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 reputation as one of Britain’s best and most expensive divorce specialists. Now she, Hilary and Nico Browne-Wilkinson agreed: the solution was to oust Aylard and to appoint a really first-class public relations consultant.

      At the ensuing dinner in St James’s Palace, the three lawyers did not limit themselves to discussing Charles’s reputation. Hilary Browne-Wilkinson also spoke sympathetically about Camilla’s frustration that, while Diana basked in popular esteem, she was cast as the self-seeking adulteress. ‘I’m not this awful person,’ Camilla complained. ‘I just wish someone would do something about it.’

      Over the previous fifteen years, she had been forced to reassess her opinion of her rival. At the beginning of Charles’s marriage, in 1981, she had called Diana a ‘mouse’. But that evening with the Browne-Wilkinsons she spoke about a ‘wretched woman’ who was creating havoc by refusing to conform to her society’s expectations in dignified silence.

      Charles felt the same anger. While he spoke to the public about medicine, architecture, education and the environment and was generally ignored, Diana won global adulation by hugging children suffering from Aids, visiting hospices and sponsoring an anti-drugs campaign. ‘Clip her wings,’ Aylard had told the Foreign Office.

      ‘Good God, the games they play,’ was Diana’s reaction after an invitation from the British ambassador to Japan for her to visit the country had been cancelled. ‘We want to put her in her box,’ Aylard openly told Patrick Jephson, Diana’s private secretary.

      Yet despite all attempts to reduce Diana’s glow, her star remained undimmed. And on her own Diana had been remarkably successful in frustrating Charles’s efforts to make Camilla acceptable. Repeatedly, she had called amenable journalists to pour scorn on her former husband and his mistress.

      Agitated by her slurs, Charles and Camilla finally agreed that Mark Bolland should be appointed as soon as Charles’s divorce was finalised. Hilary Browne-Wilkinson intimated that she had secured the support of David English, the legendary editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail group. Bolland’s appointment was supported by Shackleton, who spoke out after having secured the approval of Robert Fellowes, not only the queen’s private secretary but Charles’s former brother-in-law. Prodded by Camilla, Charles agreed; Bolland would serve as his assistant private secretary under Aylard, and would also be Camilla’s adviser, friend and provider of the prize gossip she adored.

      Entrusting his fate to someone like Bolland was the last throw of the dice for the supreme aristocrat. Charles’s big hope was that Bolland possessed the allure and the media contacts – both of which Kilkenny and Aylard had lacked – to mastermind the revolution he needed. Inevitably, his close friend Patty Palmer-Tomkinson wanted to vet the proposed appointment. Invited to the Browne-Wilkinsons’ for lunch in the extended kitchen of their terraced house in Islington, north London, Palmer-Tomkinson exposed the social gulf between the prince and his proposed saviour: ‘So where do you normally eat dinner?’ she asked with genuine bewilderment. Shortly after, Bolland’s appointment was formally approved. ‘Charles has introduced a cuckoo into the nest,’ Kilkenny would drily observe. ‘His brief is to get rid of Aylard.’

      The wheels duly turned. Charles and Diana’s divorce was finalised on 28 August 1996. Days later, Bolland was introduced to Charles. ‘We need to improve my media image,’ said the prince. ‘To get me out of this hole.’ Reversing the Dimbleby blowback was the priority.

      Bolland’s attraction for Charles was unsurprising. The prince was animated by new personalities, especially a self-confident, streetwise soothsayer. For his part, Bolland offered loyalty and true friendship, especially to Camilla. She quickly passed on one observation she had learned early about her partner’s limitations. ‘Never push Charles too hard,’ she advised. ‘Always remember his terrible childhood, and how he was bullied at school and by his parents.’

      Bolland understood his terms of employment, but first he had to assess the people close to the prince. He was struck by the extent to which Charles disliked critical advice and surrounded himself with sycophants. Chief among them was Michael Fawcett, the son of an accountant from Orpington. Officially, Fawcett was Charles’s principal valet, but in reality he was his closest aide and most trusted comforter. Known as ‘the Fixer’ and ‘the Enabler’, he seemed omnipresent, loading Charles’s guns at Sandringham, wrapping his Christmas presents and caring for Camilla. An indispensable perfectionist, he smoothed his master’s existence. Unseen by outsiders, he also dominated a mendacious war zone competing against Paul Burrell, his opposite number in Diana’s court. Employed initially at Buckingham Palace in 1976, the nominal butler Burrell had next worked for Charles and Diana at Highgrove, and after the separation moved with Diana to Kensington Palace. Ever since, he had become a confidential accomplice in Diana’s life, witnessing her extreme moods and secret affairs.

      Of the two, Michael Fawcett’s position was the more uncertain, because Richard Aylard was plotting his removal. Bolland took a different view. ‘Fawcett is a good and decent man,’ he concluded after a short time, opting to conceal his antagonism towards Aylard, who he recognised was under threat.

      ‘I know why you’re here,’ said Sandy Henney, the deputy press officer at St James’s Palace, on the day Bolland was formally appointed, 12 May 1996. ‘It’s to make Camilla Parker Bowles acceptable.’ Bolland smiled. He had agreed with Charles that this often unkempt, horsey countrywoman should be transformed into the prince’s future wife, dressed by the best couturiers.

      The impetus for Charles’s instructions to Bolland often followed an agitated telephone conversation with Camilla. ‘You know, Mark,’ Charles would say, in what became a familiar routine, ‘I think people should be told about …’ The public should be aware, he complained, of his family’s demand that he abandon Camilla. The pressure on him, he continued, was unrelenting. On one occasion he read out a letter from his father urging him not to marry Camilla; Bolland was told to leak its contents, and Richard Kay of the Daily Mail, so often the royals’ first port of call, was duly briefed. Bolland also briefed the Daily Telegraph that after his divorce Charles would remain celibate, and would never see Camilla again.

      Disseminating that canard served several purposes. In their eagerness to stay close to Charles, few of his old circle welcomed Camilla’s proximity to the throne. Soon after Bolland’s appointment, Nicholas Soames, Berkshire landowner Gerald Ward, the Palmer-Tomkinsons and Charles’s other close friends visited him at St James’s Palace to ask about Charles’s relations both with other members of the royal family and with Camilla. The ‘three in the marriage’ scenario painted by Diana, they said, was not the whole story. There had always been other women in Charles’s life, including Eva O’Neill, a statuesque German blonde, and of course the Australian Dale ‘Kanga’ Tryon, whom he would visit as he drove between London and Gloucestershire (on which occasions Kanga’s husband conveniently made himself scarce). Charles, they said, was unlikely to marry Camilla.

      Bolland was not yet in a position to judge his employer’s intentions. He quickly saw that Camilla, like so many hunting women, was fun and fearless. Her romantic adventures as a teenager were no secret, nor was her unusual relationship with her husband Andrew. The husky captain in the Royal Horse Guards, ‘the Blues’, was famous for his affairs, and so had been unconcerned about Camilla’s first meeting Charles in the early 1970s, before their marriage. In Andrew and Camilla’s banter – she was prone to exaggeration – she had laughed about the prince being an emotionally immature boy suitable for a fun fling until, seven years into her relationship with Parker Bowles, she persuaded the captain to propose to her.

      Their engagement was presented by Charles, through Jonathan Dimbleby, as the missed opportunity of his life. At the time he was serving as a Royal Navy officer in the Caribbean. Ignoring the reality that Camilla neither loved him nor was interested in marriage other than to Parker Bowles, he lamented not having proposed before his rival. ‘The surge СКАЧАТЬ