Читать книгу Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail - Tom Bower - Страница 11

In mid-1998, Mark Bolland and Fiona Shackleton were lunching at the Ivy restaurant off St Martin’s Lane when both their mobile phones rang. The Highgrove switchboard connected the prince. ‘I’ve got a terrible problem,’ said Charles. ‘I’ve had a delegation of the staff led by Bernie and Tony and they say that everyone will resign unless Michael Fawcett goes.’

The mutiny among Charles’s staff at Highgrove had been brewing for weeks. Fawcett had been imposing unreasonable demands, especially on five of the staff serving under him: a valet, two sub-valets, an equerry’s assistant and a chauffeur. The result was a revolt by a group of people noted for exaggerating the smallest inconveniences out of all proportion. However, on this occasion Fawcett’s behaviour would seem to have been insufferable. Fearful of losing all his employees, Charles had instantly surrendered to the delegation and agreed that Fawcett should resign, despite his seventeen years’ service. Then, immediately regretting his decision, he had telephoned Bolland and Shackleton. Both were joyful at the news. Later that afternoon, on Stephen Lamport’s orders, Bolland drove to Highgrove. ‘Make sure he’s fired,’ were Lamport’s parting words. In unison, the prince’s closest advisers ‘went into overdrive to make sure Fawcett left before Charles changed his mind’. The thirty-five-year-old, they agreed, was a hated bully. Regardless of Fawcett’s usefulness, no one could understand why Charles had chosen to live alongside such a seemingly unpleasant man.

Bolland entered the prince’s study to be ‘greeted by the sight of Charles and Fawcett crying together’. Amid their tears, Charles told Fawcett that he would have to go, but that provision would be made for him to continue working for him privately. An announcement was made that Fawcett’s departure was ‘entirely amicable’. Commentators, misled by spokesmen, mistakenly reported that Fawcett was the casualty of a ‘war’ within St James’s Palace between the old guard and the modernisers.

The backlash began soon after. Led by Patty Palmer-Tomkinson, Charles’s friends urged him to recall Fawcett.

‘Poor Michael,’ said Palmer-Tomkinson.

‘It’s not my fault,’ replied Charles. ‘They made me do it.’

The following Friday, Charles and Camilla were invited to Chatsworth by Debo, the Duchess of Devonshire. Debo, at seventy-eight the youngest of the Mitford sisters, was a favourite of Charles. Amusing and resourceful, she was independent-minded and the most practical of duchesses, having rescued the family estate at Chatsworth with her marketing zeal. During his marriage to Diana, Charles and Camilla had often been welcomed by Debo to stay while they discreetly hunted with the Meynell in Derbyshire. Less discreetly, she revealed to a confidential source that Charles and Camilla slept in the same bed on these visits, and that Charles was submissive to Camilla. ‘That’s why the relationship works,’ she had said, smiling, hinting at a deeper meaning to Charles’s expressions of adoration in the Camillagate tape.

The next day, while Charles and Camilla were out hunting, Debo summoned Bolland and Lamport to drive up immediately from London. Within minutes of their arrival, she reprimanded them: ‘You’re making Charles unhappy about Fawcett. This must stop.’ Charles, it became obvious, had been easily persuaded by his hostess that Fawcett was too important to lose, especially as Camilla remained so indebted to him.

During the months after her separation from her husband, Camilla had lived in comparative impoverishment. Receiving £20,000 a year in alimony, she could barely afford to run her Wiltshire home. Without Fawcett’s help, Debo reminded Bolland and Lamport, Camilla’s life would have been ‘seriously unpleasant’. Thanks to him, food had been sent from Highgrove, her laundry was returned pristine, and Andy Crichton, a former police protection officer, had been made available to act as her driver. Moreover, Fawcett was a great survivor. Ten years earlier, John Riddell had arranged his dismissal, only to discover that Charles had reneged on their agreement. The same would happen now. Fawcett, Debo made clear, was non-negotiable. As one of Charles’s senior staff was to observe, ‘The man who puts the death mask on the king will be Fawcett.’ However, neither man was persuaded to reverse his dismissal.

On their return from hunting, Charles and Camilla were frosty towards the two private secretaries, whom they inexplicably blamed for Fawcett’s plight. One solution, they nevertheless speculated, would be for him to be employed by Robert Kime, the prince’s favourite interior decorator. Kime was invited to Highgrove for dinner the following Saturday.

Around the table a week later sat Charles, Kime, Lamport and Bolland. Kime advised that Fawcett be employed as a private contractor, as Charles had suggested originally, but after listening to Bolland and Lamport discuss the valet’s fate, Charles expressed his fears. For the past week he had lived through the horror of life without Fawcett. No doubt the valet had crossed the line by bullying the staff, but he was more important than any friend. He also posed an enduring threat, as at any time he could succumb to the temptation to sell his story to the media.

