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William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Tom Bower 2018

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Source ISBN: 9780008291730

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008291778

Version: 2018-09-21

Dedication

To Veronica

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

1 New York, 22 September 1999

2 Plots and Counterplots

3 The Masters of Spin

4 Uneasy Lies the Head

5 Mutiny and Machiavellism

6 Body and Soul

7 The Masterbuilder

8 Teasing the Government

9 Diana’s ‘Rock’

10 A Family at War

11 A Butler’s Warnings

12 A Struggle for Power

13 A New Era Begins

14 Shuttlecocks and Skirmishes

15 The Queen’s Recollection

16 A Private Secretary Goes Public

17 Money Matters

18 Whitewash

19 Revenge and Dirty Linen

20 Drowning Not Waving

21 New Enemies

22 For Better or Worse

23 Resolute Rebel

24 Rules of Conduct

25 King Meddle

26 The Divine Prophet

27 Scrabbling for Cash

28 Marking Time

29 The Prince’s Coup

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Sources

Index

Also by Tom Bower

About the Publisher

Preface

This book is the story of Prince Charles’s battle for rehabilitation after Diana’s death, and his refusal to obey the public’s expectations of a future king. Many books have been written about Charles, but none has fully described the crisis he faced after 1997. For nearly ten years, he was buffeted by scandal. His approval rating fell to the lowest figure for any royal in recent times. His succession to the throne was endangered.

Among the most serious disclosures to undermine public confidence in the prince were those exposed during the unsuccessful prosecution for theft in 2002 of Paul Burrell, Diana’s butler and confidant; the simultaneous revelation of disreputable behaviour within Charles’s household; and the possibility that he had personally interfered in the judicial process. At the end of that two-year drama, Charles’s survival as heir to the throne was on a knife-edge.

Additionally, throughout those years he was repeatedly criticised by the media and politicians for his extravagances. His father denounced him for being a rent-a-royal, yet he continued to sell access to himself – to raise money for his many charities and to indulge in ostentatious luxury. At the same time he provoked a fractious relationship with Tony Blair in his years as prime minister which undermined the prince’s constitutional duty to stay impartial. And he blithely disregarded the disdain of many Commonwealth leaders, which wrecked his assumption that he would automatically inherit leadership of the association of fifty-two countries.

During this period of turmoil, one issue dominated Charles’s life – the status of Camilla Parker Bowles. Ever since they had resumed their relationship in the mid-1980s, he had stubbornly fought to rescue their reputations. Single-mindedly he confronted all the Establishment forces, including the queen, who was determined to prevent their marriage. His principal ally was Mark Bolland, a young media consultant, who for the first time has revealed in this book the intrigues that he masterminded on behalf of Charles and Camilla, which climaxed in their wedding in April 2005. Thereafter, the scandals in Charles’s life diminished, although it would take another six years before the departure of his five most senior advisers signalled the end of the turbulence.

By November 2011, Charles’s reputation as a rebel was truly established. Not only had he defied the nation to marry Camilla, but his championship of controversial causes including the environment, architecture, fox-hunting, complementary medicine and education, had aroused fierce opposition – and also praise. ‘I have never known a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused,’ comments Thomas Fowler about the eponymous ‘Quiet American’ in Graham Greene’s novel; the same could be said about Charles. Few doubted the sincerity of his campaigns, but many feared that his provocative dissent made him unfit to be king.

He has repeatedly mentioned his devotion to his duty. He believes passionately that he can make Britain a better country and that he can help the disadvantaged. Whatever criticisms may be levelled at him have been mitigated, especially by his admirers, by his commitment to many valuable causes. Many Britons have personal experience of his dedicated visits to schools, hospitals and hospices. Carefully briefed, he talks engagingly to staff, pupils and patients, leaving them all with an enduring memory of his decency.

The contrast for the majority who have not enjoyed a personal encounter is stark. During the many scandals that would have destroyed a lesser man, there has been no evidence that he has suffered a moral struggle. Shame and guilt seem foreign to him. Despite all the eyewitness accounts of his melancholia and self-doubt, Charles has never admitted any wrongdoing. In general terms, he is certainly not misunderstood by the public.

My decision to write about such a familiar character was taken after several months of research. With the exception of Anthony Holden and Jonathan Dimbleby, most of Charles’s subsequent biographers recite events, statements and comments in reverential tones. They do him a disservice. In reality, his life has been a gripping political, financial and personal drama. With hindsight, his survival today may seem preordained, but there were long periods when his future was in doubt, especially after Diana’s death. That his conflicts have been conducted in the spotlight makes his story even more interesting because so much of what occurred has remained in the shadows. I make no claim to have unearthed every truth, but after interviewing over 120 people, many of whom served the royals for long periods and with great distinction and have not given their accounts before, I believe that this book does reveal many new insights about the future king.

As with many of the other personalities I have investigated, I started this biography with limited knowledge about Charles’s life beyond the media reports. Because I have ‘lived’ with him throughout my life – we are of similar ages – I could not fail to be conscious of his exceptional tribulations, but I was unsure how much my research could reveal. The incentive was the suspicion that Charles, like all powerbrokers, must have deployed guile to conceal his tracks.

In the past, my criteria for choosing a personality to investigate have been his or her use – and misuse – of fame and fortune to influence society. Newspaper owners, billionaire tycoons and successful politicians all want to change our lives, and simultaneously to enhance their own reputations. What has fascinated me in all those I have previously covered is their climb from obscurity up the slippery pole, then their battle to stay on top. Along the way they have crushed rivals and subtly altered their own biographies. Often they have publicly paraded their service to mankind, while in reality pursuing largely self-interested agendas.

Charles of course was born at the top of the pole, and though he has not exactly falsified his life’s story, he has concealed many truths. Determined to be a figure of consequence – a long-lasting influence is a sign of greatness – he has used his position since the early 1980s to influence how Britain is governed, and after the mid-1990s employed his powers as a royal to massage the media in order to secure his and Camilla’s survival. My quest was to discover how he manipulated those levers of power.

To my surprise, I found that Charles’s conduct has created a substantial number of victims, many of whom are saddened over how he acted, both in general and towards them. His loyalty, like his attention span, is limited. Embraced today, a favourite can be cast out tomorrow. Like some feudal lord, he presides at the centre of a court with no place for democracy or dissenting views. Unlike the queen, with her genius in being able to unite the nation, especially in difficult times, Charles divides his countrymen. Clearly he enjoys provoking argument, but only on his terms. He has refused to engage in debate. Advisers know that to say ‘No’ will simply prompt his search for a replacement who will say ‘Yes.’ Every decision is his and his alone.

