Royal butler Burrell prunes price by £50k to flog flower shop

Garrulous former royal footman Paul Burrell has made a small fortune from the memory of Princess Diana.

Now he has cashed in once more having sold his florist’s shop in the Cheshire village of Farndon which came into existence, he says, thanks to Diana.

I can disclose that the former lorry driver’s son is to trouser £550,000 after putting the elegant Georgian property on the market. Burrell and his spokesman decline to comment.

‘The Princess set me up in this business, really,’ reflected Burrell, 60, after announcing the closure of his shop earlier this year.

But I’m told that Burrell, who is now intending to travel the globe in Diana’s footsteps, had hoped for rather more. ‘He wanted £600,000 for it,’ says an observer of the Cheshire market, adding that the property includes a three-bedroom flat as well as the shop.

While he has always been willing to offer his thoughts about his former employer, Burrell is rather more coy about developments in his own life — memorably insisting after divorcing his wife Maria that he was ‘a single man’ — even though he had, by then, been enjoying an affair with lawyer Graham Cooper for nearly a decade.

No doubt Burrell, who married Cooper in 2017, a year after his divorce, will soon be displaying his customary talent for exploiting commercial opportunities.

His books so far have included In The royal Manner: Butler To Diana and The Way We Were: remembering Diana. But it was his memoir, a royal Duty, which caught the attention of Princes William and Harry, prompting them to issue an unprecedented statement.

‘We cannot believe that Paul, entrusted with so much, could abuse his position in such a cold and overt betrayal,’ it said.