Charles: Victim or villain?. Penny Junor

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СКАЧАТЬ If you’ve been in the ring with Nigel Benn you’re not frightened of the Prince of Wales. So it was absolutely fine.’

      The private secretary beat a retreat. A little later Eubank called him back. ‘Anyway, I hope I did the right thing. I called him Mr Windsor. I’m Chris Eubank, so I’m Mr Eubank. He’s Charles Windsor, so he must be Mr Windsor. Right?’

      ‘Yes,’ said the private secretary, fearing for his profile. ‘That’s absolutely fine.’

      Charles does have a sense of humour and a great sense of the absurd, but anyone who knows him well knows how important it is to judge his mood before ever presuming familiarity. His children are the exception; they can say and do what they like to him and if he starts to get testy or pompous about it, they simply tease him out of it. They are sensitive enough, though, to know who not to tease him in front of.

      One other person who can stop the Prince taking himself too seriously, and get away with it, is Mrs Parker Bowles; but she too picks her moments and would never embarrass the Prince in front of anyone other than his closest friends. They all acknowledge she has a miraculous effect on him, and whenever invitations to dinner at Highgrove are issued, they desperately hope Camilla will be there. If she is, the evening will be relaxed and good fun, with a great deal of gossip, jokes and giggling. Without her, the Prince is likely to be serious and if he’s feeling down – which without her he often is – he can be fairly leaden company.

      Thousands of young people whom he has helped during the course of the last twenty-one years rightly regard him as someone very special: without him they might never have had a chance in life. He has helped when no bank manager would have considered their application – even if they had known how to apply for a loan. He believed in their potential and has put time, thought, effort and money into helping through the Prince’s Trust and its various offshoots. The Prince’s Trust was just the beginning. He has spread himself over a wide range of interests and concerns, and he has done a huge amount of good in his fifty years, much of it unrecognised by the majority of the population. He has exploited his privilege and his position to very good ends, and there is no doubt that he is an extremely sensitive man, who cares desperately and sincerely. Yet he remains intrinsically very selfish and very spoilt.

      The problem is that Charles has no social equal, and few people have ever been brave enough over the years to say what needed to be said. There have been a few exceptions, and whenever rebuked for behaving in an inconsiderate manner to someone, the Prince has always been deeply ashamed. On one occasion, speaking at a Queen’s Silver Jubilee Trust dinner, the Prince made some rather barbed remarks about a couple of people in the room who were dragging their feet about taking up one of his ideas. At the end of the evening, Michael Colborne told the Prince he thought he had been unnecessarily harsh on the two individuals. Colborne had known the Prince during his time in the Navy and joined his staff in 1974. He felt so strongly that over the following weekend he sat down and put his feelings on paper, and sent the letter to the Prince, who was by then staying on a Duchy farm. A week later Charles was back at Highgrove, and called Colborne into his office.

      ‘You know that letter you wrote me?’ he said. ‘Do you know what I did with it? I read it and I screwed it up into a ball and I kicked it round the bedroom.’

      ‘Oh you did, did you, sir?’ said Colborne with a slight smile. ‘Why was that?’

      ‘Because unfortunately you were right. I wasn’t very nice to those two men that night.’

FOUR

       The Discovery of Diana

      ‘She was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything.’

      Friend of Prince Charles

      When Charles first met Diana she was a nondescript schoolgirl of sixteen – his girlfriend’s little sister. He was in the midst of a lengthy and enjoyable relationship with Sarah, and they met at Althorp, where he had been invited to a shoot. Diana was nothing more than a slightly plump, noisy teenager, but he made a profound impression on this particular teenager and Diana secretly set her heart on him then and there and determined that she would become Princess of Wales.

      Sarah’s romance with Charles came to an end when she spoke candidly to the press about it, saying, ‘I wouldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love, whether it was the dustman or the King of England. If he asked me I would turn him down.’ But they remained friends, and the Prince invited Sarah and Diana to his thirtieth birthday party at Buckingham Palace a year later, and a few months after that, in January 1979, they were both invited as guests of the Queen to a shooting weekend at Sandringham. That very weekend, their father, Earl Spencer, had come out of hospital following a brain haemorrhage that very nearly killed him.

      Later that year Diana was staying with her sister, Jane Fellowes, in her house at Balmoral to help with Jane’s new baby, while the Royal Family was in residence at the castle. But the first time Charles saw her as anything more than a jolly and bouncy young girl whom he enjoyed taking out from time to time as one of a group to make up numbers was in July 1980, when they were both invited to a weekend party with mutual friends in Sussex. He had just had a dramatic and humiliating bust up with his latest passion, Anna Wallace, and he and Diana were sitting side by side on a hay bale while their hosts prepared a barbecue, when the conversation turned to Mountbatten, who had died the previous August. What Diana said touched the Prince deeply – as she knew it would.

      ‘You looked so sad when you walked up the aisle at Lord Mountbatten’s funeral,’ she said. ‘It was the most tragic thing I’ve ever seen. My heart bled for you when I watched. I thought, “It’s wrong, you’re lonely – you should be with somebody to look after you.”’

      It is ironic that her sensitivity about Lord Mountbatten should have triggered Charles’s interest in Diana as a future bride, for Mountbatten would not have approved of the match. In losing his beloved great-uncle, his ‘Honorary Grandfather’, the Prince had lost his mentor; also, for a considerable time, he had lost his way in life. Mountbatten would have applauded Diana’s sweet nature, her youth, her beauty, her nobility and her virginity; but he would have seen that the pair had too little in common to sustain them through fifty years of marriage. He might also have spotted her acute vulnerability and the damage sustained by her painful start in life, and known that the Prince, with his own vulnerability and insecurity, was not the right man to cope with her needs.

      Mountbatten’s murder had an unimaginable impact on the Prince’s life; it knocked him entirely off-balance. As he wrote in his journal on the evening he heard the news, ‘Life has to go on, I suppose, but this afternoon I must confess I wanted it to stop. I felt supremely useless and powerless …

      ‘I have lost someone infinitely special in my life; someone who showed enormous affection, who told me unpleasant things I didn’t particularly want to hear, who gave praise where it was due as well as criticism; someone to whom I knew I could confide anything and from whom I would receive the wisest of counsel and advice.’

      Mountbatten had criticised the Prince of Wales, most notably for his selfishness, but he also made him feel he was loved and valued, which neither of his parents had ever been able to do. Where his father had cut the ground from under his feet, Mountbatten had built him up, listened to his doubts and his fears, rebuked him when he felt he had behaved badly, encouraged him, cajoled him, provided a sounding board for his wackier ideas, a shoulder to cry on, and given him some much needed confidence. There was no one else in his life at that time who could СКАЧАТЬ