The death of the queen mother on 30 March 2002 altered the lives of both the queen and Prince Charles. Until the eve of her death, the queen mother had telephoned her daughter every day. Her voice alone reminded the seventy-four-year-old monarch about the stoic values inherited from her father. As she held the hand of her mother at her death she knew that such support was gone forever.
‘What we really need is a good funeral,’ Bill Heseltine, the queen’s former private secretary, told Roy Strong. A big show, he implied, would encourage support for the crown. Heseltine had good reason for concern. The BBC’s news coverage was distinctly non-deferential, and the government’s recall of Parliament in recognition of the queen mother’s passing was scorned by republicans as ‘an embarrassing spectacle’.
In the event, the sceptics were proved wrong. Public grief for the queen mother was widespread. Two hundred thousand people filed past her coffin as she lay in state in Westminster Hall, and over a million lined the streets for the funeral procession. Few of the mourners appreciated the late queen’s part in persuading Charles to marry Diana, or her ruthlessness with those she disliked – according to one courtier her eyes would go ‘dead, ice cold’. The queen’s advisers noted that the public’s affection for her mother lightened her own gloom about the monarchy’s unpopularity.
The mood, captured by Charles’s emotional reaction, influenced the queen’s decision over whether Camilla should be invited to the funeral. Her immediate response had been ‘No,’ because her mother had so disapproved of Camilla. That decision, she knew, would be challenged by Charles, who when told of his grandmother’s death had rushed back from a skiing holiday in Switzerland. In a televised address he expressed his profound sorrow at the loss of a woman who was more than a grandmother. Throughout his life, especially when he was a young child and his parents were away for months touring the Commonwealth, his ‘darling magical grandmother’ had been his friend, confidante and supporter. She had been especially kind during his frequent depressions.
To his surprise, after his TV tribute his mother called and thanked him. Probably she did not agree with the criticism that in his address Charles had spoken about his own grief rather than about the subject of that grief. She had decided that Camilla could be at the funeral as ‘a friend of the queen mother’, but not as Charles’s partner. In truth, she had little choice. The latest opinion polls showed that the majority of Britons were now in favour of Charles and Camilla getting married.
There was no doubting Charles’s deep grief. During the funeral ceremony he was openly distraught. He stared at the coffin, his lips trembled and he was close to tears. A solitary figure, he travelled with the coffin to Windsor Castle and watched its interment in St George’s Chapel. Then he flew to Scotland to meet Camilla at Birkhall. By then speculation about his future, encouraged by Bolland, was rife. On the back of his tearful speech, the Sun urged him to marry: ‘Follow Your Heart, Charles’. Camilla’s position was sealed when it was agreed that later in the month she and Charles would meet the queen for thirty minutes before a concert by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich at Buckingham Palace. The objections to normalising their relationship were finally peeling away. Everything was in place for Buckingham Palace’s modernisers to rebrand the monarchy. The queen mother’s death, combined with that earlier in the year of Princess Margaret, had removed two obstacles to reform.
Charles’s complaints about the conduct of the minor royals were reinforced when Princess Michael of Kent allowed her children to host a party for more than a hundred friends at Kensington Palace until 5 a.m. while the queen mother was still lying in state. That was quoted as another example of exploitation of their privileges. Without any formal announcement, the queen agreed that the official line-up on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for future state occasions would be limited to five royals – the queen, Prince Philip, Charles and his two sons.
A few days later, Charles flew to Greece to stay for three days on his own in a monastery on Mount Athos. In the aftermath of his grandmother’s death, that seemed reasonable. However, a newspaper photograph showed the prince stepping off a boat with a butler in tow. The contrast between the bereaved royal carrying out his duty, and his lifestyle – billionaires’ yachts, private jets, six homes, shooting, a huge staff, all funded by the duchy, and a remarkable amount of luggage for a few days of meditation – sat uneasily with the theme of the imminent Jubilee celebrations: to emphasise the monarchy’s relevance in modern Britain. Julia Cleverdon, one of his charity’s executives, stuck the photograph on her office wall and wrote, with risky irony, ‘We’re off to Mt Athos with 43 pieces of luggage.’