For over thirty years, the Prince of Wales has been prey to his follies. Since 1997 he has resorted to machination and media manipulation to restore his position. Although the large number of British people who previously supported the succession passing directly from the queen to William gradually diminished and then rose again, Charles’s rehabilitation is still unfinished business. His popularity, as I write in early 2018, remains disconcertingly low.

As a committed monarchist, I want Charles to become king, to bequeath the throne in a healthy state to his son, whose popularity will protect the institution during his father’s short reign. Whether and how that happens depends on Charles’s age at the time of his coronation. At the moment, neither Charles nor indeed anyone can predict how the country will react to the queen’s death. Will Britain allow him to inherit the throne smoothly, and watch Camilla anointed as queen? Or will the nation resent Charles and his final ascent? He will undoubtedly become king; but the circumstances are in doubt.

The central question posed at this stage of his life is what kind of monarch will Charles make – given that he is the most unpopular heir for generations. Had the queen died a decade ago, his controversial interventions could well have provoked a constitutional crisis. However, over the past seven years he has moderated his speeches in public, and has tried to encourage the belief that his takeover will be much more acceptable than even the most loyal monarchist could have imagined. His efforts have not been wholly convincing. After speaking to so many of those who have lived with and loved the royals, I share their trepidation over whether Charles can become a unifying monarch. At the end of writing this book, I am convinced that he is determined to make his mark on British history, and will not choose an impartial silence during his inevitably short reign. He remains a historian, writer and political activist, and will want to cement Charles III in people’s memories for centuries to come. How he might achieve that of course remains a puzzle, but to some extent is answered in what follows.

During my research, I inevitably encountered a large number of different opinions. All are reflected in the book. Readers will not be surprised that many of the quotations are anonymous. Those who still associate with Charles and Camilla – as friends or employees – understandably do not want their relationship endangered. To protect them, I have made a point of disguising many of my sources. However, the reader can be assured that every quotation is accurate and was noted during my interviews. Although the two decades covered in my book can be understood only by referring to aspects of what went before, I have restricted such excursions into the past to what is sufficient to understand the present.

Finally, researching this book has been an unexpected pleasure, not only because I have come to understand so many previously unknown conflicts and hitherto imperfectly reported events, but also because Charles emerges as an exceptional character. Easy to like and easy to dislike, he is the unique product of Britain’s genius – a rebel prince, eventually to become a rebel king.

1
New York, 22 September 1999

Her anger was uncontrolled.

‘I won’t stop it. It’s my life and it’s the right thing to do.’

From a suite in New York’s Carlyle Hotel, Camilla Parker Bowles was laying down the law. Her outburst was directed not only at the Prince of Wales but also at his friend Nicholas Soames, the Conservative MP and grandson of Winston Churchill. At the other end of the line, Charles was three thousand miles away, fretting in his study at Highgrove, his Gloucestershire home. He had just passed on the news that Soames had been protesting about her high-profile visit to America.

‘There’s too much publicity,’ Soames had told Charles. ‘It’s that bloody man Bolland.’

‘Well,’ the heir to the throne had replied, ‘let’s all have a meeting with Mark when he returns and he’ll explain everything.’

Thirty-three-year-old Mark Bolland was in theory the prince’s assistant private secretary, his job since 1996, but in reality he was far more than that – the orchestrator of how Charles and Camilla appeared to the world. He stood now in the Carlyle suite witnessing their argument. Also present was Michael Fawcett, Charles’s trusted servant of over twenty years, again far more than a valet. Both men admired Camilla’s scathing dismissal of Charles’s pleas. In Bolland’s opinion, the London media reports about Camilla’s hectic itinerary in Manhattan justified his gamble to defy Buckingham Palace’s demand that she remain unseen and instead propel her into the spotlight.

‘We have to break eggs to push it,’ he had warned Charles before finalising plans for the four-day trip. ‘Things don’t happen by themselves.’ Charles’s doubts had been dismissed by Camilla, who was determined to emerge from the shadow of her predecessor’s glorious conquering of America in 1985. The fifty-two-year-old Camilla was not pulling back. She handed the phone to her media adviser.

Ever since he was hired, a year before Diana died, Bolland had enjoyed a good relationship with Charles. His sole purpose, his employer had stipulated, was to reverse Camilla’s image as his privileged, fox-hunting mistress, make her acceptable to the public and overcome the queen’s hostility to their being together. At the outset, in 1996, there were constant arguments about how Charles’s relationship with Camilla would end. Three years on, she smelt success. ‘Why can’t I meet your mother?’ she had asked. More frequently she would snap, ‘You’re off to the theatre with friends, so why can’t I come?’ Or, ‘You’re off on Saturday to stay with people who are my friends too, so I should be with you.’ To satisfy her, Bolland’s tactics had hit a new level. ‘We were turning up the gas,’ he would say, ‘because the queen was unmovable.’

‘The strategy,’ he explained to Charles, ‘is to scare the horses a bit. To move the dial.’

‘Go ahead,’ Charles agreed.

Back in London, the Sun had responded to Bolland’s overtures with the headline ‘Camilla Will Take New York by Storm Today’, and had listed the celebrities ‘clamouring for invitations to lunch and dinner’. Further to promote her, Bolland had revealed to the paper that the revered TV personality Barbara Walters was invited to one dinner, while Edmond Safra, a billionaire banker, would give a drinks party and the formidable New York socialite Brooke Astor would host a lunch – at which film star Michael Douglas would describe to Camilla the curing of his sex addiction at an Arizona clinic. In Bolland’s currency, Camilla’s appearance on the newspaper’s front page was a triumph.

Soames had protested about such orchestration. ‘Charles,’ he complained, ‘is not a political campaign. He is not a political party.’ Bolland’s tactics also shocked Robin Janvrin, the queen’s private secretary. The Sun’s threat to campaign against the queen, he protested, was typical of the divisiveness masterminded by Bolland.

Over lunch with the publicist, David Airlie, one of the queen’s most respected advisers, had voiced similar unease. Bolland had retorted, ‘Well, give me the alternative of how we will achieve what we want.’

‘Don’t make it too obvious,’ was Airlie’s advice.

‘What’s the alternative?’ Bolland repeated.

Airlie grimaced but made no suggestions. Employment by the palaces, Bolland understood, brought out the worst in even the best of people.

