by Penny Junor
Charles has never shown any signs of being a quitter. He has worked solidly fulfilling his predecessor’s promise, doing all that he can not just for the disadvantaged of South Wales but for the disadvantaged everywhere, finding work for the unemployed, better housing, better schooling; he has fought for rural communities, for urban communities, he has built a model town; the list of what he has done in the last thirty years is remarkable and whatever you think of his stance on architecture or beliefs about complementary medicine, the commitment is hugely impressive, and he has already stuck at it for twenty years longer than his Uncle David.
But there is still one striking similarity: he refused to give up the woman he loved when it was abundantly clear that her existence was in danger of rocking the monarchy to its foundations. We will never know what would have happened if Charles had given up Camilla in the early nineties when Diana was on the rampage. It was probably too late for him and Diana to have salvaged any happiness from their marriage, but he might have prevented his jealous wife from pressing the self-destruct button.
This was never going to have been a marriage made in heaven. It was a mismatch of epic proportions and neither Charles nor Diana was emotionally strong enough to have given to each other what they needed. Charles did not cause Diana’s instability by his love for Camilla. Diana came into that relationship with colossal problems that had nothing to do with Charles and everything to do with her unhappy childhood and her feelings of being unloved and unwanted by her parents. Charles was simply not equipped to handle her; he was the very last person who should have married Diana. He had never looked after himself let alone anyone else, and his position as Prince of Wales with so many demands on his time made it impossible for him to give her the attention she craved. She would have proved a challenge for any man she married, and I suspect might never have found true happiness with anyone. But I do strongly suspect that having a figure in the background like Camilla to fixate on made Diana worse.
Of the four incidents that stand out head and shoulders above the multitude of embarrassments and blunders that the Queen’s other children have sprung upon the monarchy in recent years, Camilla Parker Bowles was at the root of them all: the Morton book, the Prince’s admission of adultery, Panorama and the divorce. And if you push that to its logical conclusion, if Diana had still been married, she would never have been travelling through the streets of Paris at dangerous speeds with a drunken driver at the wheel and no police protection.
It is hard to understand how someone who is so dutiful and cares so passionately about the monarchy should have this blind spot. Not unlike the blind spot he has about his former valet, Michael Fawcett, whose bullying manner and the adverse publicity he has attracted has caused untold damage to the Prince’s reputation yet who remains firmly favoured and in regular employment. My guess is that both anomalies are attributable to a mixture of insecurity and loyalty. The Prince has a tendency to become very dependent on people close to him; he seems to have an almost childlike need to have his thoughts, ideas and decisions, and hence his confidence, constantly bolstered and reinforced. Camilla has fulfilled that role; so have one or two of his private secretaries over the years and other members of staff like Fawcett. Richard Aylard was so close to the Prince at one stage that, according to another member of his staff, they were almost breathing the same air. Mark Bolland, who was with him for seven years, was another he needed to have either by his side or on the end of a phone night and day. Camilla, of course, fulfils other needs too and is in a different category; she understands him, knows where he’s come from emotionally, has lived through the traumas with him, shares the history. But mostly she stems the chronic loneliness of the man so many outsiders enviously think has everything.
THIRTEEN
Mrs PB
Nearly twenty years ago, in a biography of the Prince of Wales, I made a stupid and very expensive mistake. I muddled up two Camillas – Camilla Shand, who became Camilla Parker Bowles and long-term lover of the Prince of Wales, and Camilla Fane, who didn’t. Both had known him in his bachelor years and been photographed with him at polo matches, but the latter went on to marry a man called Hipwood – and not, as I had said, a man called Parker Bowles. ‘The Prince fell deeply in love with Camilla,’ I said, ‘more, some friends say, than he has ever been again.’ And unknown to me at the time, at almost the precise moment the book was published, Prince Charles was bailing out of his troubled marriage and he and Camilla were busy rekindling the relationship.