Kime was concluding that Fawcett was not going anywhere when there was a commotion. Arriving late, Camilla had entered Highgrove through the kitchen, where several employees were milling about. Dressed as the woman in charge rather than in her usual country clothes, she told them, ‘I hear you’re being beastly to Michael and I’m angry with all of you.’ Her direct language, Roy Strong later said, brought ‘the common touch to the household which Charles lacked’. After extracting grovelling apologies, she headed for the dining room, where Kime was pleading Fawcett’s case. Finally, at 2 a.m., it was agreed that he would stay, and that some of the members of staff who had complained about his bullying would be fired.

During the previous week, Camilla’s assistant Amanda McManus had shifted her attitude. On Monday she had told Robert Higdon, ‘I hate Michael. He’s not honest and he’s a liar. He should go,’ but by Thursday she was willing ‘to go through hell to help Camilla on Fawcett’s behalf’. Survival, she evidently realised, depended upon unquestioning sycophancy.

The crisis had been a failure of management. Unlike conventional executives, Lamport could not tell Charles to his face that his loyalty to Fawcett was unwise. Such outspokenness would guarantee his dismissal. Quietly, he implemented the royal wishes. Fawcett’s authority was restored, and indeed magnified. Outsiders seeking an appointment with Charles increasingly approached Fawcett in the hope that he would deign to be helpful.

The contrast between Charles’s management of his personal kingdom and his mother’s concern for the realm was captured soon afterwards at a meeting of the Way Ahead Group in Buckingham Palace’s cinema.

As he stood chatting with Simon Lewis, Lord Camoys and Michael Peat, Robin Janvrin felt particularly proud of his creation of the group back in 1993. The four officials who had taken over the queen’s private office presented themselves as the new generation. In the past, Richard Aylard had simply kept the show on the road, while Robert Fellowes had been the firefighter. Now Janvrin, jokingly dubbed ‘the angry young man’ by David Airlie, stood before the royals under a metaphorical banner that read ‘We must have change.’ In his opinion, his opponents offered the ‘doctrine of unripe time’. Gathering the key members of the royal family together, he suggested, could resolve their differences, and would help them plan the monarchy’s response to the tabloids’ intention to scratch open the raw scars once again as the first anniversary of Diana’s death approached.

The queen, Philip and their four children arrived, kissing each other warmly without betraying any tensions. Despite their rivalries, the family ostensibly remained friends. Janvrin’s tripwire was Charles. The heir’s natural stubbornness, he hoped, would melt away in the face of his unemotional presentation of the advantages of reform.

In anticipation of the meeting, Lewis had sent the queen a report based on a Mori opinion poll. Commissioned by Janvrin, it had been opposed by Michael Peat as a waste of money. Its conclusions were the basis of Lewis’s one-hour presentation, complete with slideshow.

The six royals understood the sharp difference between the public’s attitude towards the monarchy and towards other British institutions. Each of the four nations and each age group had differing attitudes towards the family. To rebuild its popularity, Lewis advised, over the coming months they should take up a dual focus: on Scotland, and on forging a relationship with Britain’s youth.

The queen agreed. Janvrin proposed to lighten the tone of her official tours. Meetings with the uniformed county lord lieutenants would be reduced, and instead she would visit schools, a pub, take a ride in a London taxi, sign a Manchester United football, walk past a McDonald’s and meet some of the homeless and unemployed. The queen agreed again. To placate Anne’s anger that Charles was occupying too much of the spotlight, Janvrin proposed that the princess should be given special status in Scotland. The queen’s continuing approval encouraged the Blairite modernisers.

The next item was the Jubilee, four years in the future. ‘What will we do?’ asked Philip, starting a family discussion. The unity crumbled. Charles wanted to reduce the numbers of the family appearing on the Buckingham Palace balcony and the number of teenage royals entitled to police protection. His particular targets were Andrew’s two daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie. Then he mentioned in a critical tone the commercial activities of his two brothers. ‘Enough has been done,’ interrupted Philip. He urged the queen to protect tradition. Amid that discord, the meeting ended.

Nervous that the Mori poll’s findings would provide negative headlines, Janvrin forbade Lamport to show the results to Bolland. Regardless, Charles ensured that some critical figures were leaked to the Sunday Times, partly because he disliked the idea of the Way Ahead Group and the meetings, and partly because he wanted to assert his primacy over his siblings. ‘I’m the Prince of Wales and they’re not,’ he said. To reassert his status still further, he opposed Janvrin’s plan to improve cooperation between himself and his mother by merging the two palaces’ press offices and appointing Lewis at their head. He ridiculed the idea of a New Labour spin master overseeing ‘The New Monarchy’ and prying into his plans, not least because he was becoming disenchanted with the government.

