Charles’s lavatory at Highgrove was filled with cartoons featuring himself. In the guest’s lavatory of Camilla’s house, Ray Mill, were unflattering cartoons of Diana.
‘That mad cow,’ said Camilla, echoing the view held by her and Charles’s friends. Camilla’s denigration of Diana was unknown beyond their circle. The reward for her discretion was opinion polls that showed public feeling had moved in her favour. The latest finding was that 50 per cent of the British people supported her marriage to Charles, although 78 per cent opposed her becoming queen. Charles’s ratings had also slightly improved. Seventy-six per cent now supported him as the next monarch. Few realised, however, that while Charles lived openly with Camilla, their domestic arrangements were unorthodox.
Seventeen miles from Highgrove, Camilla preferred to lead a separate life in the shabby farmhouse bought after her divorce for £850,000, half the proceeds from the sale of the family home, and registered as owned by a trust run by Lord Halifax. In the timeless network of their social class, Halifax was married to the former wife of Richard Parker Bowles, Andrew’s brother. Living informally with her dogs, her garden and much cast-off furniture, Camilla was critical of Highgrove’s tidy perfection. ‘It’s too small and too Charles,’ she told her friends. ‘I can’t touch a thing.’ The home of a fussy bachelor offered a ‘lifestyle that doesn’t suit me’. Life at Highgrove also frustrated her: ‘Charles is always working, working, working.’
In their flexible arrangement, Camilla alternated between staying overnight at Highgrove or St James’s Palace, and returning to Ray Mill. That also suited Charles. He was accustomed to living apart from rather than with a woman, and chose to sleep in a separate bedroom even when he and Camilla were under the same roof. Both enjoyed regular separation. A creature of habit, Charles followed virtually the same routine every month in every year, allowing nothing to interfere as he moved his ‘permanent’ home between St James’s Palace, Highgrove, and Birkhall, the queen mother’s house on the Balmoral estate, with intervening stops at Balmoral itself and occasionally at Sandringham. When it suited her, Camilla followed. In a crisis, she would be summoned by Michael Fawcett to drive to join Charles regardless of the time of day or night. A sudden bout of melancholia or self-doubt required relief. Thankfully, she could always make him laugh or, in her words, ‘jolly him along’. In return, money was no longer a problem. Charles paid off her overdraft, stabled her horses, provided a car and gave her increasing amounts of cash.
Camilla’s public image was that of an undemanding mistress devoted only to making Charles happy, with no mention of marriage. ‘She has never worked in her life,’ commented Bolland, ‘and is terrified of being on public display. A member of her family described her to me as “the laziest woman to have been born in England in the twentieth century”.’ As hard as Camilla tried to prove Bolland wrong, she remained ‘nervy and lacked stamina’. The accepted view of a woman whose youth had been exclusively focused on social excitement, especially parties and hunting, making good in middle age was entirely accurate.
In the opinion of Tom Camoys and other like-minded courtiers, Camilla was not lazy in one respect: urging Charles to establish her own status. To oblige his mistress, he became careless about propriety. Yet another poll, this time by Mori, reported the public’s continued belief in the royals as hardworking patriots who embodied British virtues and values.
Somewhat undermining that opinion, Charles flew to Greece in August 1999 with his sons for a cruise around the Aegean on Yiannis Latsis’s yacht the Alexander. Two days previously, Camilla and her two children had been flown to Greece by private jet, paid for by Charles, from an RAF airfield near Ray Mill to await a large group of their and Charles’s friends, including Hugh van Cutsem. The intention was to stage a public event as part of their continuing campaign.
To Charles’s misfortune, the long-planned cruise risked being overshadowed by a scandal that had been bubbling for six weeks. The spotlight was on Tom Parker Bowles, Camilla’s twenty-four-year-old son, who had been exposed in the News of the World offering friends cocaine. Charles had good reason for concern. Although Tom Parker Bowles was seven years older than William, he had become his confidant. According to William’s friends, Parker Bowles’s behaviour posed a significant threat because Chris Morgan, a Sunday Times journalist, was keen to associate Charles’s sons with cocaine. Another notable guest on the holiday yacht was Patty Palmer-Tomkinson, whose daughter Tara, a media personality and renowned publicity-seeker, had recently been admitted to an American clinic in the hope of curing her cocaine addiction.
Charles would not allow such embarrassments to ruin the cruise. On his instructions, the family get-together was presented to the media as William’s idea, which had taken his father ‘by surprise’. Few believed that, especially Charles’s critics at Buckingham Palace, in whose opinion Charles was using William and Harry to paper over the scandalous behaviour of Camilla’s son. Among those critics was Prince Philip, irritated once again by his son freeloading on Latsis, an unattractive character. The cruise was worth over £1 million, and Charles had recently accepted another £1 million from Latsis for his Youth Business Trust. Philip charged his son with damaging the public’s trust by allowing the rich to buy access to him.