On Charles’s return, in time for Princess Margaret’s memorial service, Roy Strong recorded, ‘The Prince looked awful.’ During the countdown to the make-or-break Jubilee celebrations, ‘the queen became less relaxed’, noted one adviser. Five years’ planning was coming to a climax, but she remained uncertain about the public’s response. Naturally sympathetic to the lives of her people, she had earlier opposed the suggestion by a senior official that she should emerge from Buckingham Palace to watch the Changing of the Guard and observe a minute’s silence with the crowds after the Islamic attacks in America on 11 September 2001. Such an action, she replied, could be seen as a gimmick; but after a reasoned discussion she agreed, and was surprised by the success of her appearance. Similarly, she overcame her initial reluctance to fly by helicopter to a hospital, land on the roof and visit some patients. That too met with an enthusiastic reaction, encouraging her to trust her advisers’ radical suggestion: a speech to both Houses of Parliament to celebrate her Jubilee. She would start by refuting any speculation about abdication, rejoice about the nation’s continuing support for the monarchy, and set out her manifesto for the future.
On 30 April she stood in Westminster’s Great Hall as the pillar and protector of Britain’s ‘enduring’ and ‘timeless values’, as she named them. ‘We in these islands have the benefit of a long and proud history,’ she read (credit for drafting the speech was given to Robin Janvrin and Richard Luce):
This not only gives us a trusted framework of stability and continuity to ease the process of change, but also tells us what is of lasting value. Only the passage of time can filter out the ephemeral from the enduring. And what endures are the characteristics that mark our identity as a nation and the timeless values that guide us. These values find expression in our national institutions, including the monarchy and Parliament, institutions which in turn must continue to evolve if they are to provide effective beacons of trust and unity to succeeding generations.
The magic was restored. An early-evening reception for two hundred journalists at Windsor Castle soon after converted many remaining republicans into admirers.
Charles could not have made a similar speech. As a rebel, he was unsuited to unite political foes with an appeal to Britain’s traditional values. Whatever the latest opinion polls said about his possible marriage to Camilla, only a minority of his country respected him, and few felt affection for him. Until he reframed his challenges to the government in less sermonising tones and resolved his domestic status, his succession might be unopposed, but it would not be welcomed.
Camilla’s fate remained problematic. Charles was spotted making an extravagant show of affection to his mother during her visit to his ‘healing garden’ at the Chelsea Flower Show, which he had dedicated to the late queen mother. Under pressure, mother and son had evidently come to an arrangement, or at least a truce brokered by Janvrin for the Jubilee: during the parades in front of Buckingham Palace, Camilla would sit in the royal box.
Over the first weekend in June, two sunny days, more than a million people gathered around Buckingham Palace to watch spectacular classical and pop concerts, highlighted by Queen guitarist Brian May playing from the palace’s roof. The whole event was ‘a masterstroke’ judged the cabinet secretary Andrew Turnbull. Few had anticipated the extravaganza: a choreographed five-hour march by twenty-two thousand people down The Mall, appearances by Cliff Richard, Paul McCartney and Rod Stewart, a dramatic fly-past and three tons of fireworks exploding for fourteen minutes over London. Amid astonishing scenes of affection, ecstatic crowds waving Union flags sang ‘God Save the Queen’. As indeed He had. All the queen’s doubts about the country’s loyalty vanished.
The following day, a further million followers lined the City’s streets to watch the royal family gather at the Guildhall for lunch. Tony Blair spoke for the majority when he said, ‘Affection is earned and the affection this country feels for you is real.’ The queen in her reply said to the people of Britain, ‘I’m so proud of you,’ and praised Charles’s ‘gratitude, respect and pride’ for his country. In his tribute, catching the mood and watched by Camilla, Charles was more effusive than usual: ‘I am so proud and grateful for everything you have done for your country and Commonwealth over fifty wonderful years.’ He was loudly cheered.
Celebration led to opportunity. Three weeks later, the afterglow of the celebrations still lingered. Ninety American multi-millionaires were brought to Buckingham Palace by Robert Higdon. The cast for the five-day visit included Blaine and Robert Trump, Betsy Bloomingdale, Kip Forbes, Perry and Nancy Bass from Texas, Steven and Kimberly Rockefeller, Queen Noor of Jordan, King Constantine of Greece, Cem and Alara Uzan – and Lily Safra, whose third marriage, like the previous two, was about to end in unusual circumstances. Charles paid particular attention to Joe and Barbara Allbritton, in spite of recent accusations that the chief executive of Riggs Bank had overseen illegal financial transactions.
