by Penny Junor
When Colleen arrived with them all for her first skiing trip, there was no snow on the mountains so she postponed the photo call. But some of the media couldn’t stay long enough for the weather to change and so all the Princes agreed to do an interim shot outside the hotel. Colleen made it clear that once there was some snow they would do the usual photo call for everyone else. ‘They didn’t hear that bit,’ she says, laughing, so when, after heavy snowfall that night she announced the next morning that they were going to do a lovely photo call up in the mountains, some Princes were more cooperative than others.
‘I asked the Prince of Wales and he said, “Yes, absolutely fine, go ahead. You talk to William.” So I had to go and chat to William. Harry was there as well – they were watching something on the telly. It was hysterical, a programme called Bansai which they would shout every so often; Harry kept bursting into laughter; the Prince of Wales was sitting in the corner reading, looking up at me. So I said, “We’ve got to do this photo call.” William said, “No, we’ve done a photo call.” “No, that was only for some of the media, the ones that had to leave. Now we need to do another one, otherwise you’re going to have all the paparazzi following you around for the rest of the week. So let’s just go and do a nice big one up the mountain.” “No, I’m not doing it.”
‘Now, I’ve got 150 media; it’s my first trip, Sandy’s sick so I can’t ring her, and I’m sitting there with this belligerent young man. This carried on backwards and forwards for a bit and in the end, I just lost it, the Mummy in me came out and I said, “Look, you’re doing it, otherwise you’re all going to be in trouble and it will be a rotten week for everybody. It won’t hurt you, it’ll be good for you, dah, dah, dah, dah” and went mad, and he just sat there.
‘Then Harry said, “Yeah, let’s do it, William. Get out the way, Colleen, I’m watching something,” and that was it. So Harry got the deal signed for me. That was the photo shoot where the public first heard William speak. I asked an ITN guy to ask him a question. He said ‘How’s it going?’ and William responded. It was a great photo call. They laughed, they chatted, they did it brilliantly – the best one they’d ever done. It was a turning point and the media went crazy because they’d never heard him speak on camera before. It was a kind of two fingers up to me I think, it was like, “Yeah, I can do it if I want to, when the mood takes me. I can deliver.”’
THE MEETING WITH MRS P. B.
When his initial attempt to introduce William and Harry to Camilla met with reluctance, the Prince of Wales didn’t push it. She was never at Highgrove when the boys were at home, nor at York House, where they now lived when in London, and although he was longing to bring her properly into his life, he felt that William and Harry’s feelings were paramount.
As a preliminary move he invited her children, Tom, his godson, and Laura, to stay with them when they were up at Birkhall in Scotland during the Easter holidays in 1998; another guest in the house was the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes. The meeting could not have been more successful, and thereafter the children met up from time to time, both in the country and in London, but still the Prince didn’t push it. The initiative, he felt, had to come from the boys.
At much the same time, William and Harry began plotting a surprise party for their father’s fiftieth birthday in November. It started out as a party for the Prince’s godchildren and their parents. As Tom was his godson, William therefore wanted to invite Camilla, but first he wanted to meet her in more private circumstances.
William had heard a lot of terrible things about Camilla from his mother, and about his father too – she spared him little – but he was beginning to realise that not everything he’d heard was entirely true. The party was an opportunity to say the things that had perhaps gone unsaid in the past, and a meeting with Camilla was an important part of that. He told his father he would like to meet her, and in June telephoned to say he was coming to London. Camilla happened to be staying for a couple of nights. When she heard,she said she must leave immediately, but the Prince said, ‘No, stay. This is ridiculous.’ He then rang William to tell him that Mrs Parker Bowles would be in the house, would that be a problem? To which, William replied, ‘No.’