At the heart of that operation was the omnipresent Robert Higdon. In 1998, however, the American fell blind drunk from a boat in St Vincent into the Caribbean. ‘I’m a wreck from alcohol,’ he admitted, but nevertheless shortly afterwards he brought John and Caroline Kennedy to a dinner at St James’s Palace that raised about £200,000. At another meal in Kensington Palace with the prince he introduced Ted Stanley, an American billionaire businessman, and other guests who each donated $250,000 to Charles’s charities. ‘Lamport and Bolland were freaked out by all the names I brought to London,’ Higdon boasted. ‘Their only problem was the placement.’ But there was a second concern: his alcoholism. After an argument, the fundraiser returned to Washington prepared to resign.
‘They flew me back to London for lunch with Charles, Geoffrey Kent and Bolland,’ recalled Higdon. ‘Charles asked me, “Are you being treated fairly?” and I replied, “Do you expect me to answer honestly in front of these two? Hell no, I’m not. I’m being treated very badly. I’m being lied to. You wouldn’t be able to raise millions of dollars without me and you’re not giving me anything.”’ These were the rants of an unstable man who needed treatment and a fond farewell. Instead, in Higdon’s version, Charles angrily exclaimed: ‘No one’s helping me. I’m being sabotaged. Tell me what you need and you’ll get it.’ In truth, he could not afford to lose such an outstanding source of revenue, and Higdon remained employed after receiving treatment. Together with Geoffrey Kent, he could entice a raft of American billionaires to finance Charles’s charities.
In June 1999, eighty donors to Charles’s American Foundation had booked to have dinner in Buckingham Palace. Knowing that the queen would be at Windsor, Charles intended to invite Camilla. That raised a double problem. The queen disliked the use of her home to raise money, and while she tolerated press photographs of Charles and his mistress at theatres and restaurants, Camilla’s presence in Buckingham Palace was unacceptable. She usually just ignored such dilemmas, but this time she made one stipulation: while Camilla could be present at the party, she could not sit at Charles’s table. The couple bit the bullet, and the evening went ahead.
Four months on, Higdon proved his value again. Forty Americans including the comedian Joan Rivers, Eileen Guggenheim of the wealthy mining family, and Carol Petrie, the billionaire widow of an American retailer, had dinner at Holyrood. Charles’s Phoenix Trust was seeking £6 million to transform four deprived areas in Scotland – including a derelict industrial complex of nineteenth-century sandstone buildings at Stanley Mills, on the River Tay in Perthshire – into stunning housing estates. Higdon’s introduction of Rivers, a close friend of his, strengthened Charles’s profile in America and, helped by her amusing introduction, his speech of thanks to his guests after the dinner produced a gush of cash. He was now tempted to take bigger risks.
In May 2000, at the queen’s request, Charles became the lord high commissioner of the Church of Scotland. Rather than copy the pattern of his mother’s unpretentious engagements and modest dinner parties for a maximum of twelve, he was persuaded to arrange a week of high-profile events climaxing in a dinner for two hundred guests entertained by jugglers and fire-eaters. Bolland’s motive was to promote Camilla. After endless prevarication and frets that ‘We mustn’t frighten the horses,’ Charles agreed that without Camilla at his side he would risk looking furtive. The Sunday Times headline at the end of the celebrations rewarded Bolland’s persistence: ‘He Came. He Saw. He Conquered.’ Thereafter, Charles disappeared from public life in Scotland for another year.
For about six months of every year, the heir to the throne enjoyed a unique lifestyle in beautiful places either in seclusion or with friends. Although his travelling staff (a butler, two valets, chef, private secretary, typist and bodyguards) could anticipate most of his movements between his five homes, the only definite confirmation of his final destination, especially to his hosts, would be the arrival of a truck carrying suitcases, furniture and food. Then followed endless telephone calls with his staff as he changed his mind about his future plans and projects.
Charles’s demands were constant. An assistant was on call in his office until he went to sleep, and would be subject to familiar daily tirades: ‘Even my office is not the right temperature. Why do I have to put up with this? It makes my life so unbearable.’
For four months every year he lived in Scotland, expecting people to visit him from London regardless of any discomfort – and usually at their own expense. When he emerged in public, he behaved impeccably and showed genuine interest in people and events. Few outsiders could guess whether or not, as one adviser commented, he was ‘just putting on a game face’; insiders were similarly perplexed.
One of his habits was to have dinner served to guests at 8 p.m., but not to arrive himself until 8.15, because he had decided against eating the first course. The guests would be allowed to start without him, although visitors to Highgrove were cautioned by Camilla not to begin their breakfast before Charles appeared. Or he would arrive at a function with his policeman carrying a flask containing a pre-mixed Martini, to be handed over to the host’s butler along with the glass Charles insisted be used. Hosts would be informed that an aide would deliver a bag containing the food Charles would eat. Unlike the queen, who ate the same food as other guests, Charles not only made it clear what he would consume, but if he accepted an overnight invitation, how and where he would sleep.