Accompanied by her loyal assistant Amanda McManus, Camilla had flown to New York on Concorde. Their tickets had been bought by Geoffrey Kent, the financier of Charles’s polo team and the founder and owner of Abercrombie & Kent, the millionaires’ travel agent. Bolland was waiting at Kennedy airport, having flown ahead to supervise the final preparations. Among those helping him were Peter Brown, a well-connected British PR consultant, and Scott Bessent, a rich financier who worked with George Soros.

As soon as Camilla touched down, Bessent flew her to his home in East Hampton to give her two days to recover from jet lag (even the three hours it took Concorde to cross the Atlantic could upset her). He would provide a helicopter to fly her from there to Manhattan. Robert Higdon, the chief executive of Charles’s charity foundation in America, was then meant to introduce the team to Camilla’s hosts, but in the aftermath of a tussle among the courtiers he had been abruptly excluded. Languishing in the hotel lobby while Camilla raged at Charles, Higdon nevertheless negotiated for her visit to be hyped in New York’s society columns. ‘Camilla and Charles knew that I was being beat up by the others,’ said Higdon, ‘but the Boss and the Blonde kept me because they knew the money I was bringing in.’ Charles might not have warmed to him, but he could not do without his money-raising talents.

Over the previous four years Higdon had developed huge affection for Camilla, who, he told a journalist, ‘has more self-confidence than anyone I know. Unlike Charles, who is doubtful and whiney, she’s so tough. She never questions anything.’ That judgement was about to change.

The tension led to disagreement between Charles and his four horsemen Bolland, Kent, Brown and Bessent. Their confidence in the value of publicity had been eroded.

‘It wasn’t the right time,’ concluded Higdon. ‘It didn’t feel right for Camilla. It was too soon.’ She was ‘not great’ with Americans. Even worse, she was lazy. ‘For her to get up in the morning and survive until nightfall is a major effort. It was even hard for her to get out of bed. She tries her best to do nothing during the day.’ On the American trip, ‘the biggest problem was persuading her to dress up for a big occasion. The effort was overwhelming. Camilla was pissed off by the whole thing. It was horrible, a disaster.’

While Camilla argued on the phone, Peter Brown was fretting in Brooke Astor’s luxurious Park Avenue apartment. The guest of honour was already thirty minutes late. ‘She’s gossiping with you-know-who,’ Brown confided to one of the guests, unaware of the true circumstances. But when Camilla did finally arrive, no sign of any argument was visible. That skill offset her limitations, and was adored by Charles.

On public occasions she did her best to shine. Three days before flying to New York she had appeared to enjoy a dinner for fifty guests in the Chelsea home of the Greek shipping and steel magnate Theodore Angelopoulos and his wife Gianna, and a few days earlier she had been jolly at Geoffrey Kent’s fifty-sixth birthday party, despite her intense dislike of two of her fellow guests, Hugh and Emilie van Cutsem, both close friends of Charles.

In her unusual world, Camilla was happier when having dinner later that night at Harry’s Bar with Andrew Parker Bowles, her former husband, and his new wife. Andrew was one of the few among her associates who aroused no antagonism among the courtiers. Others, she discovered, were less fortunate in the vicious intrigues around the court.

A new plot, allegedly inspired by Galen Weston, a Canadian billionaire, had sought to oust Geoffrey Kent from Charles’s inner circle. Weston was irritated that Charles played for Kent’s polo team, and that Kent, rather than Weston, was the team captain. Their rivalry had spilled out into a dispute about a joint property development near Palm Beach. Now Weston was seeking to persuade Charles to dump an ally. Venomous spats among courtiers were not unusual for Charles. Despite the generosity shown to him by Kent, a global networker, Charles rarely reciprocated loyalty. ‘We don’t have close friends,’ he had told a member of the polo team. ‘The royal family does not allow anyone to become too familiar and be privy to our secrets.’

During a helicopter trip – a moment chosen so the police escort could not overhear – Bolland had spoken to the prince about his benefactor’s fate. ‘He’s been a good and generous friend,’ agreed Charles. ‘Tell Stephen not to do anything. I’ve changed my mind.’ Stephen Lamport, Charles’s senior private secretary and Bolland’s superior, was accustomed to cutting off those who had displeased his master, and readmitting those who were pardoned.

Charles’s decisions were often influenced by money, and in recent years Camilla had adopted the same criterion. The previous month, she and Charles, her two children and over twenty friends had sailed around the Aegean on the Alexander, the world’s third largest private yacht. They were the guests of Yiannis Latsis, a foul-mouthed Greek shipping billionaire whose fortune, some gossiped, was based on black marketeering, collaboration with the Nazis, and bribing Arabs for a stake in the oil trade. Six weeks later, after her introduction to Edmond and Lily Safra in New York, Camilla discovered that the billionaire banker also owned a luxury yacht, as well as an eighteen-acre estate in the south of France, La Leopolda, valued at over $750 million.

‘Is there any chance,’ Camilla had asked Higdon, who had made the introduction, ‘that I could stay at Lily Safra’s?’ An invitation to visit St James’s Palace was duly issued to Safra, and soon afterwards Michael Fawcett was arranging Camilla’s holiday on the estate.

Her current trip to New York was part of Charles’s campaign to win over the British people; but in 1999 that struggle was far from won.

2
Plots and Counterplots

Charles’s campaign to make Camilla accepted had started in 1996, one year before Diana’s death, a period that marked a new peak in the public’s disgust with the lives in the royal palaces. A succession of scandalous books, tapes and television interviews had reduced the prince’s approval rating to less than 10 per cent. Fearful that he would not inherit the crown, and even worse, that he might buckle under the pressure, Camilla had discussed his plight with Hilary Browne-Wilkinson, the solicitor who had managed her divorce from Andrew Parker Bowles. Soon after, Charles and Camilla invited Hilary and her husband, Nicolas ‘Nico’ Browne-Wilkinson, a senior judge, for dinner at St James’s Palace. The third guest was Fiona Shackleton, Charles’s divorce lawyer, at that time a decisive influence in his life.

‘You must deal with your media image,’ Nico Browne-Wilkinson told Charles.

Nico’s wife offered a solution. While working at the Press Complaints Commission she had met Mark Bolland, the Commission’s twenty-nine-year-old director and in his private life the partner of Guy Black, a Cambridge graduate and political adviser. Bolland, Hilary Browne-Wilkinson said, was charming and well-connected, and had good relations with London’s senior media executives. He was also an outsider. Unlike other palace officials, he had been educated at a grammar school in Middlesbrough and had gone neither to Oxbridge nor the army, but had read Chemistry at York University. His understanding of the real world made him an ideal choice to promote Camilla and secure the public’s acceptance of her relationship with Charles. Hilary was supported by Fiona Shackleton, who said Bolland should be appointed as soon as Charles’s divorce was finalised.