That disenchantment would soon become public knowledge. In June 1998, Charles declared war on Labour’s support for genetically modified crops. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, he warned that scientists were straying into ‘realms that belong to God, and God alone’, and questioned whether man had the right to ‘experiment with and commercialise the building blocks of life’. Genetic food engineering to produce long-life tomatoes, pest-resistant crops and soya beans with added protein would, he asserted, create a man-made disaster and deprive the public of organic foods. Consumers should consider the profits made by the manufacturers of the pesticide DDT and asbestos – both once hailed as scientific wonders but eventually proven to have potentially fatal side-effects – as an omen for GM crops.

Forewarned about the prince’s attack, Blair told Alastair Campbell, ‘We’re going to have running troubles with Charles because on many issues he’s more traditional than the queen.’ In the hope of securing an armistice, the two drove to Highgrove in the September sunshine. By then, Blair’s acerbic spokesman had become hostile towards Charles. The begrudging agreement by Highgrove’s staff that Campbell could use the swimming pool – which he found ‘a bit manky and with too many leaves floating around’ – did little to improve his temper. The visit, he declared, was ‘a journey back so far back in time it felt extra-planetary’.

After his swim, Campbell was offered lunch in the staff canteen. Inside the house, Blair was sharing a meal with his host, who for over fifteen years had championed a number of unfashionable causes, a category which until recently had included environmental protection. Ignoring Tory ministers’ mockery, he had warned about the failure to combat acid rain, protested against farmers burning straw, demanded a ban on CFC gases to protect the ozone layer, forecast ‘the problems and dangers of possibly catastrophic climate changes through air pollution’, warned about plastic bags and bottles polluting the seas, and lamented the mass extinction of species as a result of the loss of tropical forests. All his campaigns, Charles believed, had been dismissed by lethargic politicians and ignorant officials. Almost without exception, they had ignored the threats to mankind. The latest of that breed, he suspected, was Tony Blair.

Dealing with the royal family was difficult for any politician. To have a direct conversation with someone with unusual preoccupations was inevitably uphill, but a dialogue with Charles was especially perilous. The various self-deprecating cartoons of the prince in the guest lavatory did not signal democracy in the household, but rather the owner’s vanity. Blair understandably wanted to know in advance where any discussion would end. There was no answer. His caution proved justified when four weeks later a newspaper published an account of their meeting. Blaming the ‘national disgrace’ of using unproven technology for ruining farmers in ‘an arms race against Nature’, Charles publicly urged Britons to boycott GM crops – or, as environmental campaigners described them, ‘Frankenstein foods’.

The indiscretion surprised Blair. Not only did Charles explicitly oppose government policy, but, as Mark Bolland witnessed, ‘he didn’t care’ about a public disagreement. Far from upholding traditional royal impartiality, Charles thought only about his ‘duty’, discounted the government’s problems and ignored the danger of his overt prejudice. Blair asked Peter Mandelson to caution the prince, and in a telephone call from New York, Mandelson, who believed that Charles’s views ‘were anti-scientific and irresponsible in the light of food shortages in the developing world’, told the prince that his remarks were ‘unhelpful’. He congratulated himself that his royal hearer did ‘tone down his public interventions on the subject’, but his success was temporary.

Charles now switched his attention to Camilla. The discretion about their relationship, he decided, had to end. Camilla wanted to be seen with Charles at the theatre, go on holiday with him openly, and establish a bond with his sons; but a relationship akin to marriage could be considered only after the public had accepted her. Her principal opponents remained the queen and the queen mother. Neither would allow her to be in the same room with them, yet both welcomed her ex-husband to receptions, race meetings and house parties. To show their affection for him, a palace official had lobbied that he should be promoted from colonel to brigadier, and appointed director of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps. Both suggestions were approved. In protest, the army’s senior vet resigned, a rare exception to the universal enchantment with the new brigadier.

Charles could not understand the queen’s sympathy for Diana and her antagonism towards Camilla. After all, Diana’s theatrics in the media had damaged the family, while Camilla had remained utterly discreet. Why, he asked, could his mother not approve of a traditional Englishwoman who loved the countryside and horses? Camilla’s case had been raised by the Earl of Carnarvon, the queen’s racehorse trainer and close friend. His efforts as a go-between having proved unsuccessful, he switched to the queen’s side. Princess Margaret had also tried on Charles’s behalf, but her sister had replied that she wanted neither to meet nor to talk about Camilla. Few understood the reason for her disapproval: the queen was nervous that the character exposed in the Camillagate tapes was that of a shrewd mistress. ‘Oh darling, I love you,’ Camilla had gushed. The much less savvy Diana never made such over-the-top declarations. Carried away by a gust of tenderness towards himself, Charles complained that neither Diana nor his mother ever sympathised with his needs.