Both Mr Parker Bowles and Mrs Hipwood sued me for libel. The clear implication from my false and malicious words, they claimed, was that they had committed bigamy (or several alternatives too tedious to go into); and ‘by virtue of the said publication’, said Lady Camilla Hipwood, daughter of the sixteenth Earl of Westmoreland, in her statement of claim, ‘the Plaintiff has been gravely injured in her character, credit and reputation and brought into public scandal, odium and contempt’. Blah blah blah. I sent a grovelling apology to each of them and offered to pay a sum of money to the charity of their choice. Neither was interested. And so the case proceeded and my publishers and I were left out of pocket.
Alan Kilkenny, who was charged by the Prince of Wales with the task of easing Camilla Parker Bowles into public life after his divorce and has been a friend for years, knew that I had long wanted to meet her, if only to tackle her about what I saw as a monumental injustice; in 1996 I had my opportunity. Two years earlier Camilla had become involved with the National Osteoporosis Society. Its director, Linda Edwards, who has sadly since died of cancer, had read in a magazine article that Camilla’s mother suffered from the disease and had written to Camilla. By the time her letter arrived, Mrs Shand was dead – she had died a particularly painful death as a result of osteoporosis – and Camilla, who had known nothing about the disease before her mother’s illness, and had never heard of the NOS, was keen to do anything she could to help other families who were facing what she had been through. Her one stipulation was that there should be no publicity. That was no problem for the charity – what it needed was money, which Camilla was happy to try and generate and as she spoke to friends – both her own and those she met through the Prince of Wales – donations started to roll in. She personally donated her half-share of £25,000 paid to her and Andrew Parker Bowles by the Sun for publishing private photographs stolen from their house at the time of their divorce. And courtesy of her friends the Earl and Countess of Shelburne, she was hosting a private soiree for two hundred guests at Bowood House in Wiltshire. Thanks to Alan Kilkenny, I was one of those guests and, eager for a bit of sport, he lost no time in introducing me to Camilla.
‘This is Penny Junor,’ he said. ‘She tells me you sued her.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ said Camilla with a wicked glint in her eye. ‘It was my ex-husband. Let me find him for you’, and with our hands firmly clasped we fought our way through the crowded room until we found her rather florid-faced ex, whose face became considerably more florid as she explained why she was introducing us. I have had a very soft spot for Camilla ever since, and the sight of Andrew Parker Bowles’s embarrassment when put on the spot by his ex-wife – and much to his ex-wife’s merriment – was almost worth the settlement I’d paid to him all those years before.
Camilla has been very badly done by over the years. I happen to believe that for the sake of the monarchy the Prince of Wales should have given her up years ago, but it is not her fault that he didn’t; and quite why she should have been the scapegoat for everything that befell the family is a mystery to me. Throughout this whole sorry saga, throughout all the years of provocation, criticism and abuse, she has never said a word out of place to anyone. She has never retaliated, never attempted to defend herself, not even when newspapers have published stories that are simply, grotesquely, untrue. Even when the Prince himself exposed her and her family by going public with their adultery, she said nothing. She has been the soul of discretion. True, she did sleep with the Princ
e of Wales but I don’t think she exactly had to tie him down and threaten him first. His marriage was over, he was depressed, desperate, and she dragged him back to the land of the living. What she did was love him and value him as no one had ever done before and the effect she has on him is miraculous, even today. Charles felt he owed everything to Camilla. She had brought him back from the emotional abyss in the dark and desperate days of his marriage; she had restored his will to live, given him the confidence to carry on. She was his lifeline. She was and is a gentle, steadying force, down-to-earth, practical, sensible – mother, best friend and lover rolled into one, with an ability to giggle at all the worst moments, to lighten his spirits and make him laugh. She helps him enjoy life, stops him feeling sorry for himself. She takes an interest in his work, listens to him, supports him; she even hosts receptions and dinners for him and chatters to all his boring guests. They go on holiday together, go painting, walking; they go to the theatre, they garden together, and until recently (but no longer) she used to hunt with him. She couldn’t be happier that he finally went down on one knee to her, but she hadn’t been desperate to marry and she had no ambition to be queen. She was happy being his companion, his lover, his soulmate. And yet, because Diana pointed a finger at her, she has been treated by everyone, including his family that are now officially in-laws, as a villainous marriage wrecker.