By the end of the evening, Charles and Camilla were half-persuaded. Both Shackleton and Hilary Browne-Wilkinson appeared relieved. Dabbling in that world, with access to the heir to the throne, was a fizzy experience for both lawyers. Charles’s reliance on such people signalled his anguish. In 1996 he was searching for scapegoats to blame for a decade of horror. Prone to grasp at any excuse, he agreed with the latest judgement of his inner circle of friends that Richard Aylard, his private secretary, was mainly responsible for his plight.

In their opinion, Aylard’s cardinal error had been to encourage Charles two years earlier to open his heart to the journalist Jonathan Dimbleby for a biography and a two-hour television documentary.

Over the previous months Aylard had spent nearly every day and many nights responding to his employer’s cries for protection from criticism, sacrificing his own private life and his marriage. To overcome Charles’s bouts of depression, he had encouraged him to cooperate with Dimbleby. When the resulting book and film proved a personal disaster, Charles refused to accept any blame for pressing Aylard to arrange the extraordinary access to his secrets.

The Dimbleby project had been born from Charles’s anger that he was being treated as a mere ribbon-cutter rather than as the heir to the throne. His status had been devalued among courtiers in Buckingham Palace and some cabinet ministers by his refusal to end his relationship with Camilla. At that time, the very notion that the couple might marry was ridiculed by a country that had lost respect for the man who had betrayed his wife Diana. Unless Camilla was ousted, the critics agreed, Charles could not remain the queen’s automatic successor. Inaction might even jeopardise the monarchy itself. The huge majority of the public reflected the homily of Walter Bagehot, Britain’s nineteenth-century constitutional expert: ‘We have come to regard the monarchy as the head of our morality.’ Charles failed that test.

His fate had been dictated by a series of humiliations, not least by Diana’s disclosures in Andrew Morton’s 1992 book Diana: Her True Story. Morton’s revelations had broken through the carapace of lies about the royal marriage. Diana had portrayed her estranged husband as an unloving and unfaithful father without a care for anyone except himself. ‘It is so very awful,’ Charles wrote to Nancy Reagan, the former president’s wife; ‘very few people would believe it.’ Through Dimbleby, Charles wanted to right the balance but also to retaliate, to have his revenge against a wrecker.

First he agreed to the queen’s insistence that he and Diana formally separate. The announcement was to be made by John Major, recently re-elected as prime minister.

A strong prime minister would not have tolerated the warfare between Charles and Diana, and would have halted the books and briefings. Instead, Major believed that his duty was to reconcile the two and restore the public’s trust. Sympathetic to Diana’s side of the case, he did not underestimate his task, particularly after a private flight when Diana had emerged from the plane’s lavatory covered in blood. There was no explanation other than that she was psychologically unwell.

Major’s intentions were obstructed by Buckingham Palace. Robert Fellowes, the queen’s private secretary, gave no clear guidance about the royal family’s attitude. Until the circumstances were compelling, Fellowes judged, the queen would remain reluctant to interfere. Her inactivity magnified the ineptitude of her advisers. ‘The trouble is that Charles is a Hanoverian,’ a senior civil servant observed, ‘and now that he’s delivered “an heir and a spare” and has done his duty to the nation, he thinks he’s entitled to live the way he wants.’ In the coded language of the official classes, he added, while Diana Spencer could trace her family’s British ancestors back to 1478, the Windsors had been invented only in 1917. Their history became irrelevant when the queen’s hand was finally forced by Diana’s secret cooperation with Morton and her untruthful denials of that pact to Fellowes.

At Charles’s request, Aylard had insisted to Major that when announcing the formal separation he should tell the House of Commons that ‘no third party’ was involved; and so on 9 December 1992 the lie was formally announced in a speech drafted by a quartet of officials: cabinet secretary Robin Butler, Robert Fellowes, Buckingham Palace’s senior spokesman Charles Anson, and Aylard.

To control the narrative, Charles expected Aylard to dictate the ‘truth’ about the separation, a divorce and the possibility of remarriage by employing the usual convenient formulas: ‘There are no plans …’ or ‘It is not the intention that …’ Silence and denial were his tactics to become king – a contested succession, as some senior bishops doubted whether an adulterer could lead the Church of England.

Aylard knew that loyalty meant suspending the conventional role of a private secretary. Unlike the queen’s supportive working relationship with Fellowes, Charles would not tolerate Aylard discussing whether muddying the facts about his relationship with Camilla was tolerable. To continue as Charles’s adviser required acceptance that the heir was infallible, divinely ordained, and that his ‘truth’ remained unchallenged. That fiction had been instilled in Charles since childhood. Reminded of the fate of Europe’s other royal families, he had learned that the House of Windsor’s survival depended upon minimising the public’s indifference, assuaging its hostility and dispelling any suggestion of insecurity.

To fulfil that ambition, Robin Butler had included in Major’s statement a second fiction. Despite their legal separation, Major would tell MPs, there were no constitutional implications; with a formal separation rather than a divorce, on Charles’s accession Diana would still be queen. Butler would later concede that his advice was wrong.

Early on the morning of his announcement, the prime minister shuttled between Diana in Kensington Palace and Charles in St James’s Palace to seal their final approval. Any satisfaction he may have felt was shredded a few hours later when his statement in the House evoked widespread derision. His suggestion of a monarchy of two separate individuals offended the British reverence for their royal family. Instead of calming the public, the speech raised speculation that Charles might abdicate.

The queen had already responded to the danger: persuaded that she had to reprimand her son, she had forbidden him to move from Kensington Palace into Clarence House, the queen mother’s home, after formally separating from Diana. The prospect of Charles entertaining Camilla in a palace shared with his grandmother, then aged ninety-two, was offensive. He had been assigned instead to St James’s Palace, a cold, comfortless dwelling.

At which point, his troubles increased. Five weeks later the Daily Mirror published the transcript of an eight-minute telephone conversation between Charles and his mistress. Millions around the globe listened as he told Camilla how he yearned to ‘live inside your trousers’ and be reincarnated as ‘God forbid, a Tampax, just my luck … to be chucked down the lavatory and go on and on forever swirling round the top, never going down’. Charles fled to Sandringham, hoping never to see a newspaper again. He was, however, unable to escape a Daily Telegraph report that his approval rating had fallen to 4 per cent. Further crises seemed imminent. He lacked even the authority to demand an investigation into who had targeted him. The obvious suspect was a rogue employee at the government’s intercept agency GCHQ who had recycled his work to amateur radio hams.

