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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СКАЧАТЬ claimed to have witnessed not only Charles’s trysts with Camilla but Diana’s affair with her riding instructor, Major James Hewitt. But in November 1995 both scandals were eclipsed by Diana’s television interview on the BBC’s Panorama. After reciting her rehearsed criticism about the royal family, she admitted her adultery with Hewitt, and voiced her doubts about whether Charles would ever be king. The next moment, she accused Camilla of committing adultery with Charles from the first day of her own marriage, even intimating that her rival had slept with Charles the night before their wedding. Camilla, claimed Diana, was a permanent presence on their return from honeymoon: ‘There were three of us in the marriage, so it was a bit crowded.’

      Britain was divided about where the guilt lay. The majority, especially women, blamed Charles. They believed the version written by Richard Kay, the Daily Mail journalist and Diana’s confidant: ‘I knew a girl of utter simplicity, even naïvety – frightened, uncertain and delightful company. She needed to be understood. She was not manipulative, but pushed to extremes of misery by the commentators. She just dreamed of being ordinary with a humdrum routine. “They don’t know how lucky they are,” she said about the millions of anonymous women envious of her looks and lifestyle.’

      Visitors to Balmoral described a very different figure. Their accounts portrayed a manipulative woman intent on wrecking relationships, especially her own with Charles and with his mother. Some recalled an occasion when the queen, happily anticipating walking through the fields with her grandsons during an autumn pheasant shoot, was taken aback to be told that Diana had insisted instead that her children go swimming in a local public pool. Those same eyewitnesses blamed Diana for deceiving her staff about her covert cooperation with both the Morton book and the Panorama interview. They indicted royal advisers, especially Fellowes and Aylard, for failing to prevent the recurring crises.

      Blame also fell on Camilla. Many times, her critics believed, she could have stood back to allow Charles and Diana to reconcile. Instead, she coldly pushed her rival aside. The climax was a confrontation between the two women sometime in 1989, when Diana arrived unexpectedly at a birthday party at Annabel Goldsmith’s house in Ham, near Richmond. Charles was with Diana, while both the Parker Bowleses were already there. As the rest of the room fell suddenly silent, Diana challenged Camilla to leave Charles alone. While acknowledging the hurt she was causing, Camilla controlled her fury and commented only about Diana’s ‘unacceptable behaviour in a private house’. The princess, she said was poorly placed to complain. While Camilla confined herself to a single, conventional relationship, Diana, she had been told by friends, was ‘working her way through the Life Guards’. Camilla’s intimates blamed the bruising encounter on Diana for creating ‘such a public scene’. Others accused Camilla of bitchiness.

      Following Diana’s Panorama interview, the queen and Prince Philip – neither of whom Charles viewed as well-meaning advisers – told him that he could not rebuild his image nor dampen the controversy about the succession until he broke with Camilla. His misery deepened, and under pressure from his mother he agreed that he and Diana should divorce. Racked by self-doubt, he telephoned friends for reassurance, often talking well into the night. He mainly sought consolation in long calls with Fiona Shackleton and Camilla. ‘No one else,’ he later remarked, ‘was willing to lift a finger to help me.’ Less than twenty miles from Highgrove, damned as a marriage-wrecker, Camilla hid out in her house. Fuel was poured onto the flames by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who privately let it be known that, while he would crown Charles, he would not crown Camilla.

      ‘What more do I have to do?’ Charles tearfully asked Sandy Henney, a media adviser on his staff, and Aylard, her superior. ‘What’s the solution?’ He took the advice on offer, then made his decision: first, he ordered Aylard to announce that he had no intention of remarrying. Second, he followed Henney’s suggestion: ‘Push the PR to show “business as usual”. Project your work, sir.’

      One of his first initiatives was to visit a market in Croydon, in south London. After walking through the stalls eating jellied eels, he met locals in a pub. As with his earlier trip to Caernarvon, the media ignored his visit. On the same day, spectators and journalists besieged Diana at a Paris fashion show, and for twenty-four hours she once again dominated the world’s headlines. There were times in her years in the limelight when she was the most photographed person in the world.

      Charles realised that in media terms it was no contest, and ordered Aylard to send him only cuttings with good news. ‘Mama down the road,’ he told a visitor, ‘reads newspapers; I don’t. It would drive me mad.’ Instead he listened to Radio 4’s Today programme while on his exercise bike. Occasionally, enraged by an item, he threw an object at the radio. The set was always being repaired.

      The modern world continued to infuriate him. At a conference to promote the Prince’s Trust, the umbrella for all his charities, he was introduced to young people using computers, which he disliked. ‘Show His Highness how Google works,’ one girl was asked. ‘Tap in “Prince of Wales”.’ The first item to appear was about a Prince of Wales bar in Seattle, on America’s west coast. Charles did not appreciate the general laughter.

      Highgrove was his sanctuary, although even there he was not totally safe. One day Bruce Shand, Camilla’s father, paid a visit. The Mayfair wine merchant told the prince that Aylard’s announcement that Charles would not marry again had upset both Camilla and himself. ‘You can’t treat my daughter like this,’ he said. ‘She’s neither fish nor fowl.’

      The entire House of Windsor also seemed ranged against him. At Christmas 1996, Charles brooded over his suspicion that his brothers, Edward and Andrew, were plotting his downfall. Andrew, he believed, had been spreading poison about Camilla to the queen and Prince Philip; now, mindful of Diana’s prediction on Panorama that he would not be king, Charles convinced himself that Diana and Sarah, Andrew’s estranged wife, were hatching plans to replace him as heir by announcing that on the queen’s death or abdication Andrew would be Regent until William was eighteen, when he would take over. ‘Andrew wanted to be me,’ Charles later told Bolland. ‘I should have let him work with me. Now he’s unhelpful.’ As for Anne, his sister had aggravated the situation; instead of mediating between her siblings, she had criticised Charles for his adultery. ‘She’s one to talk,’ he said, irritated by her Goody Two-Shoes image. ‘Look at her past.’ Anne, he declared, had enjoyed an intimate friendship with Andrew Parker Bowles at the same time that Charles was with Camilla.

      By the end of the Christmas holiday, Charles had decided to ignore his parents and continue his relationship with Camilla. Once his divorce was finalised, he would no longer suffer the indignity of meeting her only in secret. Succumbing to the public’s displeasure was beyond the price of duty. Convinced that the nation’s hostility would diminish if her virtues were explained, he telephoned Alan Kilkenny, the public relations consultant who in late 1994 had helped guide Camilla through her divorce, to ask for assistance.

      Kilkenny had already been advising Charles to shed his ‘uncool’, fogeyish image. As usual with such requests, Charles expected Kilkenny to work without payment. The publicist might expect a Cartier clock embossed with Charles’s crest, but nothing more. The prince’s plan for Camilla’s divorce had been discussed at a meeting between himself, Dimbleby (present as a close friend), Camilla and her sister Annabel Elliot, Annabel’s husband Simon, Aylard and Kilkenny at the home of Patty and Charlie Palmer-Tomkinson. The Palmer-Tomkinsons lived seventy miles from Highgrove and were close friends, particularly after an incident in Switzerland in 1988, when an avalanche had swept Charles and his skiing party towards a cliff edge. Andrew Parker Bowles was not told about the summit.

      The plan backfired when news of the Parker Bowleses’ divorce was leaked and private photographs of the family, stolen from their home, were published. Over the following months Kilkenny did his best, but by the middle of 1996 Charles feared that Camilla’s cause was being pushed ‘the wrong way and too hard’.

      Undecided СКАЧАТЬ