Exasperated by what he termed an intolerable situation, and egged on by Princess Margaret, he approached his mother late one night while he was staying at Balmoral and asked that she soften her antagonism so he could live openly with Camilla. He assumed that the queen, who rarely interfered or directly forbade anything, even the Dimbleby project, would not object.

But on that evening she had had several Martinis, and to Charles’s surprise she replied forcefully: she would not condone his adultery, nor forgive Camilla for not leaving Charles alone to allow his marriage to recover. She vented her anger that he had lied about his relationship with what she called ‘that wicked woman’, and added, ‘I want nothing to do with her.’ Met with a further hostile silence, Charles fled the room. In his fragile state, her phrase – ‘that wicked woman’ – was unforgettable. Tearfully, he telephoned Camilla. She in turn sought consolation from Bolland, who later received a call from Charles with a verbatim report of his conversation with his mother. Shortly after the confrontation, an opinion poll found that 88 per cent of Britons opposed their marriage.

Not everything was bad news. Good fortune had pushed disagreeable characters to one side. ‘Kanga’ Tryon, Charles’s Australian former girlfriend, had died suddenly after a period of declining health, so removing one potential source of mischief; and Charles Spencer, Diana’s brother and an outspoken critic of Charles, had damaged his own reputation with an acrimonious divorce.

With two irritants removed, Charles decided to defy the queen and take a small but critical step towards Camilla’s acceptance. On 12 June 1998 he introduced Camilla to William at St James’s Palace. On the eve of his sixteenth birthday, his son assumed that the twenty-minute meeting would remain private, but in what turned out to be a genuine mistake Camilla’s assistant leaked it. In the tabloid storm that followed, Camilla found herself implicated in Diana’s death. To fight back, she and Bolland arranged that Stuart Higgins, a former editor of the Sun, would write a flattering article in the Sunday Times. At the recent Way Ahead Group meeting, Higgins wrote, the royal family had agreed as a priority to normalise Camilla’s position in the royal household. That was inaccurate: she had not even been mentioned during that summer’s meeting. But the distortion, approved by Charles, chimed with his campaign during the weeks before his fiftieth birthday. In Downing Street no one was fooled. Alex Allan, the prime minister’s private secretary, had written about the obstacles that faced Charles and Camilla, and concluded that nuptials were unlikely.

Disregarding the resentment towards them, Charles, Camilla and Bolland met at Highgrove to construct another campaign. The first hurdle was to demythologise Diana by radically changing her image and portraying her as a manipulative hysteric. The vehicle was to be Penny Junor’s book. The author’s plan had changed since Diana’s death. Instead of focusing on Camilla, Junor intended to shatter the image of the late Princess of Wales as the put-upon innocent and to cast Charles as a helpless victim, with neither parents nor friends to provide support. The publication of Charles: Victim or Villain? was timed to coincide with his birthday in November. Enriched by dramatic disclosures, the book described Diana as ‘sick, irrational, unreasonable and miserable’ on account of her bulimia, and therefore an unbalanced and unfaithful woman who compelled Charles to return to his true love. ‘[Charles] had to put up with years of tantrums and abuse,’ wrote Junor. He ‘cut his friends out of his life at Diana’s insistence, and even gave away the dog he loved in an effort to make Diana happy’.

Junor questioned Diana’s sanity by quoting a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, arrived at by scouring the internet, for an explanation of her behaviour. Charles supported the diagnosis: ‘We must get this out,’ he said. In a further attempt to damage Diana’s reputation, Junor wrote that the princess had been the first to commit adultery. In a series of revelations, the book described Diana bombarding Oliver Hoare, a married art dealer with whom she was having an affair, with anonymous telephone calls. Diana had denied the relationship, even though it had lasted some months, but accurately blamed a mischievous schoolboy for the nuisance calls. The book also unmasked her affair in 1986 with Barry Mannakee, one of her police protection officers, as well as confirming her long amour fou with James Hewitt.

Junor’s book shocked Diana’s loyalists, who were outraged by the complicity of Charles’s staff. Throughout his life, Charles had never been able to give and take. Thinking only about himself, he resented suggestions of equality with his wife. Diana’s supporters recalled his jealousy of her popularity during their first visit to Australia in 1983. Junor, they noted, had omitted from her book the argument between Charles and Diana on their plane after it landed at Alice Springs about who should go down the steps first (Charles won). Later that day, the roaring welcome that the children in the crowds gave to Diana had infuriated the prince. ‘I should have had two wives and just walked in the middle,’ he said grumpily to an aide.