Each couple had paid $20,000 for dinner with Charles and Camilla in the Buckingham Palace ballroom, lunch with Camilla at a polo match featuring Charles and Harry in Cirencester, drinks with Princess Margaret’s son Lord Linley in his furniture showroom, a day’s racing at Ascot, and finally another dinner, this time in a marquee at Highgrove, with 150 additional guests. Those at the Highgrove event would sit on silver bamboo ballroom chairs, while Charles was ensconced on a gilded armchair covered in crimson brocade. ‘If you grew up in Hobo Town,’ explained Higdon, ‘$20,000 means nothing to you. And then you drive to Highgrove and see Elton John or Rod Stewart, and it’s special. Charles was so gracious, that’s what he’s trained to do, and so in the end you agree to offer the $250,000 donation.’
The target was $3 million, with the promise that small amounts of that sum would be passed on to three American charities: the Phoenix Trust, the New York Academy of Art and the Harvard Aids Institute. One unfortunate hiccup for Higdon was the hosts: ‘Charles and Camilla didn’t like all the people who gave them money. But they’d say, “We’ll get through.”’ Getting to that point always required an effort. The meals, orchestrated by Michael Fawcett, featured organic food either from Highgrove or from suppliers approved by Charles. The tables at Highgrove were lit by twenty-candle candelabras that Fawcett had brought from Buckingham Palace. The dinner in London was eaten off china from Highgrove.
Such glitzy fundraising annoyed Prince Andrew. In his opinion, his elder brother was promoting himself in the name of duty, while spending huge sums of money on himself. Charles’s decision to move into Clarence House after his grandmother’s death was understandable, but the estimated cost of refurbishment had soared from £3 million towards £6 million, all funded by taxpayers. More millions would be spent by the duchy. Charles had also taken over Birkhall, a fourteen-bedroom house, from the queen mother, and inherited the Castle of Mey, her fifteen-bedroom house by the sea at Thurso in Scotland. His sixth home would be rebuilt with the aid of a £1 million gift from Julia Kaufmann, a Canadian-born heiress living in Kansas City. Charles’s extravagance passed unnoticed by the public, but it was only grudgingly tolerated by civil servants in the protocol department of the Foreign Office. The same officials were less understanding about Andrew.
Within months of his appointment as the special representative for British trade and investment, the younger royal had attracted complaints. Too often, objected the Foreign Office’s protocol department, he refused to stick to the agreed itinerary and ‘left a trail of glass in his wake’. ‘Andrew’s relations around the world,’ commented one official at the weekly heads of department meeting, ‘are dicey. He’s showing bad judgement about people. He’s rude, lashes out to lay down the law, and it’s so difficult to sell him.’
‘You can call me “Andy”,’ Andrew told one British rear-admiral.
‘And you can call me “sir”,’ was the stiff reply.
Complaints from British embassies about Andrew were now never in writing. Ever since a British multi-millionaire had obtained a critical, classified embassy report from Belize about himself and successfully sued for libel, diplomats had been warned by the Foreign Office not to include adverse comments about people in their dispatches. Thereafter, anything unfavourable was conveyed in telephone calls. These included comments about Andrew. The public only became aware that ‘Air Miles Andy’ refused to fly on commercial airlines after the government published a list of his destinations. Included were a golf tournament, a football match and social visits across the globe to beautiful girlfriends.
An example of Andrew’s capricious behaviour was overheard in an early-morning exchange in his ski chalet in Verbier. A young guest was making his breakfast tea when Andrew suddenly appeared. ‘Andrew, would you like a cup?’ asked the guest.
‘I’m Prince Andrew to you,’ snapped the host, and walked off.
Initially, the FO relied on Charlotte Manley, Andrew’s private secretary, to ask him for better behaviour. She failed. Following complaints from embassies in the Middle East and Chile, Janvrin discussed ‘the Andrew problem’ with his senior officials. The queen, it was agreed, needed to be told. As usual, she prevaricated and suggested that Philip be consulted. If he agreed the problem needed to be dealt with, she said, she would make a decision. Unusually, Philip was annoyed, and suggested that Andrew be officially told to ‘sharpen up his act or lose his job’. An official met Andrew and issued the warning.