Each visit was subject to different requirements. At Chatsworth, the 175-room home of his beloved Debo, he and Camilla were assigned a whole wing for up to three weeks in the year for hunting. During the shooting season he enjoyed the company of Gerald Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, at either Eaton Hall, near Chester, or the duke’s shooting lodge in the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire. In between, he stayed at Garrowby, the home of the Earl and Countess of Halifax in Yorkshire, and with Chips and Sarah Keswick in Invermark, Sutherland. Before a visit to one friend in nort-east England, Charles’s staff arrived a day early with a truck carrying furniture to replace the perfectly appropriate fittings in the guest rooms: nothing less than Charles and Camilla’s complete bedrooms, including the prince’s orthopaedic bed, complete with his own linen. His staff made sure not to forget a small radio, the prince’s lavatory seat, Kleenex Velvet lavatory paper, Laphroaig whisky and water in both rooms, plus two landscapes of the Scottish Highlands. The next delivery was his food. His hosts decided, despite their enjoyment of his company, not to invite him again.
Their experience was less distressing than the family asked to host Charles for a long weekend on the Welsh borders. In the preceding months they had invited many friends for the four meals, hired staff and ordered food and flowers. On the Friday afternoon of Charles’s expected arrival, there was a call from St James’s Palace to offer regrets. Under pressure of business, the prince could not arrive until Saturday morning. The following day, the same official telephoned to offer regrets for Saturday lunch, but gave the assurance that Charles would arrive for dinner. That afternoon, the whole visit was cancelled due to ‘unforeseen circumstances’. The considerable waste and disappointment were not mitigated when Charles later revealed to his stricken hostess that the reason for his cancellation was that he had felt unable to abandon the beauty of his sunlit garden at Highgrove.
The prince was discourteous in other ways. After arriving punctually for the ceremony of the Order of the Bath in Westminster Abbey, the queen became irritated: Charles was late. Bad weather, she was told by an official, had prevented his helicopter from landing. Once he arrived, their performance was perfect. Each showed respect to the other, but as usual barely demonstrated any genuine affection.
Charles’s lifestyle was unusually extravagant. With an annual income of £7.5 million from farmland owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, he employed about ninety staff, including ten gardeners at Highgrove alone, at a cost of £2 million annually. He was unusually particular. Because he refused to use pesticides at his Gloucestershire home, he employed four gardeners to lie flat, nose-down on a trailer pulled by a slow-moving Land Rover to pluck weeds. Retired Indian servicemen were deployed to prowl through the undergrowth at night with torches and handpick slugs from the leaves of plants. Lewis Carroll had conjured a similar fantasy when the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland demanded that her roses be of the right colour. The extravagance ran to his office, where he employed an individual private secretary for each of his interests, including the charities, architecture, complementary medicine and the environment. Visitors to St James’s Palace were escorted to Charles’s office by no fewer than three footmen, each responsible for a short segment of corridor. The reason for Charles’s self-indulgence was often debated. The most obvious cause, speculated some, was his decision to defy his father’s imposition of frugality at Gordonstoun.
Rather than appreciating his good fortune, Charles would frequently give vent to resentment, earning him one friend’s accolade as ‘an Olympian whinger’. Succumbing to pressure, in April 2000 he agreed to fly to Europe on a British Airways plane instead of by private jet. He returned vowing never to repeat the experience. The incident clearly had an effect. Soon after, at a dinner hosted by a billionaire at Klosters to raise money to restore a church spire in Prague, Charles was particularly maudlin. During the meal, the glossy women and their sunburnt husbands had been bantering in the braying tones unique to the super-rich.
One billionaire asked his neighbour, ‘What did you do today?’
‘I drank coffee, had a walk and not much more,’ came the reply.
‘Who are you?’ the first man asked.
‘I’m King Constantine of Greece.’
At the end of the meal, the king and Charles huddled in a corner. ‘We pulled the short straw,’ sighed Charles. Compared to others in the room, he complained, both he and the king were stuck for cash. The duchy administrators, he said, repeatedly told him what he could not afford to do. During a recent after-dinner speech at Waddesdon Manor, Jacob Rothschild’s home in Buckinghamshire, Charles had complained that his host employed more gardeners than himself – fifteen against his nine.
Fortunately, the public were unaware of such gripes, but Charles’s lifestyle irked some of his senior staff, particularly Tom Camoys. The former banker argued that the estate should be run as a business, not as a self-indulgence. Camoys’s fate was sealed during the investiture of Elton John for his knighthood. ‘Mr John Elton,’ he announced, seemingly unaware of who the singer was. In royal circles, careers could be wrecked by a single mistake, and Camoys was now a marked man. His misfortune, observed one courtier, was that even the queen disliked his attitude: ‘He doesn’t create a good atmosphere. Tom gave orders rather than using quiet persuasion.’ Realising that even he, ranked among the most illustrious of the royal staff, was being ‘hung out to dry’, Camoys agreed to resign. To Charles, he had scored a victory over Buckingham Palace.