At first, Diana had not grasped her husband’s feelings of resentment, and when she did, she fuelled them. At a music college during their second visit to Australia in 1988, Charles scraped a bow over a cello, whereupon Diana glided across to a piano to play perfectly a favourite piece by Grieg. To the media’s bemusement, Charles looked crestfallen. She had stolen his show. While she glowed as the global icon, he was the middle-aged man typically photographed on a Scottish estate, dressed in tweeds, resting against a shepherd’s crook.

To combat that image, Junor described incidents that appeared to be fuelled by Charles’s desire for revenge. The book mentioned the speculation about Diana’s death threats to Camilla in telephone calls, and her attempted suicide while pregnant with William. However, she omitted any description of Diana’s misery during her honeymoon on Britannia after she heard Charles talking on the phone with Camilla, conversations also overheard by the ship’s crew. Nor was there any mention of Diana’s acts of vindictiveness: that Charles had entered their suite on the yacht to find her in tears cutting up a watercolour he had just completed (a version of that episode would be included in Junor’s admiring biography of Camilla in 2017). The book had only minimal sympathy for the neglected twenty-year-old bride. Undoubtedly, Diana had fabricated and exaggerated Charles’s drift towards adultery, but equally Junor did not reveal the complete truth about his relations with Camilla. In 1973, while waiting for Andrew Parker Bowles’s proposal, Camilla had many admirers but only two other serious boyfriends. Andrew, she knew, was not passionately in love with her, but he was charming, good-looking and well-connected. As a close friend would say, he was a thirty-three-year-old officer who needed to marry. Camilla was the best of the bunch as a potential wife, fun and good with people, yet he expected his bachelor life to go on as before.

One week before their wedding, Charles had telephoned Camilla from his Royal Navy ship. Sounding desperately lonely, he asked whether she was sure about marrying, but did not propose himself. After ending the call, Camilla immediately repeated the conversation to her fiancé. They both laughed, knowing that Charles felt isolated and depressed as a result of his sister Anne’s marriage to Mark Phillips.

In hindsight, even Andrew Parker Bowles would realise that he could never have been loyal to Camilla. Despite his Catholicism and his intention to be a good husband, he started his adulteries earlier than he had anticipated. Not long after their wedding, Camilla discovered her husband’s affairs. She was upset but resigned. Her feelings for Charles changed only after Andrew abandoned her during long foreign trips. Even then, she was not genuinely in love with Charles. Many friends were convinced that she continued to love Andrew, but was flattered by the prince’s attentions.

The much-trumpeted newspaper serialisation of Junor’s book was accompanied by a statement from Charles’s office that he had ‘not authorized, solicited or approved’ it. Junor would confidently contradict that assertion, and offered details of the help she had received, with Charles’s authority, from his staff.

For his part, Mark Bolland denied providing any material critical of Diana, but Robin Janvrin did not believe him. In his opinion, Bolland’s fingerprints were all over the book, which marked a sharp escalation of the campaign to make Charles’s relationship with Camilla acceptable to the British public. As another Buckingham Palace official sniped, Charles reigned over ‘an old-fashioned court filled with a sack-full of snakes’. In the midst of the Junor headlines, ITV reported that Charles would be ‘privately delighted’ if the queen abdicated. Shortly after, following an unrecorded hour-long conversation with the prince, Gavin Hewitt reported on the BBC that Charles was frustrated by Buckingham Palace’s withholding of power. Janvrin was incandescent. Not only were the tabloids using Junor’s book to reignite stories about Charles’s adultery, but simultaneously his birthday party at Highgrove for 350 people was spawning headlines about the queen’s ‘snub’ – her rejection of his invitation because of Camilla’s presence. Further to enhance his client’s reputation, Bolland circulated a comment from Mario Testino, Diana’s favourite photographer, who when asked whether Camilla should be queen, replied, ‘Definitely. Have you met her? She’s a great person. If you meet her, you want to hang out with her.’

In Janvrin’s opinion, Bolland’s operation was out of control. Charles contacted his mother from Bulgaria to protest his innocence about the abdication report. His denial was suspicious to those around the queen who knew of his impatience to be king, while Bolland’s declaration of innocence was discounted. The tabloid headline-writers were ecstatic.

Janvrin’s anger reflected the queen’s bewilderment. The monarchy, her advisers believed, did not need spin like Downing Street. During a visit to St James’s Palace, Janvrin told Stephen Lamport that there was no reason for Charles to campaign so energetically to promote Camilla. Bolland was acting as a free agent rather than as part of the team, and by standing between the tabloids and the royals he risked getting ‘run over’ for his misjudgement.