‘You have to be careful which shadows you decide to chase,’ Diana told Patrick Jephson, her private secretary, to explain why no proper inquiry had been demanded. Like Charles, she suspected that her police protection officers leaked her and Charles’s secrets, especially their adulteries. The police had accumulated considerable influence over the royals, not least after Diana and Princess Anne had affairs with their protection officers. Unethically, other officers had used that information to cultivate lucrative relationships with the media.

Charles stopped talking to journalists in 1993, even during foreign trips. Damaged by the recent revelations, he now repeatedly complained about the lack of safeguards. A senior Downing Street official was summoned to St James’s Palace and asked to ban photographers from around Balmoral, the queen’s fifty-thousand-acre estate in north-east Scotland. ‘There’s not much we can do if you go near the public highway,’ Charles was told. ‘You’ll just have to find somewhere on the estate which they can’t see, even if it’s less attractive.’

That exchange jarred after the news emerged about Charles’s negotiations over an authorised film and biography. Jonathan Dimbleby was the younger son of Richard Dimbleby, the hugely respected BBC journalist and the nation’s trusted commentator on all state occasions until his death in 1965. That pedigree was ignored beyond St James’s Palace. Speaking on behalf of the senior officials in Buckingham Palace, Robert Fellowes had strongly advised Aylard to resist Dimbleby’s offer. After Charles made his enthusiasm plain, the queen was advised to intercede. As usual, she replied that Prince Philip should be asked for his opinion; together they decided not to interfere.

Their reluctance stemmed from the breakdown in relations with their son. Charles had publicly blamed his parents, particularly Philip, for an unloving childhood and being forced into an unhappy marriage. In graphic terms, he saw his father as an emotional gangster. He wanted to appeal through Dimbleby for the public’s sympathy. To present Charles’s point of view, Dimbleby was given unprecedented access to his private papers, his friends and employees, and extensive interviews with Charles himself.

Controversy, the prince knew, was inevitable. While reading the proofs of Dimbleby’s book during a trip on the royal yacht Britannia, he regularly shouted his protests to Aylard, who in turn negotiated changes with Dimbleby – who, as he sympathised with Charles’s predicament, was usually receptive. But no one ever sought to stop publication. The result was a remarkably intimate but ultimately destructive profile.

Dimbleby presented a portrait of a vulnerable, friendless forty-six-year-old, still bearing the scars of his harsh school years at Gordonstoun. In the journalist’s graphic description, Charles never understood close companionship between schoolboys or the mutual reliance that existed among friends. Immune to the social revolution of the sixties, he resented his peers for not appreciating or understanding him.

At Cambridge he remained ‘the prince’, denying himself any relationship between equals. Nurtured to believe in his superiority, he became intolerant of criticism and refused to accept blame. Speaking to Dimbleby may have provided some therapy to relieve his demons, but by exposing his limited self-confidence he showed himself as self-destructive, thin-skinned and over-eager to find fault with others, especially his parents.

As a young man, Charles had craved a spiritual guide. He found one in Laurens van der Post, the South African explorer, writer and somewhat eccentric philosopher. Employing mystical terms, van der Post offered the young Charles a voyage of self-discovery and a comfortable port by telling him that, despite his possibly limited time as king, he could prove his greatness as Prince of Wales. Inspired by van der Post’s lectures about African tribesmen, environmental pollution and the benefits of complementary medicine, Charles developed a ragbag of beliefs linking mysticism, divine powers, geometric measurements, orthodox Christianity and Islam.

Dimbleby’s book revealed other impolitic principles. Previously, the public had been unaware that the heir to the throne was not a conventional Anglican. One single sentence threatened centuries of British stability. As monarch, Charles told Dimbleby, he would prefer to be ‘defender of faith rather than of The Faith’. The Church of England and constitutional experts alike were disturbed by his doubt about swearing the traditional coronation oath to protect the Protestant settlement of 1701. There were now not one but two religious objections to Charles succeeding.

In Dimbleby’s television documentary, the aspiring king pleaded for understanding. ‘It’s not a holiday, you know,’ he said to camera. ‘It’s all so difficult … I can’t describe the horror of seeing your life set in concrete.’ Instead of offering himself as a visionary leader, he came across as a picture of harassed weakness. As he rambled on, with a series of eye-rolling expressions, grimaces and scowls, his audience was left perplexed. ‘Who are you?’ he was asked by a child in the documentary. ‘I wish I could remember,’ he had replied.

In preparation for the programme, uppermost in the TV producers’ thoughts had been ‘the Camilla question’. The relationship had never been officially confirmed. After some discussion, Charles believed that a confession would ‘clear the decks’. Dimbleby’s enquiry about his marriage was straightforward: ‘You were, because of your relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, from the beginning persistently unfaithful to your wife and this caused the breakdown?’ Instead of briefly expressing his regret, Charles replied, ‘I was faithful until it was clear to me that my marriage had irretrievably broken down.’ He then admitted his adultery, denied that he was considering divorce, and insisted he would be king. Royalist newspapers proclaimed that Charles had ‘willingly cooperated in [his] own destruction’. The Sunday Times headline for its serialisation of Dimbleby’s book summarised its central message: ‘Charles: My Agony’.

The public was aghast. Soon after publication he made a ceremonial return to Caernarvon, where twenty-five years earlier a global TV audience had watched his investiture as Prince of Wales. Just days after his televised confession, Charles drove through the town’s empty streets; local television did not interrupt its coverage of racing from Sandown Park.

In hindsight, Dimbleby’s highlighting the facts about Charles’s marriage had in one way been a blessing, forcing the pace for his divorce. But while Charles may have settled the score, he had prepared the way for far-reaching repercussions that he could never have anticipated.