The meeting took place on the afternoon of 13 June 1998. William said he would arrive at 7.00 p.m. but, typically, turned up at York House, at St James’s Palace, at about 3.30 p.m. and went straight up to his flat at the top of the house. The Prince went to find Camilla who was with her PA, Amanda McManus, and said, ‘He’s here, let’s just get on with it. I’m going to take you to meet him now.’ So he took her up to William’s flat, introduced them and left them alone to talk for about half an hour. At the end of the encounter, Camilla came out saying, ‘I need a drink.’ But it had been remarkably easy – William was friendly and Camilla was sympathetic and sensitive and understood the need to let things go at his pace. They met again for lunch a few days later and had tea a couple of times and, although it was some time before she spent a night at Highgrove when he was there, she did occasionally stay over when they were all in London and they would sometimes have breakfast together.
Nearly a month after the meeting at York House, Sandy Henney had a call from Rebekah Wade, then deputy editor of the Sun (and subsequently a prominent figure in the News International phone-hacking scandal). Wade was a good friend of Mark Bolland, whom William and Harry referred to as ‘Blackadder’, after the sitcom character, Lord Blackadder, played by Rowan Atkinson. Piers Morgan, editor of the Daily Mirror, was another friend and all three indulged in some mutual back-scratching. Wade said she’d heard there had been a meeting between Prince William and Mrs Parker Bowles. ‘I said, “Rebekah, I’m not going to deny it but the shit’s going to hit the proverbial fan when the young man finds out about this because he will think that someone’s been spying on him and anything we’ve done in terms of trying to persuade him that the media have a place etc.… it ain’t going to work. I’m really pissed off with this.” So she said, “What do you want me to do?” I said, “Can I have twenty-four hours? I want to talk to William.” “You’ve got it,” she said, “and you can write the story.”’
‘A couple of hours before the Sun went to press, Piers Morgan rang me and said, “I hear the Sun’s got an exclusive William story.” On a point of honour, my idea of dealing with the press was never to give one newspaper’s story to another. I said, “Have they?” The call had come through to Mark, to whom Morgan spoke every other day, but Mark said it was a press inquiry and put him through to me. “Okay. What are you asking me? It’s an exclusive story.” “I want to know.” “I wouldn’t betray another paper, just like I wouldn’t betray you.” “Well, I’m not getting off the line until you tell me what’s going on.” “You can stay there till hell freezes over, I’m not going to bloody tell you.” It caused real problems between Piers Morgan and me. He kept coming back with bits of the story and finally said, “There was a meeting and I suspect it was Camilla.” I said, “Unless you can tell me the whole story I’m not going to deal with this.” I think I signed my death warrant with that conversation. But it was a clever wheeze. You give a story to one journalist and then you give it to another. It’s as old as the hills but there’s some poor sod in the middle. I remember the time when Piers said I was over-protective about the boys and he did a really nasty piece about me. When he finally put the knife in at the end I should have seen it coming.’ But that was not for a while.
So Sandy told William what had happened. ‘I knew he wouldn’t like it, because he would see it as intrusion, as I did – and he didn’t trust the Prince’s office at the best of times. I didn’t like it, and I thought it was a cynical way of using William – if William’s okay with Camilla then the public should be okay with her too. But I had to deal with this young man, so I said, “We can’t win this battle but we can lose it slightly more gracefully. The story’s going to go in but we have the opportunity to put it from our point of view.” At the end of the day, I said to William, “This is
what we’re going to say, are you happy?” “Well, I’m not happy,” he said, “but I understand.” And I thought, how grown up. He could have gone into a real teenage-boy sulk but no – he said, “I understand” and accepted it.’
When the story appeared, an internal inquiry was immediately launched and ten days later, Camilla’s PA, Amanda McManus, fell on her sword. Her husband was a Times newspaper executive (a paper owned by News International, which also owns the Sun); she had gone home that night and told him what had happened. He mentioned it to ‘a trusted third party, unconnected with journalism or News International’, who had passed it on to the Sun. There was much regret on all sides at her departure, but it was not long before Amanda was quietly reinstated, and there are those who remain sceptical and believe she took the fall for someone else in the office.
