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News that Paul Burrell will give his royal insights on Fox TV means he is standing up to those who have tried to silence him
• Say what you like about weddings, they do offer the chance to reconnect with loved ones from whom, for whatever reason, we have drifted apart. And so to Paul Burrell, everyone's favourite mad servant, who once rightly judged that the only way he could safeguard Princess Di's memory – a task with which she had officially charged him – was to stuff loads of her dresses and more portable valuables into bin bags and keep them in his attic. It was the former butler, of course, who claimed that soon after Diana's death, the Queen spent several hours fretting to him that "there are powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge". My own theory was that Her Maj was referring to the karaoke Sauron, Simon Cowell – back then merely the brains behind Robson and Jerome's No 1 version of Unchained Melody, but already identified by Ma'am as the most serious challenge to the monarchy's grip on a maudlin nation's heartstrings since Prince Philip, MI5 and the Illuminati dealt with the last one. Whatever the details, we all shared Paul's constant fear that he would be extraordinarily rendered to some Establishment black site and permanently silenced. How courageous, then, to find him contracted to Fox News for wedding duties, still fighting the system for the recognition it conspires to deny him – or as Paul prefers to fudge it: "I was there at Diana's and Andrew and Sarah's. Now I'll be at Kate and William's, and no doubt, I'll be at Harry's. It's part of my life. It's what I know best, and people watching Fox will get inside information from someone who knows it." Extreme ironists are advised to lock their screens to Fox the minute Fearne Cotton starts feeling a bit highbrow.
• Incidentally, Paul remains quite the Renaissance man, and is promoting a furniture line inspired by his life at the throbbing heart of the Royal Palaces. "One of my goals is to make elegance affordable," he says. "I have been fortunate enough to witness the ultimate in stylish and elegant entertaining, from private and intimate family occasions at Sandringham and Highgrove to grand and lavish state banquets for presidents, kings and queens." Paul, you are invited to get in touch to settle a finely poised etiquette question. Are you: a) Diana's rock, b) Northern Rock or c) crack rock?
• Speaking of Simon Cowell, what a relief to find him arriving fashionably late in the fairytale, with news that the TV coverage of the wedding ceremony will be directed by his Leni Riefenstahl – or "stage manager", as the X Factor credits still prefer to have it. As revealed by the Sun, this Diccon Ramsay will be bringing X Factor production values to the event, which we'll duly rename Triumph of the Will(iam). A typically diffident anonymous source apparently tells the paper: "They wanted the guy from the biggest show on Earth to help make the wedding the greatest event in the history of television. He's on it." No doubt he is. Expect spectacularly cynical reaction shots, the choir to be Auto-Tuned, and – right at the climax – a millisecond subliminal flash of Cowell's face and the words: "He will deliver you unto paradise."