The battle with Diana had revealed the woeful mismanagement of the royal family by the queen as well as by Charles’s senior advisers. The prince’s relationships with his private secretaries had always been fractious. Aylard, appointed in 1992, was his fourth in seven years. Edward Adeane had resigned in 1985 after a row about Charles’s uncontrollable love of controversy; John Riddell, a genial businessman who was appointed in 1985, laughed about the chicanery of courtiers and cursed the shambles of Charles’s lifestyle. ‘Every time I made the office work,’ Riddell observed, ‘the prince fucks it up again. He comes in, complains that his office is “useless” and people cannot spell and the world is so unfair, and then says, “This is part of the intolerable burden I put up with. This incompetence!”’ Such outbursts manifested the prince’s intolerance rather than a desire for perfection. After Riddell resigned five years into the job, Charles refused to award him the customary knighthood, an omission later rectified by the queen. ‘Charles would be fantastic as a second-hand-car salesman,’ Riddell told a colleague. ‘He has the right enthusiasm and conviction to sell. Then you remember he’s heir to the throne.’

Riddell’s successor was Major General Christopher Airy, the former commander of the army’s London District. Airy was hired only after being vetted, at Charles’s request, by Jimmy Savile. The TV personality, dressed in a silver tracksuit and sporting gold bangles, had met the candidate in Kensington Palace. ‘My job,’ explained Savile, ‘is to persuade you not to take the job. That’s what Prince Charles has asked me to do.’ Airy was bewildered. How, he wondered, had Savile – posthumously exposed as a serial predatory paedophile – induced the royals to allow him to make unannounced visits to Kensington Palace and be invited to Charles’s fortieth birthday party? The prince had even sent Savile a box of Havana cigars – a gift from Fidel Castro – with a note: ‘Nobody will ever know what you’ve done for this country, Jimmy. This is to go some way in thanking you.’ On his second interview, Airy was told by Savile that his appointment had been approved – but to expect lengthy waits whenever summoned by Charles.

The prince’s misjudgement about Savile coincided with his sympathy towards another sexual offender. He allowed Peter Ball, the Bishop of Lewes and Gloucester, to live in a property in Somerset provided by the Duchy of Cornwall despite the prelate’s admission that he had abused boys. The police, documents would later reveal, had cooperated with leaders of the Church of England, particularly George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to ‘prevent a scandal’, partly because Ball was ‘friendly with Prince Charles’. ‘I wish I could do more,’ Charles wrote to the paedophile in 1995, angry that Ball had not been re-appointed as bishop. ‘I feel so desperately strongly about the monstrous wrongs that have been done to you and the way you’ve been treated.’ Ball would be jailed in 2015.

These shameless relationships were unfamiliar to Airy. Within a year of his appointment, the ceremonial guardsman was reprimanded for suggesting to Charles that a forthcoming and unwelcome visit was ‘your duty, sir’.

‘Duty is what you do!’ Charles shouted at him. ‘Duty is what I live – an intolerable burden.’

Soon after, unaccustomed to his employer’s campaigns about poverty and his propensity for flying to hot climates for environmental summits, Airy was summarily fired – knifed, some speculated, by Aylard, his successor. Airy’s misery on his dismissal was later rekindled by gratuitously unpleasant comments about him in Jonathan Dimbleby’s book. Charles was a bad enemy. He carried grudges. That was the background to his disillusionment with Aylard. The fallout from the Dimbleby project exposed Aylard as hidebound by court procedure and unable to think outside the box. His lack of sympathy for new ideas increased the temptation for Charles to recruit Mark Bolland. He needed a saviour to relieve the agony of the previous fifteen years.

Ever since 1981, when a billion people around the world had watched his marriage to Diana, the battle of the Waleses had aroused global fascination. The accepted story of a selfish and cruel older man betraying a beloved icon was, Charles believed, the product of mismanagement by his advisers, although Charles conceded that even the best spin doctors would have been overwhelmed by the revelations about his private life.

Ken Stronach, a junior valet, had written a book about Charles’s affair with Camilla and was suspected of taking photographs of the royal bed; Wendy Berry, a Highgrove housekeeper, 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 what to do next, he had lost confidence in Aylard and forged an even closer relationship with Fiona Shackleton. Educated at Benenden, the tall, blonde, loquacious lawyer had earned a 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 of raw feelings,’ wrote Dimbleby, ‘reduced him to tears of impotence and regret, the more severe because he was lonely and so far from home.’ (Twenty-three years later, Camilla’s biographer would claim that Charles had written to her one week before her wedding, urging her not to marry – but no letter has been produced.)

From the outset, the Parker Bowles’s marriage was unusual. Army officers expected their wives to play their part in regimental life, tolerate regular relocations of home, and maintain appropriate standards in dress and housekeeping. Among her husband’s fellow officers, Camilla was known to avoid all that, not least because, as he admitted to his friends, ‘she’s bone idle’. Andrew Parker Bowles circumnavigated their untidy country home by living in London during the week.

‘Camilla was unhappy,’ observed a friend, ‘because Andrew was always putting her down.’ Sensing her disdain for army life, Parker Bowles avoided any permanent relocations abroad, not least because he was conducting successive affairs in London. By 1979, after he had been posted to Rhodesia as the last military liaison officer before independence, Camilla started seeing Charles. Few were shocked. Her family was known for adultery, desertion and divorce, and Parker Bowles made no protest. On the contrary, he preferred a bachelor’s life in Rhodesia while his wife enjoyed Wiltshire – and Wales. For Charles, Camilla was a relief after Amanda Knatchbull, Earl Mountbatten’s granddaughter, had rejected his proposal of marriage.

At the time, Mrs Parker Bowles was the perfect match for Charles. Sexually experienced, she was content to accommodate herself to his demands and his schedule – polo, shooting, fishing and his royal duties. Most of all, she showed genuine interest in everything he said. Her husband only became aware how far the relationship had progressed when in 1980 he invited his wife to Salisbury, Rhodesia’s capital. One week later, she welcomed Charles as the queen’s representative at the country’s independence ceremonies. While Parker Bowles spent most days in a helicopter in the company of an attractive American woman photographer (and was also beginning an affair with Charlotte Hambro, the married sister of Nicholas Soames), gossip columnists hinted that Camilla was the perfect escort for Charles. Typical of the risqué nature of their social set, Charlotte’s husband Richard was the brother of Rupert Hambro, Camilla’s first serious boyfriend. Tactful understanding precluded anyone frowning over Andrew’s behaviour. ‘Always one of the lads, but not a lad himself,’ said a fellow officer with a smile. Parker Bowles, promoted to major, may have resented the suggestion that Charles and Camilla had flown out to Rhodesia together and had isolated themselves in Charles’s private quarters on the plane, amid sniggers that they were joining the mile-high club, but generally her affair was acceptable so long as it remained discreet.

