Towards the end of 2001, Robin Janvrin, with the queen’s support, persuaded Michael Peat, the keeper of the privy purse, to replace Stephen Lamport as Charles’s private secretary. Although Peat’s range of conversation was limited and his manner slightly robotic, his successful reorganisation of the queen’s finances had won plaudits. Charles’s instinctive resistance to his nomination was largely dissipated by David Airlie, whom he trusted.
The queen’s motives were understood in both palaces and in Downing Street. Peat was tasked to bring order to Charles’s world. In the queen’s opinion, the collection of advisers around her son, still empowered by their knowledge of secrets about his faltering marriage, needed to be removed.
Unfortunately, Charles had been persuaded by the queen mother to trust these people, but in the hysteria since his marriage collapsed too many had become privy to confidences, and hence unduly powerful. Even Lamport acknowledged that he was overstretched. Others would say that the emollient official was out of his depth, especially in his handling of Bolland, who reported directly to Charles and Camilla. ‘He never did anything right for me in eight years,’ Charles said ungenerously of the loyal retainer who had never failed to bow. The prince’s scheming courtiers subsequently mentioned that Lamport’s exit was helped by Fred Goodwin, the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, who had made a job available for him not long before he began steering RBS into bankruptcy.
Peat’s qualifications for his new post were mixed. At Buckingham Palace he had cultivated a parsimonious image by cycling to work. He had removed the minor royals from the civil list and reduced the monarchy’s costs by 50 per cent in real terms over just five years. The media headlines praising his financial acumen had sealed his reputation as a moderniser. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he had surpassed both his father and grandfather, who had been merely auditors of the privy purse, and proved that he was not just a good accountant: he had mastered Buckingham Palace’s sensitive tax affairs, negotiating adroitly with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown about the civil list, and delivered an assured performance in front of the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee.
But his critics were sceptical. In the opinion of one prominent courtier, Peat was ‘a fiddler, a cunning accountant who can dress things up’. Others, like Patrick Jephson, believed that he had fortuitously secured an apartment in Kensington Palace that had been expensively refurbished and filled with paintings and antiques selected from the Royal Collection. His weekly rent was a mere £880, including gardeners and maintenance. Although that was more than Prince and Princess Michael of Kent’s weekly rent of £67 for a sixteen-room flat, it was still far less than the market rate of approximately £4,000 per week.
In 1996, soon after arriving in Kensington Palace, Peat had asked Jephson whether Diana would agree for his wife to exercise her dog in the courtyard, to avoid the less convenient trip to Kensington Park. ‘No,’ he was surprised to be told. Diana’s reason was her dislike of the social ambitions of Peat’s wife. Peat’s own aspirations had spurred his move five years later. Activity at Buckingham Palace, he saw, was declining. Power was gradually shifting to Charles’s court. The promise of political influence alongside an active heir was attractive for a slightly bored accountant. When the queen died, he believed, he would be in the right place. Those ambitions disturbed some officials in Buckingham Palace and Whitehall. Their suspicions were fuelled by the cost-cutter’s arrival on his first day at St James’s Palace in a new claret Bentley Arnage worth £165,000. Most assumed Peat owned the car, but in fact he had arranged a three-month loan of it. Even so, there was bewilderment about what he was trying to prove.
To Charles, Peat’s self-confidence was a positive. With some private wealth, the accountant had sufficient privilege to pledge independent loyalty. An added attraction was his commitment to improve the Duchy of Cornwall’s income. David Lansdale, the existing land agent, in charge of the duchy’s commercial properties and farms of about 120,000 acres, had not radically reformed their management. Peat intended to recruit an agent from Savill’s to increase the rents and produce more income from investments. These would finance Charles’s increasingly expensive lifestyle.
To those few Whitehall officials who understood St James’s Palace, Peat was the wrong appointment. Without the experience of a civil servant – the Foreign Office was particularly useful – they doubted whether he understood the difference between accountancy and giving advice based on a deep grasp of constitutional and political history. He was undoubtedly reliable and decent, but there was no evidence that he was astute or imaginative enough to guide an activist prince. After all, Whitehall’s masters had watched Stephen Lamport failing to challenge Charles’s rebellious outbursts.
‘You need someone who will tell you the truth,’ the prince had been told.
‘I agree,’ came the reply. ‘I need strong advice.’
That exchange was purely theatrical. Charles wanted an adept servant who would follow his orders, regardless of his own independent judgement.
Peat’s first task immediately challenged his new employer. On the queen’s behalf, Robin Janvrin wanted Bolland controlled or, better still, got rid of. ‘You’re too divisive,’ he had told Bolland, ‘and you’re too much in the spotlight.’ To remain in the palace, Bolland understood, would require reinvention of his role. That was achievable in theory, but impossible in reality. Every day and every night, Charles telephoned him with new demands, and after nearly five years Bolland’s personal relationships were suffering from the pressure. Peat’s arrival was an opportunity for him to disengage. Only Camilla’s fear of her vulnerability delayed his departure. Both she and Charles still relied on him to steer them clear of dangers and ultimately towards marriage.