The millennium was approaching. To the queen’s closest advisers, the planned celebrations were noticeably undermining her self-confidence. Even before the exhibition at the Dome celebrating twenty-first-century Britain opened, its contents were derided as tacky, and on the night itself the long queues and dreary show left the monarch looking glum. Her Jubilee, she warned, would be another damp squib. Bruised by years of media scrutiny, she relied for support on her daily phone call from the queen mother, during which she could also share her anxiety about her sister Margaret’s declining health, the cost of a lifetime smoking and drinking. Her unhappiness permeated the household. The absence of leadership among the staff at Buckingham Palace was disturbing. ‘I need them to work together,’ she said to a senior official, ‘so I can give my best.’ After a pause, she also admitted her concern for her elder son’s fragility.
Charles was even more wedded to the telephone. During his night-time and Sunday-morning calls to friends, he would wail about the stress of his semi-covert life, the tensions with his family, and Buckingham Palace’s complaints about Mark Bolland. In that case, his predicament was insoluble. He needed his propagandist more than ever to legitimise Camilla, yet Robin Janvrin regularly complained that Bolland’s activities were ‘dangerous and irresponsible’, dividing the two palaces. Bolland fought too hard, was the word. With skill and passion he was promoting Charles as the star, sometimes, Buckingham Palace believed, at the expense of the queen and other members of her family.
In their anger towards Bolland, Janvrin and other senior courtiers assumed that Charles was too gullible to ignore Bolland’s advice. No one imagined that Charles and Camilla were approving or even directing Bolland’s activities. To warn her son about the dangers, the queen agreed that an adviser should once again travel to Highgrove. The emissary was met with indifference as he described the ‘bad atmosphere’ between the palaces and the need for more genial relations. He then listened to Charles heap blame on Stephen Lamport. In truth, Charles’s powerless but good-hearted private secretary was besieged by irreconcilable demands from the courtiers on the one side, and from Charles, Camilla and Bolland on the other.
The meeting of the Way Ahead Group chaired by the queen on 30 March 2000 reflected the family’s year. Everyone was bad-tempered, and almost the only person not to raise his voice in anger – other than the queen – was Charles, who, fearful of a stinging rebuke from his father, remained silent. Eventually the tensions faded.
Only Camilla was satisfied. Her plan to be accepted by both monarch and public, she believed, was slowly bearing fruit. At Charles’s behest she had met Robin Janvrin, David Airlie and Michael Peat, who had been praised for vastly improving the queen’s finances. She had also been introduced to Scottish church leaders and to George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, at the south London home of the clergyman’s son. During those encounters she did much to detoxify her image.
Pressure on the queen was growing. At another fundraising dinner in Buckingham Palace organised by Robert Higdon, Camilla had fussed that she wanted to sit on the same table as Charles, but he was reluctant to antagonise his mother or Janvrin. While Bolland bore the prince’s familiar complaints about the unfairness of life, Robert Higdon produced a solution: ‘Why don’t we keep Camilla “off-list” on the seating plan, then just put her in an unnamed “empty” chair on Charles’s table?’ While Charles greeted his guests at the door, Higdon approached the American socialite Betsy Bloomingdale and asked, ‘Can you look after Camilla before dinner so she won’t be alone?’ ‘Delighted,’ she replied. Camilla ended up seated opposite Charles, between the husband of Patty Hearst, the renegade newspaper heiress, and Ted Stanley, a manufacturer of collectable coins and stamps. ‘When Ma’am’s away,’ Charles told his guests, looking across at Camilla, ‘the mice will play.’
The game plan was reaching another landmark. King Constantine of Greece had accepted an invitation to celebrate his sixtieth birthday in June 2000 at a barbecue lunch at Highgrove with many of Europe’s royal families and the queen’s close friends. Charles knew that his mother would be loath to miss the occasion. To his satisfaction, Janvrin told Bolland that the queen would go to the party, although she would refuse to be introduced to Camilla. ‘For Her Majesty, she does not exist,’ one courtier commented, adding that it was ‘churlish of the queen’. Charles was told to arrange for the two women to sit far apart. Two days later, the Sun revealed that they would both be at the party. Camilla, ‘a source’ told the newspaper, had ‘emerged into the sunlight. They are now free to marry if they want to.’
Bolland’s optimism proved premature. Two weeks later the queen hosted ‘the Dance of the Decades’, a party at Windsor to celebrate the queen mother’s hundredth birthday, William’s eighteenth, Margaret’s seventieth and Anne’s fiftieth. The queen refused to invite Camilla, but sharing her mother’s fondness for Andrew Parker Bowles, she welcomed the brigadier, by then hailed as the Guards’ most popular commanding officer. Regardless of all the pressure, the queen did not believe that Charles would marry Camilla in her lifetime.
In the festering aftermath of the Windsor party, Robin Janvrin persuaded Stephen Lamport to make a formal complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about the Sun’s headline ‘Marry Her’, with the demand that Bolland receive a knighthood. Charles and Camilla, Lamport wrote to the newspaper, had no plans to marry. Strictly speaking, that was true, and was evidence of Janvrin’s campaign against Bolland – and the prince.