Charles broke that rule after all three had returned from Africa and met again at the annual Cirencester Ball. Parker Bowles watched the prince kiss Camilla passionately while dancing with her. ‘HRH is very fond of my wife,’ he told friends flatly, ‘and she appears very fond of him.’ Parker Bowles’s circle assumed that he was thrilled that Charles was in love with his wife. Their marriage could continue so long as the façade did not jeopardise his good relations with the queen, and especially the queen mother. Invitations from Buckingham Palace for shooting and fishing holidays, and hospitality at Ascot and Cheltenham, were invaluable. Nor was he perturbed when in 1980 Charles bought Highgrove, near Parker Bowles’s family home in Gloucestershire. For their part, Charles and Camilla felt no guilt about their affair until February 1981, when he announced his engagement to Diana.

Both Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles individually invited Diana for lunches. Camilla’s much-publicised meeting with Charles’s fiancée took place at a well-known London restaurant. By contrast, Andrew’s lunch, at the Turf Club, was discreet. Both were diplomatic successes. Thereafter, Charles and Diana stayed for weekends with the Parker Bowleses. On one occasion, in front of others, Andrew told Charles, ‘Diana is the girl for you.’ Charles had nodded in appreciation, and as a signal of their friendship replied, ‘You must tell me if I’m ever pompous.’

Andrew believed that, with the advent of Diana, his wife had decided to break off her relationship with Charles. When invited by mutual friends for dinner, she would ask, ‘Are the Waleses coming?’ If the answer was yes, she would refuse the invitation. ‘It’s easier if we don’t meet,’ she told her husband. Some were suspicious about such protests, especially after Diana’s denunciation of Camilla in 1992 and her allegation that Camilla had slept with Charles on the night before their wedding. Somewhat bewildered, Parker Bowles asked his friends whether they recalled that night. All would honestly reply that Camilla returned to the barracks with him from the party at Buckingham Palace. The story had in fact been invented by Stephen Barry, another of Charles’s disgruntled junior valets.

By the mid-1980s, the truth had become murky. Charles’s relationship with Diana collapsed after the birth of Harry in 1984. Clearly unsuited to his young wife, the prince sought comfort and advice, especially from Camilla. In 1986 Andrew Parker Bowles began a passionate affair with Rosemary Pitman, the wife of a friend and fellow officer. He had finally found true happiness, but, to protect his young children and his army career, he resisted divorce. In parallel, Camilla’s relationship with the heir to the throne intensified. ‘Charles,’ Diana told Richard Kay, ‘is obsessed by Camilla’s tits, and I haven’t got tits as big as Camilla’s.’

Although Kay was close to Diana, he was simultaneously forging a good relationship with Mark Bolland, an advantage to Charles when, in August 1996, on the eve of his decree nisi, the News of the World published a blurred shot showing Charles and Camilla in a garden in south Wales. The caption complimented Camilla on her appearance, because she was smiling rather than scowling: the implication was obvious. Shortly after, Charles took Camilla to a performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon. Journalists were waiting. The tip-off, Charles assumed, had come from Bolland. By this time, just a few weeks into Bolland’s new job, Camilla was speaking about the next steps to him, Hilary Browne-Wilkinson and Fiona Shackleton up to six times a day. Besides gaining favourable mentions in the media, Camilla said, her priority was Richard Aylard’s removal.

That, Bolland realised, was not Charles’s immediate concern. His employer’s dominant need was to unburden himself about his feelings towards his family and about the harm Diana had done to him. His young ex-wife, he complained, was badly educated, without any O- or A-Levels, and lacked self-discipline. Nor, he added, did she have any interest in theatre, poetry, music or opera. He seemed to have forgotten that in fact Diana loved opera and ballet, and played the piano daily. Her evenings at the pop concerts he so scorned were to raise money for charity.

Such inconsistencies were irrelevant to Charles. All he demanded was that none of his derogatory comments about Diana’s sanity should be quoted to the public. In the narrative he wanted Bolland to create, Camilla was perfect, while he was suffering the burden of dutifully going through life without the woman he loved. Bolland was unsure. Was Charles’s relationship with Camilla really the big love story, as Diana made out? Or had two middle-aged people, at the tail end of their marriages, found each other a convenient staging post? Either way, he was certain that his employer was not ideal husband material, and suspected that he could never live permanently with any woman. Even Michael Fawcett warned him against forcing Camilla onto Charles.

Bolland decided that Fawcett’s doubts could be discounted. Jealous of others, the valet wanted to be the only person in Charles’s life. The reality about Charles and Camilla’s relationship could be heard on the Camillagate tape. Charles’s reference to being Camilla’s tampon was not just unusual, but was calculated to gain her sympathy. Being treated as a child suited him. ‘My role in life is to support you and love you,’ she cooed. When Charles told her, ‘I need you several times a week,’ she replied, ‘I need you all the week, all the time.’ If the young Diana was the mouse, Camilla was catnip. Charles would always return to Camilla because she gave him what he needed emotionally, and was a skilled mistress. The twist was the layers of deceit on which their relationship had been built: the lies uttered by his staff, those assigned to protect them, and the friends who provided houses for their trysts.

In September 1996, during the prime minister’s annual visit to the queen at Balmoral, John Major described the public’s deep unease about Charles’s campaign to promote Camilla. The heir to the throne, the beleaguered prime minister said, should cool his romance with his old flame.

Unspoken was Major’s irritation at Charles’s lack of self-discipline when at the same time he was publicly criticising the government’s mismanagement of mad cow disease, which was causing havoc for farmers and the rural tourist industry. Charles, Major hinted, always blamed others but never himself. After a decade of scandal, many in Westminster suggested that the monarchy would benefit from a period of silence. But by this time Major was a diminished figure, certain to lose the imminent general election, and he proved too weak to influence his royal hosts.

Shortly after Major left Balmoral, Charles and other members of the family congregated for a meeting of the Way Ahead Group, an informal meeting held once a year between palace officials and the queen and her children. Under Prince Philip’s leadership, the royals were encouraged to discuss fundamental changes by treating the monarchy as a business. Invited to observe the royals’ discussion were Fellowes, Aylard and Robin Janvrin, as well as David Ogilvy, the Earl of Airlie, a close friend of the queen whom she always trusted to deliver unpalatable truths. Also participating was Michael Peat, a senior accountant appointed in 1990 to reform Buckingham Palace’s finances.

