Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail. Tom Bower

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      Over the previous four years Higdon had developed huge affection for Camilla, who, he told a journalist, ‘has more self-confidence than anyone I know. Unlike Charles, who is doubtful and whiney, she’s so tough. She never questions anything.’ That judgement was about to change.

      The tension led to disagreement between Charles and his four horsemen Bolland, Kent, Brown and Bessent. Their confidence in the value of publicity had been eroded.

      ‘It wasn’t the right time,’ concluded Higdon. ‘It didn’t feel right for Camilla. It was too soon.’ She was ‘not great’ with Americans. Even worse, she was lazy. ‘For her to get up in the morning and survive until nightfall is a major effort. It was even hard for her to get out of bed. She tries her best to do nothing during the day.’ On the American trip, ‘the biggest problem was persuading her to dress up for a big occasion. The effort was overwhelming. Camilla was pissed off by the whole thing. It was horrible, a disaster.’

      While Camilla argued on the phone, Peter Brown was fretting in Brooke Astor’s luxurious Park Avenue apartment. The guest of honour was already thirty minutes late. ‘She’s gossiping with you-know-who,’ Brown confided to one of the guests, unaware of the true circumstances. But when Camilla did finally arrive, no sign of any argument was visible. That skill offset her limitations, and was adored by Charles.

      On public occasions she did her best to shine. Three days before flying to New York she had appeared to enjoy a dinner for fifty guests in the Chelsea home of the Greek shipping and steel magnate Theodore Angelopoulos and his wife Gianna, and a few days earlier she had been jolly at Geoffrey Kent’s fifty-sixth birthday party, despite her intense dislike of two of her fellow guests, Hugh and Emilie van Cutsem, both close friends of Charles.

      In her unusual world, Camilla was happier when having dinner later that night at Harry’s Bar with Andrew Parker Bowles, her former husband, and his new wife. Andrew was one of the few among her associates who aroused no antagonism among the courtiers. Others, she discovered, were less fortunate in the vicious intrigues around the court.

      A new plot, allegedly inspired by Galen Weston, a Canadian billionaire, had sought to oust Geoffrey Kent from Charles’s inner circle. Weston was irritated that Charles played for Kent’s polo team, and that Kent, rather than Weston, was the team captain. Their rivalry had spilled out into a dispute about a joint property development near Palm Beach. Now Weston was seeking to persuade Charles to dump an ally. Venomous spats among courtiers were not unusual for Charles. Despite the generosity shown to him by Kent, a global networker, Charles rarely reciprocated loyalty. ‘We don’t have close friends,’ he had told a member of the polo team. ‘The royal family does not allow anyone to become too familiar and be privy to our secrets.’

      During a helicopter trip – a moment chosen so the police escort could not overhear – Bolland had spoken to the prince about his benefactor’s fate. ‘He’s been a good and generous friend,’ agreed Charles. ‘Tell Stephen not to do anything. I’ve changed my mind.’ Stephen Lamport, Charles’s senior private secretary and Bolland’s superior, was accustomed to cutting off those who had displeased his master, and readmitting those who were pardoned.

      Charles’s decisions were often influenced by money, and in recent years Camilla had adopted the same criterion. The previous month, she and Charles, her two children and over twenty friends had sailed around the Aegean on the Alexander, the world’s third largest private yacht. They were the guests of Yiannis Latsis, a foul-mouthed Greek shipping billionaire whose fortune, some gossiped, was based on black marketeering, collaboration with the Nazis, and bribing Arabs for a stake in the oil trade. Six weeks later, after her introduction to Edmond and Lily Safra in New York, Camilla discovered that the billionaire banker also owned a luxury yacht, as well as an eighteen-acre estate in the south of France, La Leopolda, valued at over $750 million.

      ‘Is there any chance,’ Camilla had asked Higdon, who had made the introduction, ‘that I could stay at Lily Safra’s?’ An invitation to visit St James’s Palace was duly issued to Safra, and soon afterwards Michael Fawcett was arranging Camilla’s holiday on the estate.

      Her current trip to New York was part of Charles’s campaign to win over the British people; but in 1999 that struggle was far from won.

      2

       Plots and Counterplots

      Charles’s campaign to make Camilla accepted had started in 1996, one year before Diana’s death, a period that marked a new peak in the public’s disgust with the lives in the royal palaces. A succession of scandalous books, tapes and television interviews had reduced the prince’s approval rating to less than 10 per cent. Fearful that he would not inherit the crown, and even worse, that he might buckle under the pressure, Camilla had discussed his plight with Hilary Browne-Wilkinson, the solicitor who had managed her divorce from Andrew Parker Bowles. Soon after, Charles and Camilla invited Hilary and her husband, Nicolas ‘Nico’ Browne-Wilkinson, a senior judge, for dinner at St James’s Palace. The third guest was Fiona Shackleton, Charles’s divorce lawyer, at that time a decisive influence in his life.

      ‘You must deal with your media image,’ Nico Browne-Wilkinson told Charles.

      Nico’s wife offered a solution. While working at the Press Complaints Commission she had met Mark Bolland, the Commission’s twenty-nine-year-old director and in his private life the partner of Guy Black, a Cambridge graduate and political adviser. Bolland, Hilary Browne-Wilkinson said, was charming and well-connected, and had good relations with London’s senior media executives. He was also an outsider. Unlike other palace officials, he had been educated at a grammar school in Middlesbrough and had gone neither to Oxbridge nor the army, but had read Chemistry at York University. His understanding of the real world made him an ideal choice to promote Camilla and secure the public’s acceptance of her relationship with Charles. Hilary was supported by Fiona Shackleton, who said Bolland should be appointed as soon as Charles’s divorce was finalised.

      By the end of the evening, Charles and Camilla were half-persuaded. Both Shackleton and Hilary Browne-Wilkinson appeared relieved. Dabbling in that world, with access to the heir to the throne, was a fizzy experience for both lawyers. Charles’s reliance on such people signalled his anguish. In 1996 he was searching for scapegoats to blame for a decade of horror. Prone to grasp at any excuse, he agreed with the latest judgement of his inner circle of friends that Richard Aylard, his private secretary, was mainly responsible for his plight.

      In their opinion, Aylard’s cardinal error had been to encourage Charles two years earlier to open his heart to the journalist Jonathan Dimbleby for a biography and a two-hour television documentary.

      Over the previous months Aylard had spent nearly every day and many nights responding to his employer’s cries for protection from criticism, sacrificing his own private life and his marriage. To overcome Charles’s bouts of depression, he had encouraged him to cooperate with Dimbleby. When the resulting book and film proved a personal disaster, Charles refused to accept any blame for pressing Aylard to arrange the extraordinary access to his secrets.

      The Dimbleby project had been born from Charles’s anger that he was being treated as a mere ribbon-cutter rather than as the heir to the throne. His status had been devalued among courtiers in Buckingham Palace and some cabinet ministers by his refusal to end his relationship with Camilla. At that time, the very notion that the couple might marry was ridiculed by a country that had lost respect for the man who had betrayed his wife Diana. Unless Camilla was ousted, the critics agreed, Charles could not remain the queen’s automatic successor. Inaction might even jeopardise the СКАЧАТЬ