Lamport could have honestly pleaded ignorance. He was unable to manage Bolland, who with the two principal plotters excluded him from their discussions. To keep face, he volunteered that, whenever relevant, Janvrin would be kept informed about Charles’s plans, and that his opinion would be taken into account. He added that Bolland might not be a desirable presence, but he was effective, and said that Charles would like to introduce Janvrin to Camilla, who by chance was in the building. ‘Certainly not,’ replied Janvrin – any meeting would need the queen’s permission. With that, he walked out of the palace. Charles was furious.

In an effort to calm the storm, David Airlie took Bolland for lunch at White’s, his club in St James’s. The older man counselled that things were done in a certain way, and that Her Majesty would be grateful if he could stick to the rules. In his defence, Bolland contended that Stuart Higgins, acting as an adviser to ITV, had distorted a conversation between them. ‘Stuart screwed me up,’ he said, and refused to speak to the former journalist again. ‘But it was a tricky week,’ he admitted.

Reports of the lunch at White’s reached Camilla. She feared that her agent was ‘moving to the dark side’ and taking orders from Buckingham Palace. Bolland rushed to reassure her, and in turn Charles, who on reflection decided there was no alternative but to treat Janvrin as an ally. Bolland was dispatched to tell the courtier about a weekend party Charles was hosting at Sandringham. Among the guests would be Jacob Rothschild, Peter Mandelson and Susan Hussey, a trusted friend and lady-in-waiting to the queen. Under pressure from Camilla, Charles agreed that she should also be invited. The tabloids would undoubtedly highlight her presence in the queen’s home despite the monarch’s disapproval. To Bolland’s relief, instead of protesting, Janvrin consulted the queen, who agreed that as it was a private party, she did not need to be involved.

Janvrin also averted another argument, this time about Michael Fawcett. Charles had insisted that Fawcett supervise the preparations for his official birthday party at Buckingham Palace. The queen, who still disliked Fawcett, objected, but Janvrin persuaded her that he ‘must be kept onside’ because of his importance to Charles.

Shortly after this, the plotters delivered their coup: a major birthday party for Charles, this time at Highgrove, with Camilla on public display. She was duly photographed arriving at the party looking regal, having prepared herself for the event with a week’s cruise on Yiannis Latsis’s yacht in the Aegean. Charles presented himself as a man who had found peace with the woman he loved. The event was arranged by Emilie van Cutsem, a socially ambitious Dutchwoman, the wife of an old friend of Charles from his Cambridge days. Having cared for William and Harry during the worst years of the prince’s marriage, she was distrusted by Camilla, but that undercurrent went unnoticed during the riotous celebration. However, what was not so easy to overlook were the absentees: of the royal family only Princess Margaret turned up. None of Charles’s three siblings accepted his invitation.

His close friends were divided. Some supported him for ‘pushing at the right pace’. Others, mindful of their relations with the queen and fearful of losing invitations to Sandringham and Balmoral, spoke loudly about the advantage of caution. This group included Nicholas Soames; Emilie van Cutsem’s husband Hugh; Charles Lansdowne, owner of Bowood House in Wiltshire near Ray Mill, Camilla’s home; Piers von Westenholz, an antique dealer; and Charles and Patty Palmer-Tomkinson. One malicious critic told of Patty’s panic during a motorway journey. Charles had telephoned to say he was unsure whether he could be present at her daughter Santa’s wedding. Patty pleaded, and finally Charles and Camilla agreed to come, but arrived separately. In the background hovered Annabel Elliot, Camilla’s sister. The Elliots protected Camilla from Soames and the Palmer-Tomkinsons. Their vigilance, sniped some, stemmed from their fear of losing influence. Everyone seemed to have mixed motives, but few forgot Diana’s carping about the ‘brown-nosers’ around Charles, whom she called ‘oilers’.

Two nights later there was yet another birthday party, this time at Hampton Court. Camilla was there too. Early the next morning, Charles left for Sheffield to meet a group of disadvantaged young people. Such visits not only placated his critics but also reflected his genuine interest in the young. The following evening, nearly a thousand guests, including Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, arrived for Charles’s official birthday party at Buckingham Palace. Camilla was not among them.

‘Everyone here,’ said the queen, turning to her son during her speech, ‘has benefited from the breadth of your interests and from your vision, compassion and leadership.’ Listening alongside Blair was Peter Mandelson. Both must have appreciated Charles’s political talent in his endearing reply to ‘Mummy’, concealing his true feelings about the absence of his mistress.

Six weeks later Mandelson, newly appointed as minister for trade and industry, was forced to resign after failing to reveal a loan from Geoffrey Robinson, a Treasury minister, to help buy his house while Robinson was under formal investigation by his own department. As Mandelson sat tearfully in his ministerial office listening on the telephone to Blair’s fatal reprimand, Alastair Campbell, who was in the room with him, noticed a Christmas card from Charles occupying pride of place on his desk. Campbell dismissed the prince as an interfering, privileged fool, but Mandelson defended him, grateful for Bolland’s reassurance that his relationship with Charles would be unaffected by the scandal. Charles could not afford to cast aside a valuable if tainted supporter just as he was heading for another showdown with the media.