Don McKinnon, the secretary general of the Commonwealth, felt that Charles needed the same medicine. One year after his unimpressive encounter with the high commissioners from the Pacific countries, Charles – again reluctantly – agreed to meet the high commissioners of Africa and the Caribbean. Ever since he had spent five days trekking across an isolated area of Kenya with Laurens van der Post in 1975, digging his own latrine and swatting mosquitoes, his opinion of Africa had been jaundiced. Nevertheless, diligent as ever, he briefed himself about the difficulties created by the EU to the exports of sugar, bananas and other agricultural produce from Commonwealth countries. Come the meetings, to his irritation, the diplomats were only interested in arranging photographs of themselves with Charles to send home. As they spoke, Charles rolled his eyes. The diplomats, he signalled, were ‘dead wood’.
Bruised by the prince’s anger, Michael Peat mirrored his employer’s attitude towards Whitehall’s next suggestion: a long-distance Commonwealth trip. The mechanism was well-tested: an FO committee considered the requests for all royal visits to promote Britain, but they knew that negotiating with Charles would be difficult. ‘Unlike the queen,’ recalled a palace official, ‘who was open-minded, he argued about all the options, and any resistance by the Foreign Office provoked his anger.’ In red ink, Charles firmly wrote ‘No’ or ‘Maybe’ but rarely ‘Yes’ to the first suggestions, other than the Middle East, where his sympathy towards Islam was welcomed. Even then, he demanded refinements.
‘He would drive me bananas,’ admitted a former head of protocol.
‘Can’t you see?’ Charles shouted in disapproval at Peat. ‘You’re stupid!’
Quickly identifying the unacceptable destinations, Peat bluntly told the FO emissaries, ‘You’re wrong about the choice of countries His Royal Highness should visit.’
Don McKinnon experienced the private secretary’s prejudice head-on: ‘He effectively said, “I don’t know anything about abroad and I’m not interested. I refuse to discourage the prince from his selfish behaviour.”’ The Commonwealth leader’s reaction was blunt: ‘Peat was so English, an old-fashioned British bulldog. He was the opposite of unassuming. As an accountant he wanted to show that the prince was good value for money, and that was arrogant.’
To remain in control, Peat always hovered when Foreign Office officials called to re-present their proposals. ‘Charles usually headed towards a compromise,’ recalled one official. ‘He would agree to visit one place identified by the Foreign Office on condition that the FO would organise an “add-on”, a place he wanted to visit. So he would agree to visit the Middle East if the plane would then go on to India, where he wanted to check out a local wheat for his Duchy Originals.’
Steadfastly, Charles refused to fly commercial, and insisted on a private Airbus. ‘That’s outrageous,’ Michael Jay, the new permanent secretary at the Foreign Office exclaimed, but before long he too climbed down.
Reflecting Charles’s preferences, Peat became more uncompromising towards McKinnon. ‘He did not like being told what to do,’ realised the diplomat. ‘And Charles refused to engage with me. I met the queen once a year, but never Charles.’ If McKinnon had represented fox-hunting rather than the Commonwealth, he grumbled, he would have enjoyed greater access.
That very cause, so important to Charles, resurfaced in the summer of 2002. While Tony Blair was preparing for the invasion of Iraq, Charles and many in the countryside hoped that the government would implement the carefully crafted compromise presented by Terry Burns, the former Treasury permanent secretary, to avoid a ban on fox-hunting. Blair seemed inclined to accept the deal despite his party’s opposition. His neutrality provoked protests. But then Iraq scuppered any chance of a compromise. To secure parliamentary support for the war, Blair could no longer sit on the fence over the divisive sport. That left everyone dissatisfied. Labour’s supporters were furious at the prospect of war, while country folk, still raw about the foot-and-mouth outbreak, remained angry about the metropolitan Blairites’ animosity towards rural communities.