Charles soon saw an opportunity to retaliate. He invited a galaxy of the rich to celebrate the opening of the Prince’s Foundation in Shoreditch. The completion of the new east London centre had inevitably sparked arguments about some details, including where to locate a bar that would be open to the public. To resolve the issue, it was suggested that Charles be asked to mediate. ‘This is ridiculous,’ exclaimed Bolland. ‘The idea that the Prince of Wales would have the faintest idea where to put a bar to entice the public is completely ridiculous.’ To present a modern image, the stainless steel tables were covered in black rubber, and instead of flowers there were pots of cacti wound with barbed wire.
On the invitations to the dinner, Camilla was billed as co-host. To secure the media’s attention, she arrived in a garish pink Versace dress (Donatella Versace was one of the guests), wearing the jewels given by King Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales to his mistress – and, not irrelevantly, Camilla’s great-grandmother – Alice Keppel. The media were encouraged to report that Camilla had lost weight and was devoting attention to her appearance, with facials, manicures, a new hairdresser, and a reduced smoking habit. Unused to arriving at an event amid a blitz of flashes, she walked off from the car in the wrong direction. The media did not lampoon her mistake, nor mention that her outlandish dress had been worn in return for Donatella Versace’s donation to the Prince’s Foundation.
Publicising his feud with his mother overshadowed Charles’s other work, in particular his creation of a school for British art students. For years he had deplored Britain’s art colleges’ refusal to teach traditional drawing and painting. By 2000 his irritation was no longer simply ideological, but was exacerbated by what he saw as the sheer inability of Britain’s teachers to paint anything other than abstract art. Aspiring British painters were travelling to Italy to learn classical skills and work with life models. To Charles, the proof of the nation’s inferior art education was the celebration of Tracey Emin – known for her sexually explicit autobiographical and confessional approach – as an outstanding artist. The new Shoreditch building, the centre of the Royal Drawing School and the brainchild of Adrian Gale, the man Charles had unceremoniously dismissed from his Institute of Architecture, was acclaimed by traditionalists as a considerable achievement.
Finding the money had been the work of three people. Hilary Browne-Wilkinson had enticed the American philanthropist Drue Heinz to buy the building for £2 million. ‘I’ll give him the money if he comes to my home to ask for it,’ said Heinz. Over lunch at her home in Hay’s Mews, Mayfair, she said to Charles, ‘I’ll give you the money, but you didn’t give me a receipt for the last lot I gave you.’
Charles grimaced. Heinz’s first donation to the institute of £2.5 million had been wasted. ‘I’m so grateful,’ he said lamely.
The second donation was negotiated by Stephen Lamport, the Saudi government agreeing to translate an endowment into cash. Thirdly, Robert Higdon had persuaded Joe Allbritton, the chief executive of Riggs Bank, to make a sizeable gift.
Securing the building meant a lot to Charles. He knew that his new school would not save the world, but at least it would win him the gratitude of artists. Inevitably, there were casualties. Charles did not endear himself to Tim Bell, the political consultant who had originally led Drue Heinz into his orbit: ‘After I introduced her, Fawcett hustled himself into it and took my old friend to Scotland to meet Charles behind my back to get her money. Then they ignored me, which hurt my feelings. Charles never said a word of thanks.’
The controversial Turkish businessman Cem Uzan, another guest at the Shoreditch dinner, was more appreciative, and let Bell’s consultancy, Bell Pottinger, know that he would pay generously to fulfil his social ambitions. In the parlance of the market, ‘Uzan wanted to play with the big boys and get alongside the royal family. He wanted the photograph and the Christmas card.’ Through Bell Pottinger, Uzan was introduced to Elizabeth Buchanan, who agreed to steer him into the prince’s life.
At that point Michael Fawcett came into the picture again. Since, officially, Charles could not ask Uzan or anyone else for money, on his behalf Fawcett explained what size of donation would be expected: £200,000 would guarantee that Uzan’s wife Alara sat next to Charles at a dinner. The appropriate payment was made, and the meal went off smoothly. The following day, photographs of both Uzans standing with the prince were posted on media sites across the world. Uzan was billed as a billionaire tycoon who had bought the famous In and Out Club on Piccadilly (in fact he never did so). Charles’s relationship with Uzan aroused concern in Buckingham Palace, but the queen’s advisers knew that he would ignore any warning from them.
A few weeks later, Charles and Camilla were cruising off Nice as the guests of Neimar Kirdar, an Iraqi-born banker and chairman of Investcorp, the owner of the motorway catering chain Welcome Break, Saks department store in New York, and Gucci. To secure Kirdar’s donations, Charles had welcomed the Iraqi to Highgrove and accepted an invitation to his daughter’s wedding. Sunbathing on Kirdar’s yacht underlined the contrariness of Charles’s life. While feuding with his family, he socialised with colourful donors to his charities, but did little to promote the monarchy. Some believed that his behaviour contributed to the decline of deference signalled by the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the queen mother’s hundredth-birthday parade in August.