Peat was keen for Bolland to leave, although neither he nor Janvrin fully understood that the initiative for his ingenious manoeuvres often originated from Charles and Camilla, and were certainly approved by both. Moreover, Bolland was skilled in arts quite foreign to the two courtiers, not least in firefighting.
Not all his ideas to steer the tabloid newspapers away from exposing embarrassments had been successful: on one occasion, Camilla had walked away after a car crash, unwittingly abandoning the woman driver of the other car. He had also been helpless when seventeen-year-old Harry confessed to smoking cannabis with girls in Highgrove’s cellar, an incident leaked to the News of the World, which led to the headline ‘Harry’s Drug Shame’; but he did manage to turn that scandal into praise for Charles’s behaviour. ‘Today we commend the refreshing courage and honesty of the Prince of Wales,’ sermonised the paper, adding sympathetically, ‘As a shining and enviable example of wisdom, he emerges as a modern king in the making.’ Bolland had negotiated a deal in which the News of the World agreed to conceal Charles’s failure to spend sufficient time with his vulnerable son. ‘There is no point in hiding the truth,’ the worried father told the paper, without irony.
Bolland was not surprised by Peat’s appointment. ‘We went too far – sometimes,’ he admitted. His deals on Charles’s behalf had alienated purists like Charles Moore, the Daily Telegraph’s editor, a permanent critic. Moore preferred to ignore Charles and Camilla’s support for their spin doctor; just as he apparently preferred to forget that his refusal, in 2000, to share photographs of William’s trip to South America with other newspapers would lead Sandy Henney, Charles’s deputy press secretary, to resign. Even when, the following year, Bolland had himself offered to quit his post as a full-time employee and become a consultant, Charles and Camilla had resisted that option. His departure, they said, would be a betrayal.
At the outset, Charles, Camilla and Bolland accepted Peat as an alternative to Lamport. The mood changed after the new consiglieri introduced himself at the outset of the long transition. ‘I must control every aspect of this organisation,’ he told his staff. ‘There can be no vacuum. I must be in every space.’ His insistence on total control changed Bolland’s attitude. ‘Peat was going to be difficult to work for,’ he concluded. ‘His initial views were wrong. I could see that we would go through a lot of pain and difficulty before he got to the right place.’ Bolland again offered his resignation, and was again urged to stay.
Both Charles and Camilla had every reason to cling to their oft-time saviour. A succession of celebrity dinners promoted by Bolland was strengthening their position. In March 2001 Camilla had hosted a dinner for eighty at St James’s Palace to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Prince’s Trust. The presence of Mick Jagger, Geri Halliwell, Elton John, Sting and Joanna Lumley guaranteed copious headlines. Two months later, Bolland generated more publicity for a dinner at Buckingham Palace hosted by Charles and Camilla to raise money for the Samaritans. That night the queen was in the building; there was no stipulation about where Camilla should sit.
Five weeks later, Robert Higdon arranged for 120 super-rich American supporters of the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation to be hosted in Buckingham Palace’s picture gallery. Charles’s favourite billionaires and other celebrities including Lily Safra, Betsy Bloomingdale, Blaine Trump (the future US president’s sister-in-law), Lynn Wyatt, Patty Hearst, Joan Rivers and Shirley Lord milled around the smiling prince as Vanity Fair recorded the scenes. Once again Fawcett had invited the Turkish tycoon Cem Uzan, lauded by the magazine for owning three yachts, two helicopters and flying in on his own Boeing 747. Unmentioned in any of the press coverage was a new investigation in America into Uzan’s possible racketeering after a complaint by two companies seeking the return of $2.7 billion. Despite that irritation, Uzan’s £200,000 contribution again secured Fawcett’s agreement for his wife to sit next to Charles at the dinner.
The following day, the entire group travelled across to Highgrove to join another two hundred guests including aristocrats, actors and rich C-list celebrities for dinner in the Orchard Room, a large ballroom built by Charles near the house, where they were entertained by Shirley Bassey and Joan Rivers. In his speech of welcome, Charles thanked Fawcett for creating ‘such a fantastic evening’. Some minutes later, Higdon was found hysterical in the garden. ‘Charles called them “donors” and it should be “friends”,’ he wailed. ‘They think they’re his friends. I’m so embarrassed.’
Those two parties on consecutive days would contribute £3 million to Charles’s charitable foundation, a spokesman announced. The exaggeration could not pass unchallenged: the published accounts showed that in 2001 Robert Higdon had raised $2,622,981 for the foundation and distributed $1,912,273, less than half the sum claimed. His administrative costs and salary were $716,000, an unusually high amount, leading to renewed friction with the prince.
‘Charles and I had a dysfunctional relationship,’ recalled Higdon. ‘He would phone on Thanksgiving and Sundays, which was disturbing. But we did laugh a lot. But Charles never said thank you.’ Yet after one particularly awkward moment Camilla told him, ‘You can never leave him. He couldn’t do without you.’
Two days after the double beanfeast, photographers were summoned to a reception at Somerset House for five hundred guests to celebrate the National Osteoporosis Society, chaired by Camilla. The charity’s trustees could never have anticipated the enormous interest, but the media had been tipped off by the usual reliable source that Charles and Camilla would greet each other with a kiss.