As the meeting got under way, the queen and Prince Philip listened to their officials’ proposals to reduce the number of royals living on the civil list’s annual budget of £55 million (drawn from the Crown Estate’s £94.6 million profits in 1995); to put some distance between Charles and embarrassing members of the extended family; and to consider whether a female child could become the first in the line of succession. During the discussion, Charles spoke about modernising the monarchy, but remained silent about the contrast between the queen’s frugal lifestyle and his own.

Also unmentioned was the uncertainty in Charles’s household. His divorce may have been finalised, but the prospect of his appearing in public with Camilla, let alone marrying her, was inconceivable to those at the meeting. Palace officials spoke only about rehabilitating the prince as fit to marry and as acceptable to be king-in-waiting by the time of the queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002.

That timetable was unacceptable to Charles. The first obstacle was Aylard. ‘My job in the beginning,’ Bolland recalled, ‘was to remove the antediluvian creatures who fuelled the War of the Waleses. Sour palace courtiers like Aylard and Fellowes, the grey suits who ordered royals to disappear.’

In late September Charles triggered the endgame. Bolland and Stephen Lamport, Aylard’s deputy, were on a recce to Kazakhstan and Ukraine, which Charles was shortly to visit. The two men were drinking warm gin and tonic in a shabby hotel room in Kiev, in Ukraine, when Camilla phoned Bolland. Charles, Bolland knew, was listening in on an extension. Camilla wanted to know whether Lamport would accept Aylard’s job. ‘Yes,’ answered Lamport, ‘but I can’t make it happen.’

Charles summoned Aylard to Lochmore, the Duke of Westminster’s shooting lodge in the north of Scotland. ‘I think it is time for you to go,’ he told his loyal servant. Aylard departed in tears. Lamport would replace him, with Bolland as the new deputy private secretary.

On the instructions of Charles and Camilla, Bolland’s new task was to persuade the queen and her advisers that the heir to the throne’s continuing relationship with Camilla was non-negotiable, and that Charles’s primacy among his siblings should be conspicuously revived. ‘I won’t be trodden down any more,’ Charles declared.

Soon after, Diana called Bolland. Despite his position in the enemy camp, she was easily charmed by him, and he responded in kind to her wiles. Working together, both agreed, was so much easier than fighting. The Camilla campaign, Diana said, was disturbing: ‘I know that as part of the plan she’ll give an interview next week, but if and when she does, I will have to make a statement.’

‘There’s no plan for an interview,’ replied Bolland, aware that Diana’s ability to manipulate the media was legendary.

Her suspicion about the Camilla campaign was shared in Buckingham Palace. For the first five months of Bolland’s job, Robert Fellowes and Charles Anson, the queen’s press secretary, regarded him as benign. While both distrusted the media, they assumed that, given his previous employment at the Press Complaints Commission, Bolland would continue to guard William and Harry’s privacy. Their own priority was to protect the monarchy, not least from Charles heaping greater disrepute upon his own family and endangering his succession. But once both realised that the new man did not share their view of Camilla, Fellowes spoke about destabilising Bolland’s campaign by hiring a private detective to find evidence that he was gay. The plan was ill-conceived. ‘You can just ask him,’ Fiona Shackleton told Fellowes, ‘and he’ll admit it.’

The report to Charles about that conversation inflamed his bitterness towards Buckingham Palace’s officials, particularly Fellowes. His ex-brother-in-law, he knew, wanted to end his relationship with Camilla. In retaliation, Charles ordered Bolland to tell Fellowes and Janvrin that the queen ‘needed to move with the times’. Unsurprisingly, he was ignored. Of the besieged lovers, Fellowes judged: ‘Those two are the most selfish people I have ever met.’

At the end of 1996, a BBC TV programme about the royals and their companions called The Nation Decides echoed this view. In a poll of three thousand people, Charles was voted the most hated royal, just above Camilla. The popular dislike was personal. A further telephone poll in January 1997 found that 66 per cent of Britons supported the monarchy, slightly less than in previous years.

Finding a permanent solution to the conundrum of Charles, Diana and Camilla was the elephant in the room at the 9 a.m. daily meetings in Buckingham Palace, where the private secretaries and other advisers to the royal family met over coffee to discuss events and problems. Once mundane matters had been agreed, the officials forlornly considered the War of the Waleses. Charles, Fellowes suspected, was unwilling to surrender or even compromise. His judgement was right: Charles fought to win, regardless of any collateral damage. Like Fellowes, the influence of the other officials at the meeting was limited. All deferred to the queen. She could have summoned Charles and Diana to order both to cease manipulating the media, or asked Robin Janvrin, trusted by Diana as an honest broker, to mediate a ceasefire. Or she could have issued an ultimatum to Charles to choose between the crown and Camilla. Instead, she ignored the problem.

The queen’s fence-sitting reflected her doubts about Charles’s judgement, and also the erosion of her own self-confidence. Five years earlier, her ‘annus horribilis’ speech, written by Robert Fellowes, had revealed how vulnerable she was. Suffering from the divorce of three of her four children and having witnessed Windsor Castle engulfed in flames, she told Britons, ‘No institution – city, monarchy whatever – should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty.’ Her honesty had won widespread affection. Nevertheless, as 1997 began, she still felt battered.

‘I cannot believe what’s happened to me,’ she confessed to an adviser after describing the state of her family and her continuing struggle with Charles.

‘It’s common today,’ was the consoling reply.

Philip, her most loyal friend, offered little comfort. He merely encouraged distrust of Charles without making any meaningful suggestions other than to reinforce the queen’s anger towards Camilla.

On Charles’s behalf, Stephen Lamport was in no position to offer a solution. A cautious man seconded from the Foreign Office, he was regarded as indecisive. Cast as middle-class, Lamport knew that his income, home and perks would be terminated at a moment’s notice if the prince were displeased. ‘Stephen,’ a courtier explained to a newly appointed official, ‘hasn’t got much money, so his job is important for him.’ Every obedient courtier, irretrievably bound by Charles’s temperament and outbursts, would search his employer’s face for signs of that hour’s attitude. Charles’s rages or frosty blanking could be calculated to assert his supremacy over every official, or just reflect that moment’s volatility. Lamport was employed to obey if his advice was rejected, not to take responsibility. Loyal to the monarchy, he agreed to be led by his new deputy; after all, Bolland was acting on Charles’s behalf with Camilla’s approval. Whenever Patrick Jephson complained that Bolland was ‘monstering the media’, Lamport would reply: ‘I can find no evidence.’ His sharpest reproach to Bolland was ‘We don’t do that sort of thing.’ Both men understood their terms of employment – with Charles, only unquestioning obedience was acceptable.

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