The Prince of Wales has a great capacity for feeling sorry for himself and after Diana’s death that was particularly in evidence. Diana had been the ex from hell in many ways: she had spied on him, wanting to know where he was going, who he was seeing and why; she made it difficult for him to see William and Harry, she upstaged him, she embarrassed him, she leaked stories to the press, but deep down Charles loved Diana – she was the mother of his sons, after all – and he was overwhelmed by the tragedy of both her life and her death. In the weeks and months that followed he did a great deal of grieving for what might have been. There had been some moments of happiness in the morass of misery, but he was keenly aware that he had failed to make the happiness last, failed to make her his friend and failed to create the secure, loving home for their children that they both had dreamed of. However, headline writers who suggested he felt guilty were wide of the mark. Charles didn’t feel guilty in any way, either about Diana’s death or about his affair with Camilla. He knew he had done everything in his power to make his marriage work, but he had failed, and the failure was what hurt – and it still hurts him to this day.
It was several months before Charles summoned up the courage to face the public himself, and he knew it would be a long time before his name could be linked to Camilla’s – and longer still before they could be seen in public together – but he was determined no matter what the obstacles, no matter what the cost, that she should remain a part of his life, and in many ways he needed her more towards the end of the 1990s than ever before. Before Diana’s death they had been on the verge of coming out. Her birthday party at Highgrove had gone well; Diana, meanwhile, had been attracting increasingly hostile publicity for her flirtatious behaviour in the South of France with Dodi Fayed. Alan Kilkenny was easing Camilla gradually out of the shadows. They were two weeks away from a spectacular party to raise money for the National Osteoporosis Society at Camilla’s sister Annabel’s antiques business in Dorset. Seven hundred invitations had been sent out, at £100 apiece, and although nothing was official there were plans for the Prince to pay a surprise visit to the party. It would have been a second giant step along the path to making Camilla a legitimate part of the Prince’s life – the phrase he used time and again – which was his ultimate goal. But those and every other plan screeched to a halt that Sunday in August when Britons awoke to the shocking news that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed in a car crash.
The Queen’s desire for Camilla to disappear into the ether did not end with Diana’s death. In some respects her troubles were just beginning, and the events of the next few years made the horrors of Morton and Panorama pale by comparison. Once again, it was nothing personal. Wearing her mother’s hat the Queen was pleased that Charles, whose life had been so tortured and sad, should at last be free to enjoy the companionship of his long-term lover without fear of upsetting his ex-wife. Wearing her monarch’s hat – or possibly even crown – she had very real reservations, as did all her advisers. Charles was determined that Camilla was non-negotiable. He was not prepared to give her up, no matter what anyone thought, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the man on the Clapham omnibus – and certainly not Robert Fellowes. He was not prepared to keep her under wraps any more either. He was tired of coming and going from different entrances, hiding in the trunk of cars and playing games to foil the press. He wanted to be able to walk openly with Camilla by his side, and he wanted the British public to accept her as his partner. And in customary fashion he told members of his private office to make it happen. They did, but in their zeal to make Camilla acceptable to the British people they drove a wedge between St James’s and Buckingham Palace and employed methods that the Queen and her courtiers felt did not belong in either royal household.