Although the nation’s enthusiastic celebration of that occasion exposed the BBC’s misjudgement, respite was brief. In autumn 2000, the public mood again turned sour. Charles had been untouched by headlines about the use of illegal drugs by William’s cousin Nicholas Knatchbull, and by Lord Frederick Windsor, the son of Prince Michael of Kent, the queen’s cousin. These had distracted attention from the exposé of Tom Parker Bowles, but a new report created unexpected embarrassment.
In the past, Camilla had successfully isolated Charles from his old friends, including Nicholas Soames, and she now set her sights on Emilie van Cutsem. She suspected that van Cutsem disapproved of her relationship with Charles, and had heard that she had criticised her son Tom for taking William to unsuitable parties. She now complained that van Cutsem’s son Edward, a close childhood friend of William, was also inviting the young prince to louche entertainments. But although, as one observer noted, ‘Camilla poured her opinion into Charles’s ear’, the prince remained devoted to Emilie and Hugh van Cutsem.
In their prickly world, those who befriended the van Cutsems were ostracised by Robert Fellowes and his wife Jane. But any vitriol spread by the Fellowes enhanced Charles’s warm feelings towards the van Cutsems, who years before he had spontaneously toasted at their wedding. However, events beyond his control would stretch that loyalty to breaking point.
Chris Morgan of the Sunday Times was still determined to unearth evidence that William and Harry were taking drugs. Having failed with several attempts, he approached Hugh van Cutsem and persuaded him that Mark Bolland was gossiping that the van Cutsems’ four sons were drug-takers. Although the whole scenario had been fabricated by Morgan, van Cutsem – who was known to address underlings only if they could improve the breeding of his horses – became convinced that Bolland was guilty, and ordered his lawyers to write to Bolland accusing him of making ‘highly damaging’ remarks. Van Cutsem gave a copy of this defamatory letter, which Bolland believed was an attempt to bring about his removal from the palace, to the Mail on Sunday, adding for good measure that Camilla was undermining his friendship with Charles. In retaliation, to protect Camilla and embarrass van Cutsem, Bolland’s irate reply was also leaked.
The public argument soon became uglier. Morgan (who for unrelated reasons eventually committed suicide) wrote in his newspaper that William had been caught using cocaine, but that Bolland had briefed journalists that it was in fact van Cutsem’s son who had taken the drug, not William. That was also untrue – there was no evidence that either William or any van Cutsem had taken any drugs, or that Bolland had spread such a story. Nevertheless, to protect the royals, Bolland told the News of the World that Charles had summoned his sons from school to discuss the crisis. He also revealed that the prince had taken sixteen-year-old Harry to a rehabilitation clinic to show him the dramatic effects of addiction. Examination of the timing of all these events suggested multiple distortions of the truth – embarrassing Charles, Camilla, Hugh and Emilie van Cutsem, and the eight children of three families. All were tarnished.
‘Everyone was livid,’ recalled Bolland, aware that Janvrin had warned about this precise danger – of the royal family at the mercy of innuendo, scandalous accusations and his own manipulation of the media. At Charles’s invitation, Hugh van Cutsem agreed to settle the argument between himself and Bolland at a meeting with the prince at St James’s Palace. Stephen Lamport was also present. All four arrived convinced that they were the victim. At the end of the meeting everyone apologised, but the poison lingered. For the first time in about thirty years Charles did not invite van Cutsem to his annual shoot at Sandringham.
The unseemly spat between the friends coincided with the publication of Shadows of a Princess by Patrick Jephson, a former naval officer and Diana’s one-time private secretary. The book’s sympathetic description of Diana, and its revelations about the indignities inflicted on her by Charles, sharply contradicted Penny Junor’s pro-Charles account.
To help his sales, Jephson hinted that at an early stage while he was writing the book, with the queen’s approval, Robert Fellowes had offered to provide his confidential papers to him. ‘Well, someone’s going to do it, so it might as well be Patrick,’ the queen allegedly told Janvrin. Later, Fellowes withdrew his supposed offer. Added to that mix, Jephson also told journalists that he had not written about Diana’s descriptions of Charles’s unusual sexual life. Withholding that information did not protect the prince from the book’s mass serialisation. Lurid headlines, sparked by intimate details, attracted the usual criticisms. Nicky Gavron, the former wife of a printer and multi-millionaire businessman who had donated £1 million to the Labour Party and soon after received a peerage, announced that Charles should have married a black woman. Mo Mowlam, a prominent, publicity-seeking Labour minister, declared that the queen should move out of Buckingham Palace and live in a small modern house. Once again, the monarchy’s reputation began to slide.
Then it got worse. On 5 November the Daily Mail reported that Prince Andrew had befriended a drug dealer in Los Angeles, and next published photographs of the prince, during an official visit to New York, at a ‘hookers and pimps’ party with seedy characters. He had arrived with Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the disgraced newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell, had been seen near a known prostitute, and soon after was photographed on a yacht in Thailand with topless girls linked to drugs.
