time and our money when they should have been chasing real criminals.
But the person who really comes out of this case stinking to high heaven is the Queen herself.
Paul Burrell is babbling about his unending gratitude to the Queen. It is the servile ravings of a slave when the whipping has stopped.
The Queen could have spared Burrell and his family the nightmare of the past two years. She chose not to until it was clear that his testimony would mean extreme embarrassment for the royal family. It is the ugly instinct for self-preservation that every monarch needs, and it should make republicans of us all.
Paul Burrell is no hero. We can applaud his instinct to protect a woman he clearly loved. But it is bloody obvious that Diana's mother, brother and sisters had infinitely more claim over her possessions than a hired hand.
So the Spencers were shredding Diana's love letters. So they were trying on Diana's dresses as if they were in Giorgio Armani's. So what? They were, and remain, her family.
I have met Paul Burrell and I liked him. He is clearly a decent man. But he was a servant, and he has no claims on the possessions of a deceased employer.
The butler didn't do it. But he certainly did get ideas way beyond his station. Prince William has every right to be unhappy that Paul Burrell still keeps 13 letters that his mother wrote to him at Eton.
Paul Burrell may not be a thief. But Prince William, and Prince Harry, and Diana's mother, brother and sisters, all have every right to ask him: "Little man, who the hell do you think you are?"