FOURTEEN
Lord Blackadder
The name Mark Bolland still sends shivers down a number of spines in both palaces. He was hired by the Prince of Wales in 1996, post-Dimbleby, post-divorce, when the Prince’s reputation was at an all-time low and many of his friends were demanding Richard Aylard’s head. Over dinner at St James’s Palace, Hilary Browne-Wilkinson, who had been Camilla’s divorce lawyer, and also happened to be a member of the Press Complaints Commission, asked the Prince if he had come across a man called Mark Bolland. Her husband, law lord Nico Browne-Wilkinson, was also at the dinner table that evening, and another couple, plus Camilla. As coffee was served Lord Browne-Wilkinson launched into a fearsome attack on the way the Prince’s staff had handled the media in recent times, concluding that it was the legal profession’s collective view that the situation could not be worse, nor more damaging for the monarchy. Sitting uncomfortably, playing with his coffee cup, was Richard Aylard, the man apparently responsible, a detail not lost, I am sure, on the assembled guests.
‘He works for the Press Complaints Commission,’ said Hilary, referring to Mark Bolland, in the ensuing silence. ‘You should hire him and see if he can do anything to help.’
Two days later Bolland, who was director of the PCC at the time, had accepted a very minor role in the Press Office at St James’s Palace. He’d been warned the job he would be offered would be ‘crap’ but had been told to take it; better things would follow. As indeed they did. Bolland, clever, charismatic and confident, very swiftly became the Prince’s new best friend, the wonder man who would fix his life; and Aylard, whose loyalty and devotion to the Prince had cost the courtier his marriage, was spat out of the system like so many before him, as cherished as yesterday’s bus ticket.
It was not the Prince’s finest hour. He knew that Aylard deserved better but once again he took the weak man’s course and allowed himself to be convinced by friends that Aylard was responsible for everything that had gone wrong – and after Dimbleby little seemed to go right. In truth, Aylard had probably been there too long and had certainly given too much of himself; he discovered at the end of the day the brutal reality, that working for a member of the Royal Family, however close the relationship, is only a job. There is often a gong at the end of it or a present of some sort and a card at Christmas – and in Aylard’s case he continued to do some consultancy work on green issues – but in other respects it’s no different from leaving a burger business or a merchant bank. Out of sight is out of mind, and some new face soon becomes equally indispensable.
Aylard had been Private Secretary for five years but he had been in the household for eleven, and had been with the Prince throughout his worst years. He was at Klosters in March 1988 when an avalanche killed the Prince’s friend Major Hugh Lindsay, and with him through Morton, Camillagate, separation and divorce. They shared the same inte
rests and enthusiasms – as a zoologist Aylard was an expert on environmental matters and conservation and wrote some of the Prince’s best speeches on the subject. It was a very intense relationship; they spent hours together, round the clock, most days of the year, and if Aylard was not actually in attendance he was at the other end of a telephone, even on his days off. Aylard would never presume to have called himself a friend – no courtier ever would – but they were close and there is no doubt he enjoyed his position. ‘Richard had all the armament required,’ says a former courtier at St James’s Palace. ‘The Prince of Wales loved him, the chemistry between them was very good, but he became completely intoxicated. Late at night they used to sit in front of the fire at Sandringham and he would have all the problems of the Royal Family poured out to him. The Prince of Wales didn’t understand how tremendously overexcited he was.’
And yet for all the talk down the years, and the unburdening of the Prince’s problems, the Prince was blissfully unaware of Aylard’s own problems on the home front. The Princess of Wales was always concerned about the people around her, attuned to the slightest vibration and aware of their personal circumstances. The Prince has no such antennae, and no awareness that the demands he puts on his staff might have an effect on their family life. Because he never stops working, it doesn’t occur to him that they might need a break. Because he never has lunch, it doesn’t occur to him that his staff might feel a little peckish in the middle of the day. In Aylard’s case he had a wife who had suffered severe post-natal depression and two young children living in the country he never got home to see. He lived in a grace and favour apartment in Kensington Palace and when he did have enough time off to make it to the country, the Prince would ring and want to speak to him on the telephone all day long and half the night.