The Countryside Alliance’s planned protest in London on 22 September was supported by Charles. To those marching, Labour’s encouragement of immigration and the criminalisation of fox-hunting reflected the Blairites’ self-hatred at being English, and Blair’s betrayal of British values. Nearly two years earlier, Charles had agreed to become a patron of the Alliance, but withdrew after being advised to do so by both Bolland and Lamport. While he reluctantly resisted any public endorsement of the 400,000 people marching through London, he did personally repeat one farmer’s complaint to Blair: ‘If we as a group were black or gay, we would not be victimised or picked upon.’ He then authorised the leak of that riposte to a journalist. Charles’s contemporaneous letter to Blair, accusing the government of ‘destroying the countryside’, was also published. If hunting were banned, Charles threatened, he would spend the rest of his life skiing.
The prime minister had good reason to be shocked by such uncompromising conservatism. The prince appeared to believe the scurrilous story that Blair had sought a prominent role in the queen mother’s funeral in spite of resistance from Sir Michael Wilcocks, Black Rod. Regardless of the truth, in a speech to celebrate the Jubilee, Charles had mentioned the seldom-sung second verse of the national anthem, as a dig at the government. The verse asks God to ‘scatter [the monarch’s] enemies and make them fall, Confound their politics, [and] frustrate their knavish tricks’. The prime minister’s advisers, Charles said to an aide, should understand that ‘they need to take my opinions into account. Why can’t they understand this all means a lot to me?’ Supporters of fox-hunting hailed him as a hero.
Out hunting, jumping the highest fences, if not always successfully, Charles had won respect for his bravery. On one occasion the master of a Staffordshire hunt had rapped on Camilla’s car window to say, ‘Ma’am, I hope you’ve got some sharp teeth tonight. His Royal Highness has just pulled himself out of a hawthorn bush.’
Later that afternoon, Charles sat in a dilapidated barn eating pheasant stew with local farmers and listening to their problems, many caused by Whitehall. Those who knew his fondness for walking with his dogs in the Lake District would have recognised his genuine pleasure at being among country people – even sleeping once in a B&B with strangers was part of his rural lifestyle. ‘We have to do something,’ he said as he finally got up from lunch at 5 p.m. ‘I must return to London. I’m speaking at the Mansion House in three hours.’
Charles’s opposition to the government extended from the environment to urging Blair to confront Robert Mugabe and help Britons fleeing Zimbabwe. He had also raised concern about inadequate equipment for the military, poor roads, the pollution of the sea with plastic bags, and government programmes to de-radicalise extremist prisoners. His influence, he continued to fear, was negligible. On China, GM crops and foot-and-mouth disease, he had been ignored. ‘I’m not going to change my mind,’ he would say stubbornly. The government, he believed, should attempt to persuade him, but Blair refused to engage, suspecting that Charles had been captured by the right wing. However, he had little choice other than to indulge the prince in private, and oblige Peat’s requests to protect him in public.
In the real world, to help secure his party’s support for the Iraq war, Blair finally betrayed his own convictions and supported a fox-hunting ban. That left Charles exposed, especially to his Labour critics. Tony Banks, a vocal London MP, spoke for many when he accused the prince of ‘getting into dangerous waters’. Others believed that his letters to ministers – he was suspected of writing about a hundred of them in recent years – were ‘extremely ill-advised and foolish’. Undeterred, Charles wrote to Blair that hunting was ‘environmentally friendly’, and good for foxes. The opponents, he claimed, were ‘driven by agendas other than the welfare of the fox’. He added, ‘There is bewilderment that the government is responding to calls to ban something which uses no modern technology, which does not pollute the countryside, [and] which is completely neutral in that it relies entirely on man’s ancient and, indeed, romantic relationship with dogs and horses.’
To embarrass Charles just after the countryside march, someone in the office of Derry Irvine, the lord chancellor, leaked the correspondence between him and the prince. Since Charles’s handwritten letters were kept in Irvine’s locked safe, the culprit could have been identified, but no one was ever named.
In these letters, Charles had protested about the Labour government’s welfare policies, political correctness, and red tape. Irvine did not dispute the prince’s right to engage, but complained to his officials about feeling ‘bombarded’, a strange lament for the physically imposing, exuberant lawyer.
