The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (13 page)

Four days later Diana was dead and people like Lynda Lee-Potter were rapidly revising their opinions.

‘They’re all going to blame me, aren’t they?’ was the first question the Prince asked when he heard that she had been killed. Initial reports were that she had been badly injured but was still alive. ‘The world’s going to go completely mad, isn’t it? We’re going to see a reaction that we’ve never seen before. And it could destroy everything. It could destroy the monarchy.’

‘Yes, sir, I think it could,’ said Stephen Lamport, the Prince’s Private Secretary. ‘It’s going to be very difficult for your mother, sir. She’s going to have to do things she may not want to do, or feel comfortable doing, but if she doesn’t do them, then that’s the end of it.’

And for most of that week, while the nation’s grief brought everyday life to a juddering halt, so much so that the death of Mother Teresa passed almost unnoticed, the Prince’s prophecy came within a whisker of coming true. His mother finally did some things she didn’t want to do, didn’t feel comfortable doing and the crisis passed; the monarchy was not destroyed. But it was close; too close for comfort.

What he did get absolutely right was the prediction that he would be blamed. Had he loved Diana instead of his mistress, people argued in their anger, Diana would still be alive. She would never have been racing through the streets of Paris with Dodi Fayed. She would have been happily married and safely tucked up at Kensington Palace out of harm’s way. And who’s to say it wasn’t true?

The history of the last twenty years could have been very different if Charles had been strong enough to bring an end to his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. And the prospects for the next twenty years would have been very much more certain than they are today. Diana talked about being a sacrificial lamb. But let’s face it, Charles was too. Born into the Royal Family as eldest son and heir, he had to marry, had to breed and didn’t have the luxury that most other men in life have of choice, either about a career or a partner. A stronger character might have been able to stand up to the pressures that were forcing him towards a hopeless marriage. But Charles had neither the strength nor the self-confidence to call a halt, and allowed himself to be swept along by others in the vain belief that he was doing the right thing; doing his duty. Charles has spent his life doing what was expected and required of him. That is the curse of his birthright. The upside is that he gets to live in beautiful palaces and castles surrounded by priceless treasures and genuflecting flunkies. The downside is that his life is not his own.

Charles grew up with the spectre of the abdication hovering over him. He had been weaned on stories about the disgrace brought upon the family by the Duke of Windsor who as
Edward VIII gave up the throne rather than the woman he loved. He abandoned his duty and that single selfish decision betrayed the Church, the Crown and the British people. No one felt so bitter and unforgiving about his behaviour, nor referred to it with more venom, than the Queen Mother, who was convinced that the strain of being thrust into the role in his brother’s place eventually killed her husband, George VI. She never forgave Edward, and he and Wallis Simpson, whom he married after the abdication, were forced to live the remainder of their lives as exiles in Paris.

Nothing has spurred the Prince of Wales over the years quite like the terror that he might be compared with the Duke of Windsor. There have always been similarities, not least of all a selfish streak. Before his disgrace, Edward VIII was a charming and popular figure and much praised for his social conscience. His distress at the plight of the unemployed while visiting the mining valleys of South Wales prompted his famous remark, ‘Something must be done to find them work.’ Then added, ‘You may be sure that all I can do for you I will.’ Three weeks later he abdicated, thus abdicating all responsibility for the unemployed of South Wales and everywhere else. During the 1970s, when Charles was rattling his way through an alarming number of girls, with little apparent care or thought for anyone else, Mountbatten thought he was showing alarming signs. He warned him against ‘beginning on the downward slope which wrecked your Uncle David’s life and led to his disgraceful abdication and his futile life ever after’. The Prince was shocked that his ‘Honorary Grandfather’, Mountbatten, could have drawn such a devastating parallel and considered himself soundly rebuked.

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.

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 Prince 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.