As a climax to this frenetic offensive, on the eve of the long royal summer holidays, Bolland arranged for Charles to be interviewed by the Daily Mail. Asked whether he was considering marriage, he replied, ‘Who knows what the Good Lord has planned?’ Delighted by this salvo, he and Camilla then retreated to Scotland.
They were leaving a major problem behind. Throughout the year’s fundraising, Higdon and Fawcett had argued. Their disagreements centred on who should control the foundation’s dinners and money. Since Higdon arranged the Americans’ donations and entertainment, he wanted to supervise their visits. But Fawcett wanted to push him out, complained Higdon: ‘He not only provided bad food and horrible sweet German wine but deducted the cost of the food from my raised money, and he organised the dinners like a Barnum & Bailey circus.’ Higdon became yet more agitated about the accounts after he was billed an unusually large amount for a tent. Then they argued about the seating plans for guests. Fawcett had perfected the art of ignoring Higdon’s scheme, and placed women of his own choosing next to Charles – either because they were particularly good-looking or because they had promised significant cash.
Minutes before the guests arrived for Higdon’s lunches or dinners, almost farcical arguments would erupt, with each man grabbing or clutching a name card to place next to or away from Charles. In the case of Eva Rausing, the American wife of the Swedish billionaire Hans Rausing, their argument became particularly unseemly. Higdon had originally persuaded Rausing to support Charles’s charities but discovered that at one American dinner Fawcett placed her next to Charles, apparently in exchange for a donation of £500,000, thus outdoing the American woman who Higdon had promised would sit next to the prince – for $250,000.
To challenge Fawcett, Higdon discovered, was a self-inflicted wound. Since neither Lamport nor Peat liked either man, the two were scrapping among themselves, and Fawcett displayed his canny tactics. That had been evident ever since Charles agreed to host a charity event at the opening of the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, with Valery Gergiev conducting. A crowd of donors were already seated as they waited for Charles to enter, but Conrad Black, then the proprietor of the Telegraph newspaper group, refused to sit down – he intended to snatch a place next to Charles. Fawcett knew how to deal with that tactic. Walking behind Charles as he entered the room, Fawcett brought with him two men carrying a large chair. Under his direction they placed the chair between two seated donors of whom Fawcett approved, and soon Charles was sitting in it, while Black found himself cast to the periphery.
The frantic pace of bidding for access to Charles raised new alarms in Buckingham Palace. In the queen’s opinion, her son ignored the boundary between his charities and his constitutional position. ‘Charles cannot see beyond the horizon,’ complained one official. ‘He’s working hard but clearly cannot understand the conflict with propriety.’ While they acknowledged that Fawcett had the knack of approaching the right rich people and spreading his network to raise money, Lamport and then Peat found themselves being asked ‘How did that person get in?’ more frequently. Both may have tried to bar a ‘suspicious person’ only to discover that the guest had Fawcett’s blessing.
The phrase ‘rent-a-royal’ began to circulate. Robin Janvrin suggested guidelines for officials to implement, but he was resisted – not least by Fawcett who, while producing donors for Charles, was simultaneously receiving gifts from those he facilitated. When Charles ignored such conflicts of interest, a Whitehall official again reminded him what was permitted and what conduct was off-limits. Such a warning so soon after the new private secretary’s arrival was unexpected.
Peat’s former colleagues noticed a change in his attitude towards them. His appointment had been linked to Janvrin’s plan to build better relations between Charles and Buckingham Palace. Instead, Peat took an independent line. ‘How very odd,’ thought Malcolm Ross, comptroller of the lord chamberlain’s office in Buckingham Palace, during one meeting with Peat. ‘That must be at Charles’s request.’ Within weeks, the gulf between the palaces was even greater than before. ‘Peat was a changed person,’ recalled Ross. ‘He was contemptuous towards us and soon resisted attending some meetings. Charles wanted a strong manager and got a control freak. “Leave it to me,” Peat would say to assert his command.’
However, the moment Charles entered his office, Peat would melt, rushing to put on his jacket rather than be seen in shirtsleeves. Once properly dressed, he would bow deeply. Although there were fewer staff at St James’s Palace than at Buckingham Palace, they did not eat together. The result was an atmosphere of fear that Peat did nothing to dispel. Some in Buckingham Palace, Ross observed, became ‘upset because he was so difficult. He was more a loner than a team player. The atmosphere was so different in St James’s.’ Ross concluded that Peat had gone native. He had shifted his loyalty to Charles, and been briefed to continue the war against Buckingham Palace. Any proposal for repairing relations would be abruptly responded to with ‘I’m too busy.’
‘On every issue he had strong views,’ said Bolland. ‘There was never a discussion. Instead, he would say, “This is how it is,” and there would be a bitter argument. Then he would rethink and might agree to the original suggestion. It was an unusual way of working.’
Only one topic was off-limits: Camilla. Knowing that Charles’s loyalty to Bolland appeared solid so long as the journey towards public acceptance of his relationship remained unfinished, Peat did not share his opinions about his employer’s partner with his staff. But he assumed that Bolland’s final exit, so long discussed, could be completed in the near future.