Thanks to Bolland’s introductions, the prince had established personal relations with several newspaper editors. After receiving invitations to the birthday party at Hampton Court, they published positive articles to ‘build him up’ and prove that the Camilla campaign had not been harmed by the queen’s boycott. Just two days after the party, several papers published photographs of Camilla on horseback, with her approval.

The next task was to begin repairing the damage caused by Penny Junor’s wholesale damnation of Diana, an assault Charles half-regretted. Although Junor had written that he remained in love with Diana and prayed for her every night, his denial of any involvement with the book had not convinced anyone. In mitigation, he pleaded that his reputation would be restored by the publication of his personal documents long after his death. When that did little to silence the criticism, he was persuaded to release copies of his handwritten letters to ‘a close relative’ to the Daily Mirror. Apparently composed during their fractious journey around Australia in 1983, the letters professed his love for Diana. He especially admired ‘her wonderful way of dealing with people. Her quick wit stands her in excellent stead, particularly when silly people ask what she has done with William or why hasn’t she brought him etc.’ He went on, ‘Diana has done wonderfully throughout this gruelling exercise and has won everyone’s heart – including some of the most hard-bitten Aussie “knockers”.’ He added, ‘I do sometimes worry so much about what I have landed her in at such an impressionable age. The intensity of interest must be terrifying for her.’

In another letter, written a year later, when the couple’s marriage was already under severe strain, Diana had confessed to the same ‘relative’: ‘I can’t stand being away from him.’ She wrote that Charles’s early return from a fishing trip was a ‘wonderful surprise’, and in yet another letter described a ‘marvellous’ time at Balmoral. Since that contradicted the recollection of her friends, who recalled her permanent misery in Scotland, some suspected that an unseen hand had fabricated all the letters as a way to promote Charles.

On the following day the Mirror published more excerpts from letters apparently written to the same ‘close relative’ by Charles in 1988 and 1989, three years after the marriage’s collapse. The prince admitted to depression and insecurity because his public work had little impact and his arguments were ignored. ‘Sometimes I am terrified by the expectations people have of me and of the immense responsibility thrust on me,’ he confided. ‘I sometimes feel that I am going to let people down, however hard I try … I sometimes wonder why we rush about so much or why I, in particular, feel I have to solve all the nation’s problems single-handed? It must be a basic weakness of character which advancing age may cure!’ That was Charles’s genuine voice. The doubts about the authenticity of the early letters arose only after Mark Bolland confessed honest ignorance about the identity of the ‘close relative’ who released them to James Whitaker, the Mirror’s royal correspondent. Whitaker, loyal to Charles, added a flourish about the lonely prince’s virtues: ‘Listening to Charles talking about his lack of self-esteem, one could easily cry for him … The important thing to understand about this tortured, complex man is that he does feel he has the cares of the world on his shoulders. He tries so hard to deliver, to do his duty as he thinks is right.’

The letters’ publication gave Charles confidence to use the media more aggressively. ‘Let’s risk the biscuit,’ he told Bolland after several newspapers published photographs of his visit with Camilla to a London theatre. The positive comments encouraged him once again to confront his mother over their relationship, only this time in public.

In the weeks after his birthday, they had not spoken. The atmosphere at Sandringham over Christmas must have been frosty. Now he wanted to stage a spectacular event to establish Camilla as his permanent partner. He needed a photograph that was neither snatched nor contrived. The ideal moment would occur on 29 January 1999, seventeen months after Diana’s death, when Annabel Elliot celebrated her fiftieth birthday at the Ritz hotel in Piccadilly.

‘The prince must come,’ she wailed. ‘It would be terrible if he didn’t.’

‘Let’s lance the boil,’ agreed Bolland, arguing that snatched photographs by the paparazzi were poor-quality and rewarded only the photographer. In what Bolland regarded as Charles’s ‘cunning and tough’ directives, it was agreed to transform the couple’s exit from the hotel into a historic milestone.

A tip to a Daily Mail diarist revealed Charles’s ruse. ‘Will they arrive or leave together?’ the diarist was prompted to ask in his column. Bolland then telephoned Arthur Edwards, the Sun’s royal photographer, to draw attention to the item. From there, reaction snowballed. The first of over two hundred photographers and TV crews staked out their positions opposite the Ritz three days before the event. They were allowed to block the pavement and the street to record a romance that according to legend had started twenty-seven years earlier. The royal command overrode any official opposition from the police or Westminster council. On the night, anxious newspaper editors delayed printing their main editions while journalists called Bolland – dining with the editor of the Sunday Times in a City restaurant – for reassurance that the ‘historic’ appearance would indeed happen.