In the first leaked letter, dated 26 June 2001, Charles railed against the growth of American-style compensation payments: ‘Such a culture can only lead ultimately to an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion let alone the real fear of taking decisions that might lead to legal action.’ He condemned the decision by Norwich council to chop down some chestnut trees because people might be injured by falling conkers. New laws and over-regulation about hygiene, he continued, were preventing volunteers cooking and reheating meals for the elderly in their own homes. Good volunteers were being excluded by health and safety laws and the ‘blame’ culture. The imposition of so many rules, he wrote, echoing the opinion of many, had ‘the potential to be deeply corrosive to the fabric of our society’. Even the army’s capability was being reduced because, to minimise risk and remove the threat of a commanding officer being sued for negligence, live ammunition was not used during training.
Convinced that the leak had been orchestrated from Downing Street, Charles published the letter in full. ‘It does seem to be that over the past few years,’ he wrote, ‘we in this country have been sliding inexorably down the slope of ever-increasing petty-minded litigiousness.’ He complained about the ‘remorseless obsession with rights without there being any corresponding requirement of obligation’. Challenging Irvine’s argument about the value of human rights legislation, he said, ‘I simply do not accept, as you suggest in your last letter, that rights and responsibilities are marching forward hand-in-hand … That’s rubbish – we’re a society based on rights alone.’ The law, he insisted, did not focus on the individual’s responsibilities, and that was a threat to society.
Six days after the letter was published, Charles spoke at the rededication of a vandalised war memorial and mentioned the ‘lawless youths’ responsible for the damage. In his judgement they were ‘shallow-rooted and bereft of a spiritual and moral dimension’. They represented, he wrote, the blighted product of Labour’s human rights laws. Again, he spoke for many Britons. Irvine replied forcefully but politely. His fundamental disagreement with Charles was unshaken. The prince would not retreat, but was charmless in defeat by the unyielding politician.
In normal times, such an exchange would have been barely noticed; but in the wake of Labour’s second landslide election victory the previous year and the Tory opposition’s continued hopelessness, Charles appeared to be the government’s single significant opponent. Peat should have reminded his employer about the requirement for impartiality, but he wilted when Charles raged that, to counter the government’s leaks, he would reassert his right to send letters to ministers.
Peat was struggling with many problems. Unsurprisingly, on his arrival at St James’s Palace he had not announced, ‘I’m here to kill Bolland,’ whatever he may have felt, but Bolland harboured suspicions. Unlike some of his predecessors employed as Charles’s spokesman, Bolland was not unctuous, and on many occasions had been helpful to journalists. Peat was well advised not to challenge those relationships. To conceal his hostility, he had told journalists, ‘I’m just a boring accountant, here to look after finances.’ That approach changed as Robin Janvrin and others in Buckingham Palace suspected that Bolland had aggravated the scandals involving Prince Andrew, Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex, and even William and Harry, in order to protect his master.
By spring 2002, Janvrin and Peat wanted Bolland out. Both had apparently forgotten the palace’s cack-handed management over a decade of disasters including It’s a Royal Knockout (the humiliating TV show featuring Edward, Sarah Ferguson and other junior royals), Camillagate, Squidgygate, Sarah Ferguson’s toe-sucking and the War of the Waleses. They resented giving any credit to Bolland for rescuing Charles. His punishment for being effective was to be crushed.
The public charge against Bolland, dubbed ‘the puppet master of St James’s’, was led by Charles Moore, the editor of the Daily Telegraph. He echoed the anger of Janvrin and Peat. In a battle between the three privately-educated (Eton and Marlborough) and Oxford orthodox conservatives and the Middlesbrough schoolboy, the latter was doomed to lose. ‘The big guns are now turned on Bolland,’ wrote Richard Kay, by this time a friend of Bolland. In December 2001, under the headline ‘Revenge of the Old Guard’, Kay wrote in code about the ‘weak and ineffective courtiers who have done so much to harm both the monarchy and Britain over the past thirty years’, and now had their ‘knives out for Bolland’. The result, he warned, would be regretted: ‘There will be a rapid resurgence in everything we have come to despise about the misuse of royal privilege.’ Unable to resist the pressure, Charles and Camilla finally agreed that Bolland should leave St James’s Palace, although he would continue to provide advice as a consultant.
Kay himself could never have foreseen the accuracy of his warning. Nor, more importantly, did Janvrin or Peat particularly anticipate the effect of Bolland’s departure on the Paul Burrell saga. As Robert Higdon summarised from the sidelines, ‘Peat came in to control Bolland. The result was turmoil.’