Charles was not surprised by the revelations. He had long feared a fall-out from his brother’s antics. Their relations had become fraught earlier in the year, after Charles refused Sarah Ferguson’s invitation to her ex-husband’s fortieth birthday party. Eight years after being photographed topless while her ‘financial adviser’ Johnny Bryan sucked her toes, Ferguson’s vulgarity was still not forgotten. Charles’s dislike of his one-time sister-in-law had escalated after she had chased him around Highgrove carrying a Bible, begging to be allowed to swear her innocence of her reported misbehaviour. In that unforgiving mood, he had listened at the recent meeting of the Way Ahead Group to Andrew’s plan to become a British trade ambassador after leaving the navy the following year. Charles chose that moment to renew his attempt to remove the privileges enjoyed by Andrew’s daughters and other minor royals. On that occasion he was thwarted by Andrew, who rallied support from the queen and Prince Philip. Charles argued with his father before, as ever powerless to defy him, walking out of the room.
At the same time, he also targeted Sophie Wessex, Edward’s wife. He had warned her about the danger of accepting a contract to provide public relations services for Rover cars. Unwilling to forsake the £250,000 fee she had been offered, she had rejected his advice and took the money. In the face of such problems, Richard Luce, the new lord chamberlain and a principled former Foreign Office minister, had drafted rules for the royals to avoid compromising themselves with commercial connections. However, at Philip’s insistence, Sophie’s contract was not cancelled, although Luce did extract a promise from her not to use her position to attract business in the future. In Charles’s opinion, the conduct of Sophie’s husband was similarly unacceptable. In 1999 Edward had agreed with an American production company to produce and sell a TV documentary about the queen mother. At that point, he and Sophie were living in a fifty-seven-room house in Bagshot Park; they had made themselves vulnerable to public criticism.
All these perilous concoctions were brewing when Charles agreed with Mark Bolland’s suggestion that he, Camilla and their children accept an invitation to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Press Complaints Commission at Somerset House in February 2001. Their presence, said Bolland, would repair relations. The event, with five hundred guests, was a success, but six weeks later another crisis arrived.
In just the sort of scandal Charles had feared, Sophie Wessex was caught in a News of the World sting. A two-hour taped conversation recorded her flaunting her royal connections in order to secure a £500,000 publicity contract, unaware that she was speaking to the undercover journalist Mazher Mahmood, alias ‘the Fake Sheikh’, who was supposedly representing a Dubai investment company. The encounter had been arranged by the notorious publicist Max Clifford. That breach of Wessex’s promise was made even worse by her reference to the queen during the conversation as ‘the old dear’. She also disparaged Tony Blair as ‘ignorant about the countryside’, described Cherie Blair as ‘absolutely horrid, horrid, horrid’, William Hague as ‘deformed’, and predicted that Charles and Camilla would marry, but not until ‘the old lady dies’. What reputation she still possessed was not enhanced by her business partner’s boasts about his use of cocaine and rent boys.
The timing would never have been ideal, but it now proved doubly unfortunate. Robin Janvrin had recently mentioned to another courtier that Buckingham Palace was thankfully immune to the scandals battering St James’s Palace, and in that benign mood he had replaced Simon Lewis with Simon Walker. The former journalist and publicist, after a stint employed by John Major in Downing Street, was to focus on arranging the Jubilee celebrations. After Sophie appealed for help, he appeared sufficiently experienced to manage the maelstrom, made all the more significant because, once the queen mother died, Sophie would become Britain’s second-highest-ranking woman in order of precedence after the queen.
Walker negotiated a deal with the News of the World. The paper agreed not to publish Sophie’s comments about the queen and the Blairs in return for an interview with her about Edward’s sexuality. Naïvely, Walker did not ask himself why the paper was so cooperative. Nor did he demand a transcript of the Mahmood tape, relying instead on Sophie’s emotional outburst to him admitting her sins – although in the familiar way of royal conversations, she failed to reveal all her embarrassing comments. Thus Walker did not realise that Rebekah Wade, the News of the World’s editor, had agreed not to use the taped conversation only because it lacked, in her opinion, ‘a killer line’. By contrast, the agreed interview produced a sensational headline on April Fool’s Day: ‘Sophie: My Edward is Not Gay’. Sophie was quoted as saying, ‘I can tell you he is not gay,’ and describing the couple’s use of IVF.
That seemed, in all its tawdriness, to be that. But Sophie got stung a second time. On the same day as the publication of the interview in the News of the World, the Mail on Sunday published all her dismissive comments about the queen, the Blairs and Diana. Unknown to Walker, the Mail had somehow obtained a transcript of the conversation. Panic hit the palace. ‘That’s made it ten times worse!’ cried one official. Thrashing around for a culprit, Buckingham Palace officials assumed without any evidence that since Sophie’s embarrassment could only benefit Charles, it was Mark Bolland who had handed the scoop to the Mail on Sunday. Extraordinarily, no Buckingham Palace official dared challenge Bolland to his face. ‘You had to tread carefully,’ admitted one. ‘He had a Rasputin-like reputation. There was a risk that to make an enemy of Bolland would make an enemy of Charles.’