Just before midnight, Charles and Camilla stepped from the hotel’s entrance amid a thunderclap of flashing lights, and posed briefly before getting into a car. Dressed in a sombre suit, the prince looked serious while Camilla appeared radiant. The results exceeded Charles’s expectations. Across the world, the photographs were interpreted even more positively than he had planned. ‘At Last’ blared the Mirror. ‘Meet the Mistress’ was the Sun’s less fawning headline. There was unanimity about the fallacy of previous predictions. Over the past decade, so many clever people had forecast that the next stage would never happen: first, few believed that Charles and Diana would separate, then that they would divorce. Next, they discounted an enduring public relationship between Charles and Camilla. Now, relying on Buckingham Palace’s spokesman, the same soothsayers dismissed the idea of Charles marrying Camilla, and ridiculed the notion of Camilla eventually becoming queen. The queen remained silent, actively supported by the queen mother during their regular conversations. Charles was stubborn. He had pushed recognition one step further, but he did not underestimate the continuing obstacles before he could finally override his mother’s wishes. The media would be his weapon.

That same media which for years he had cursed for being intrusive, and for cynically disbelieving his denials of adultery, had now become his ally. Rather than revile their misrepresentations, he encouraged Mark Bolland to welcome more editors to St James’s Palace and to drip-feed stories: about Camilla wearing a brooch from him as a token of love; about the smiles towards the couple during further visits to the theatre; and, to please the Sun, a visit to the Soho gay pub that had been nail-bombed by a neo-Nazi fanatic.

Just before flying to New York in 1999 to promote Camilla, Bolland met the senior editors of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers at Wapping, News Corporation’s London headquarters. Both the Sun and the News of the World continued to reflect their readers’ love for Diana and their dislike of Charles and Camilla. Winning over working-class women – who made up many of the newspapers’ readers – was a priority. Bolland’s hosts were Les Hinton, the corporation’s chief executive, and Rebekah Wade, an editorial director at the Sun. Both distrusted the royals’ spokesmen. Too often their journalists had approached the palaces’ media officials for a comment about a murky revelation only to be rebutted with an outright lie. All that, Bolland promised, would change. He would speak the truth, not least because he needed the Murdoch press’s support against the queen. ‘We were turning up the gas,’ he would later say, ‘because the queen was unmovable.’

Nine months after the New York trip, in early June 2000, Bolland returned to Wapping for lunch with Rebekah Wade, who by then had been introduced to Charles and Camilla. Using Wade as an ally posed no difficulty for Bolland, but the alliance led to a standoff between Wade and the normally unflappable Robin Janvrin, who was surprised when she asked, ‘When is Her Majesty going to give the green light for Charles and Camilla to marry?’

‘Public opinion is against it,’ he replied.

‘Well,’ said Wade, ‘we would have to go against the queen, because our readers are for Camilla. The queen should think again.’ She added, ‘We might move to support an abdication and let Charles take over.’

Days later, the headline on the Sun’s front page blared ‘Marry Her, Sir’. Inside the same edition was a prominent report, with photographs of Charles, dressed in military uniform, taking the salute in France for seven hundred Dunkirk veterans on the sixtieth anniversary of their evacuation. ‘This is very much the Dunkirk spirit,’ he told them. That weekend was a victory for Charles, Camilla and Bolland; they were starting to dictate the agenda.

In Buckingham Palace, the normally even-handed Janvrin was shocked. The Sun’s threat to campaign against the queen was typical of the divisiveness masterminded by Bolland. Ever since he had been hired, the battle between the palaces had turned into a public brawl.

In June 1999, a poll had shown that 57 per cent of the British public supported a marriage between Charles and Camilla, up from 30 per cent two years earlier. More relaxed than previously, Charles now entered receptions looking confident – but also, Roy Strong observed, unfashionably ‘Hanoverian’ and often surrounded by courtiers chosen apparently because they were shorter than him. Tony Blair also noticed Charles’s new self-confidence. Anji Hunter, his special assistant, was sent to ask Bolland if Charles was intent on marrying Camilla. Officially, Hunter was instructed not to interfere, but privately she told Blair about Charles’s resolve.

To neutralise the Earl of Carnarvon’s support for the queen’s opposition to his remarriage, Charles recruited Angus Ogilvy, the brother-in-law of Lord Airlie, to negotiate on his behalf. Ogilvy was married to Princess Alexandra, a trusted cousin of the queen. Briefed by Charles, he relayed to the queen that her son would not compromise or surrender. This was not the rebellion of a petulant prince, but reflected a man unafraid, even delighted, to challenge authority.