‘Mark had incredible contacts,’ says Sandy, ‘and balls to do some of the things he did. Whether or not you agreed with some of his methods, he got results. He was incredible fun to work with … but Christ, he had an incisive brain, no wonder the kids called him Blackadder; but scary sometimes. My view of him was that he was working primarily for Mrs Parker Bowles and then the Prince. He wanted to make Mrs Parker Bowles acceptable; but you can’t treat the institution of monarchy as individuals, you need to treat it as a whole. They weathered the storm and the damage is behind them now but at the time, the public became almost indifferent to the institution and some of the stuff was very damaging.’
Colleen agrees. ‘Everyone paints this negative picture of Mark and he was a spin master, but if you look at what he inherited and where the Prince was, in terms of reputation, image etc., he had to turn it around and he did turn that. Some of our decisions in the Press Office may have caused some emotional upheaval. It wasn’t easy some of the time but I don’t think the Prince of Wales could have married Camilla without that groundwork. There’s payback each time. And sometimes he got that a bit out of kilter. He was very focused on the Prince of Wales and Camilla.’
As she says, ‘Without Mark, the Prince would have been unhappy and the boys would have been unhappy as a consequence, and it would have been damaging to the monarchy as a whole, so he did help. You could call it one of the greatest love stories ever or one of the greatest tragedies.’
Sandy Henney doesn’t believe that first meeting between William and Camilla healed all the wounds but it was a start, and William clearly didn’t come away thinking Camilla was as poisonous as he had been led to believe. She was nevertheless the ‘other woman’ whom his mother had blamed and he may have felt that by fraternising with the enemy he was betraying Diana. But he could see that Camilla made his father very happy and when his father was happy, everyone was happy.
Harry was less complicated about it than his brother. As someone who knows him well says, ‘Harry was just Harry.’ He just got on with life. He had no qualms about meeting Camilla, and so after consulting both boys, Charles invited Camilla to bring Tom and Laura over to Highgrove for tea one Sunday. It was the beginning of a process.
The surprise party was held on the night of 31 July, four months before his actual birthday, which fell during the school term. They had chosen a date before the summer migration to Balmoral. The Prince was incredibly touched that his sons should have gone to such trouble on his behalf, but sadly, the surprise was ruined. The Sunday Mirror got wind of what was planned, inadvertently from one of the guests, and ran a story the Sunday before the party. It did nothing to improve anyone’s relationship with the press, but the party was a huge success nonetheless.
Tiggy and the Prince’s former valet, Michael Fawcett, helped translate their plans into action but it was William and Harry who steered the event. They recruited the actors Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and Rowan Atkinson – all friends of the Prince through the work they’ve done for the Prince’s Trust – to help them write and put together a revue. It was along the lines of Blackadder, in which they’d appeared themselves, in front of several hundred of the Prince’s family and friends. The guests ate Highgrove lamb and organic vegetables and partied until 4 a.m.
The Prince was moved to tears by his children’s thoughtfulness, but what touched him most was their seating plan. They had placed Camilla in the front row of the audience between him and William’s godfather, King Constantine. Camilla was thrilled that they had asked her to be there. They couldn’t have given their father a more welcome or perfect birthday present, and he stood up at the end of the evening and thanked them both profusely. According to those who were there, he thanked everyone who had a hand in the evening, with the notable exception of Tiggy. She was obviously not in his good books.
Tiggy shouldered huge responsibility and took very good care of the boys; she was everything they needed to keep them happy and amused. She lifted the Prince’s spirits too, which, in the days before Camilla came out of the shadows, were often very low. As Colleen says, ‘She had a really important role to play. She was more like a big sister. They used to tease each other and muck about a lot. She could have been stricter on occasion. But they liked her and needed her, she was good support for them. The general opinion within the Household was that the boys were short on discipline at the time and there was nobody saying “No” – apart from the press office.’ Charles was enormously fond of Tiggy but at times she exasperated him, not least because she had an unerring ability to find her way into trouble. He was furious when a photograph appeared in the newspapers of her, with a cigarette between her lips, driving the car, while Harry was shooting at rabbits through the open window. And when a photograph of Harry abseiling down a dam wall wearing no safety gear appeared in the News of the World, he became apoplectic. And as Sandy says, ‘Tiggy and Mark [Dyer] got the bollocking of a lifetime and were told this must never happen again.’