While Buckingham Palace sniped at Bolland, the News of the World blamed Walker for breaking their agreement. The following weekend, the newspaper published the full transcript of the interview. Self-righteously, the Sun joined the fray, describing Sophie as ‘nothing but an ambitious PR on the make. We know her sort. We know her game. We have no respect for her or her husband.’
There was a naïvety in believing that Bolland was to blame for everything which was echoed by Prince Philip’s blame of media intrusion. In truth, the mess was caused by Sophie’s greed. The queen accepted the advice of Janvrin and Richard Luce: Sophie was ordered to resign from her PR job. She blamed Simon Walker for her predicament, and was supported by Lord Wakeham, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, who told Luce, ‘Walker let it happen.’ Charles, the only winner from the imbroglio, was content for Luce, his temporary ally, to launch an investigation into the minor royals undertaking commercial work and whether they should be expelled from the official family. Unsurprisingly, under the headline ‘Reform or Die – Tony Blair Had Warned the Royals’, the News of the World supported Charles’s proposal that the palace should be cleansed. ‘Only Charles is talking sense,’ commented its editor.
The prince’s three siblings were furious. While he pocketed nearly £8 million that year from the Duchy of Cornwall, which would increase by £2 million the following year, and each of his private-jet flights between London and Scotland cost nearly £20,000, he offered no solution to their financial plights. Philip shared their anger. All four children, he said, should be treated equally. ‘We have different attitudes,’ he said, persistently irritated by his eldest son’s behaviour. Why, he asked, did Charles undermine his parents’ frugal lifestyle as an example to the nation? And why did he continue his affair with Camilla, whose former husband was a brother officer? And why did he cultivate trashy American billionaires?
Charles would not tolerate such criticism. With disdain, he sat through another family meeting, knowing that Philip would be annoyed by his silence. The tension between father and son did not die down. Charles rejected his father’s pleas that he, Philip, was a loving parent. Both preferred to communicate by letter. Some still excused Charles’s churlishness as the unresolved result of the misery of his childhood. Others, quoted by Graham Turner, a journalist with access to Philip, would say that a fifty-three-year-old man was no longer of an age to scowl about being ‘quite frightened by his father who dominates the family by being bullying and loud’. Preoccupied by his own emotions, Charles showed no sympathy for Philip’s own torrid childhood as an exile, forced to move home constantly without a father, while his mother was confined in a Swiss clinic for eight years with paranoid schizophrenia. And he resented what he regarded as his father’s hypocrisy. Throughout Philip’s marriage there had been rumours of affairs with aristocrats, actresses, and even a waitress at Fortnum & Mason. Admittedly, if the gossip was true, Philip had been exceptionally discreet, and none of his dalliances could be irrefutably proven.
Any chance of brokering peace between father and son was disturbed by Graham Turner’s semi-authorised biography of Philip,serialised in the Daily Telegraph, in which he quoted Philip’s judgement of Charles as ‘precious, extravagant and lacking in the dedication … to make a good king’. Shortly after the book’s publication, Philip wrote his son an apology.
Charles’s perpetual squabbles with his parents were aggravated by their tolerance of his brothers’ follies. The latest of these was Edward’s planned TV documentary about Charles’s life with Diana and Camilla. Janvrin hesitated to seek a directive from the queen to tell Edward to halt the production. Despite Charles’s warnings, Edward then began a documentary about Prince William. Without permission, his crew filmed around St Andrews University, where William was enrolled as a student, in the hope of finding him or interviewing his friends for a £50 fee. After learning about the film, Charles refused to take Edward’s calls. Even Philip was irritated, and his anger boiled over when he heard that Andrew had just passed an entire week playing golf, and had spent £500,000 on private jets that year. ‘You’re lazy and selfish!’ he shouted. ‘Just lounging around!’ But neither younger son had a profession he could fall back on. To conceal the wounds, Richard Luce issued a statement that, subject to consultation, the royals ‘should be allowed to pursue careers, including in business, if that is what they wish to do’. Within the palaces, no one was deceived.
The wisest of the queen’s advisers had watched the slow train crash knowing that ‘it was going to end in tears’. The queen, as so often where her children were concerned, prevaricated. Torn between duty and her love of family, she asked Philip for his opinion. The duke wanted ‘action’, and agreed to a conference at Windsor about Edward’s future. In advance, officials composed a written description of Edward’s predicament. An added complication was that his production company had debts of £2 million. The solutions proposed were either that he could keep his title but be restricted to work as an unpaid royal, or that he be allowed to earn a living but become a private citizen.
While he awaited his parents’ decision, Edward spent much of his time in his house playing computer games. During the ensuing frosty discussion the queen and Philip were clearly dejected. By its end, she had decided to give Edward £250,000 annually in compensation for not working. Then, in a rare moment of frustration, she tore up the discussion document and threw the scraps of paper into the fire. Soon after, Simon Walker left Buckingham Palace. Charles had got what he wanted, although his own mismanagement was propelling him towards yet another showdown.