Does Paul Burrell really deserve the status of hero?

A few days ago he was the loyal retainer, prepared to go to prison to preserve the secrets of the Royal Family. Now he is telling his storyto a tabloid. Paul Burrell has gone from hero to zero with dazzling speed. But this is only the latest twist in a protracted saga from which no one – Princess Diana's blood relatives, the Royal Family and Burrell himself – emerges with credit.

At the weekend, Burrell was fêted as Diana's champion and victim of the Machiavellian Windsors. Now, in the light of the huge fee he has accepted from the Daily Mirror, his reticence – the trait that made so many people admire him – is in question. His latest pronouncements only confirm the impression that his behaviour, while clearly not criminal, requires more than the explanations he has given.

Burrell is obviously a very emotional man, and while his grief is understandable, his actions went far beyond collecting some of Diana's papers. The inventory compiled by detectives who visited his Cheshire home included an extensive collection of hats, dresses, skirts, blouses and handbags. Burrell also kept a box of Diana's underwear, whose implications for posterity are far from clear.

What police found at Burrell's home sounds uncannily like a shrine, complete with the relics of a saint. It is a curious fact that in the Middle Ages, when there was a flourishing trade in such memorabilia, collectors were keener on items that had supposedly belonged to female martyrs – which is how Diana is still viewed in some quarters. Burrell's obsession with her clothes suggests a combination of reverence and identification, and he has even begun to sound eerily like his dead employer.

"I want to tell my story to everyone," he declared yesterday. It could be the Princess speaking, thrusting aside protocol as she did in her Panorama interview. Indeed, it may well be true that money is not Burrell's chief motivation, for what seems to drive him is a need to restore the impression – denied in court by Diana's mother, Frances Shand Kydd – that he was her closest confidant.

"The Boss called me her rock. I was her rock, and still am, despite what the Spencers might say," he insists. When someone dies, especially as famous as Diana, there is often a contest for ownership of the dead person's memory. There have been notable examples in the literary world in recent years, the role usually being assumed by a spouse – the relict, to use an old-fashioned noun. Such people jealously guard the dead person's possessions and estate, becoming known, not necessarily with fondness, as "keepers of the flame". TS Eliot's widow, Valerie, and Iris Murdoch's widower, John Bayley, come to mind.

In Diana's case, the absence of someone to take on this role is striking; her sons were too young, she had had disagreements with her mother and brother, she was estranged from her ex-husband's family and her most recent lover died in the crash that killed her. Burrell's squirreling away of her possessions can be interpreted as an attempt to fill the gap.

Whatever this says about Burrell, it is also a telling comment on the Princess's character. Her self-appointed chief mourner was an old-style retainer who had worked his way up the Buckingham Palace hierarchy: "Frankly I felt I was the only person who could be trusted to retain her full confidence," he told detectives. He talked about performing tasks of a "very personal nature, including very late at night" and described her family relationships as "very strained".

So, it appears, are his relations with the Spencers, who are angered by his claims about his closeness to Diana. This may be motivated by guilt on the part of Mrs Shand Kydd – mother and daughter had not spoken for four months before the Princess's death – or an aristocratic distaste at the notion of friendship with servants. But there is also a Dickensian flavour to the story, with the butler demonstrating as intense an attachment to Diana's garments as Miss Havisham, the jilted bride in Great Expectations, did to her wedding finery.

The Princess herself implied that Burrell offered her emotional support, but few observers have remarked on the power imbalance between them. For all her superficial modernity, Lady Diana Spencer was born and bred in one aristocratic dynasty and married into another; she was unable to thrive in either, and it may be a sign of her isolation that Burrell was not the only member of her entourage with whom she had an ambiguous relationship. She became close to some of her police bodyguards, and her former private secretary, Patrick Jephson, published a book that catalogued her difficulties in forming lasting relationships.

Friends can answer back, but employees have to suffer in silence or find other jobs. There is still a great deal of kudos attached to working for a royal – something has to compensate for the appalling wages – and there is no doubt that the Princess inspired enormous affection in some of her staff. But while very emotional people are often drawn together, these were not relationships among equals.

Burrell's acquittal has offered fresh insights into the Princess, the Royal Family and the kind of people – servile and self-justifying by turns – they gather around them. However Burrell perceives his story, it offers dramatic confirmation of the anachronistic and emotionally unhealthy atmosphere of royal households.