Sandy had taken a call from Clive Goodman, the News of the World royal editor (who went to prison in 2007 for intercepting the Princes’ mobile phone messages, and was arrested again in 2011 on charges of corruption for bribing police officers). It was common for newspapers to ask for a comment. ‘It was a classic Saturday morning call. He said, “I’ve got this set of photographs, they’re quite horrific. It’s Harry going down the side of a dam on a safety line, abseiling.” “Clive,” I said, “come on, mate, it’s Saturday morning, how do I know what these photos are showing?” He said, “I’ll bike them to you.” An hour or so later, I see them. No crash helmet, no safety line and I’m thinking, Oh my God. First of all, get hold of Tiggy. “Tiggy,” “Yes, Granny,” which was their nickname for me, “what have I done wrong now?” “I don’t know yet but I want to know the circumstances behind this,” and she said, “Mmmm yes, we were there.” So I said, “Where was bloody Mark Dyer? He’s supposed to be in there acting like the big brother and sorting all this stuff out,” and she said, “He was asleep on a rock somewhere.” That’s a fat lot of good.’
A passer-by had taken the photo at the Grwyne-Fawr dam in Monmouthshire, and although it showed only Harry, both boys had abseiled down the 160-foot dam wall without any safety equipment – and no doubt had the thrill of their lives.
Sandy was in a dilemma; the photos were in breach of the privacy rules but they did show the people responsible for the Princes’ safety failing to protect them. In the interests of being open and honest with the press, she let the News of the World publish. The photograph ran on the front page with the headline ‘MADNESS! The boy dangling 100 ft up with no helmet or safety line is PRINCE HARRY.’ ‘Could I have stopped it?’ she says. ‘I doubt it. Yes, all right, the photographs were taken in an intrusive way but they showed someone being put in danger who shouldn’t have been, so I said, “I’m not going to complain to the PCC if you run it.” It was a judgment call but for us to have suppressed that would have been more damaging to the monarchy than by admitting it was a stupid thing to do and taking it on the chin.’
Maintaining a good relationship with the media was vital – for every story that made it into the newspapers, m
any more were suppressed; and much of the time it was good old-fashioned horse-trading.
‘We’d say, “Okay, you’ve got that but let’s go with this, if you don’t say anything about that.”’ ‘There was a lot of negotiation like that going on,’ says Colleen Harris. ‘There were many times when we managed to protect William and Harry and keep them out of the media when they were up to mischievous things. Nothing terrible, nothing criminal but things they wouldn’t have wanted the media to write about.’ That was partly down to good relationships with the press, but partly because she and Sandy discussed things with the boys ahead of time. ‘What could happen if you did this, and what might happen if you did that? They might not have always agreed but we worked through scenarios. William learned quite a lot from that about how to control and play the media.’
They were trying to prepare both boys for when the Code, which protected them to the age of eighteen, no longer applied. Sandy would always say, ‘Don’t ever do anything that you don’t want to see in a newspaper at some stage.’ But she admits that life is much tougher for William than it ever was for his father at the same age.
‘Regardless of what the Prince of Wales might think of the problems he had as a teenager, the media were still respectful. I don’t think anyone has gone through what William’s been through, which makes me admire him all the more. I’m not deriding it, but the cherry brandy incident was about as bad as it got [Charles, in his first year at Gordonstoun, accidentally found himself in a bar for the first time in his life, having become separated from his school group on a sailing trip, and in his terror and confusion, he ordered the only drink he’d heard of, which was a cherry brandy. A journalist happened to be standing at the bar at the time and the story of the Prince’s underage drinking not only made headline news, but earned him severe and disproportionate punishment from the school].
