The aftermath of the serialisation of Burrell’s book was painful, and eroded any goodwill Charles had generated over the previous six years. Camilla disappeared from public view. By the time she surfaced again, in February 2004, she was still being portrayed as a kept woman who preferred to do as little work as possible. Cocooned from the outside world, she glided between London, Highgrove and Birkhall in her expensive jewellery and fine new clothes, while making it clear that she ‘could not stand abroad’.
To fuel the poor press, a story surfaced that she disapproved of Charles’s friendship with Antonia Wellesley, the attractive younger wife of the heir to the Duke of Wellington. Camilla was credited with having introduced Antonia to David Somerset, the Duke of Beaufort, with whom she felt she had more in common. Miranda Beaufort, the duke’s second wife, was not grateful. Christopher Wilson, a journalist who covered the royals, described Charles’s fury that a whispering campaign to destabilise Camilla had started.
Without Bolland’s protection, the gossips, especially Charles’s old friends, angered at being excluded by Camilla, dug up the deathbed confessions of ‘Kanga’ Tryon about her long affair with the prince. Kanga’s graphic account of their romance during Charles’s stopovers while driving between Highgrove and London was sold to a newspaper. In the wake of that revelation, the chatterers revived stories about his affair during the 1980s with Eva O’Neill, a German divorcee to whom he had been particularly generous. None of this was pleasant; but then came something truly damaging.
Peter Settelen, the former actor employed by Diana between September 1992 and December 1993 to improve her confidence while making public speeches, had decided to profit from the recordings of her confessions to him during their sessions. The tapes – found in Burrell’s attic during the police raid and recovered by Settelen from the police after his victory in a court battle launched by Sarah McCorquodale for them to go to Diana’s estate – were sold to the American TV network NBC for a reported £700,000.
In the first broadcast from beyond the grave, Diana spoke about her misery, her suicide attempts and her confrontations with Camilla: ‘I had so many dreams as a young girl … hopes that my husband would look after me, he’d be like a father figure, he’d support me, encourage me, say “Well done.” But I didn’t get any of that.’ In the next instalment, she confessed to her affair with her police bodyguard Barry Mannakee. At that time, she revealed, ‘Charles only wanted to make love once every three weeks.’ After Charles discovered the relationship, ‘He [Mannakee] was chucked out. And then he was killed [in a motorcycle accident in 1987]. I think he was bumped off. He was the greatest fellow I’ve ever had. The biggest blow of my life.’ Nearly twenty years after the event, Diana described her sobbing pleas for help to ‘the Top Lady. And I said, “What do I do? I’m coming to you. What do I do?” And the Queen replied, “I don’t know what you should do. Charles is hopeless.”’
If it were possible, the prince’s stock fell even further in America, while his humiliation in Britain was complete. A meagre respite was the support from George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, for Charles and Camilla to marry. In his disclosures, revealed while promoting his memoirs, Carey sniped at Diana’s ‘cunning’ use of the media and, after revealing his meetings with Camilla in the late 1990s, contradicted the public perception of an ‘ogress’ or ‘temptress’: ‘I came to the conclusion she cannot be like that.’ He wrote, ‘The present situation is unsustainable and hypocritical … We need to put the case for a marriage with Camilla. She’ll be splendid as a king’s consort.’
Carey’s lone voice did not influence Hugh van Cutsem, one of Charles’s oldest companions. In October 2004 the van Cutsems sent out invitations to 650 friends announcing the marriage of Edward, their eldest son, to Lady Tamara Grosvenor, the daughter of another of Charles’s great friends, the Duke of Westminster. The queen, Philip, Charles, William and Harry were all invited to the wedding at Chester Cathedral. Naturally, the monarch and her family would sit at the front. The van Cutsems explained that Camilla, although invited, would have to sit at the back, and could not enter the cathedral through the main door. Charles was outraged. He interpreted the seating plan as a continuation of the feud started by the false accusation about Edward van Cutsem being implicated with Tom Parker Bowles over taking cocaine. For Camilla, to be cast into the cathedral’s outer reaches was the outcome of Emilie van Cutsem’s pique that Camilla threatened her long relationship with Charles and his sons. The ill feeling between the two women had deepened since Hugh van Cutsem tried to restore his friendship with Charles. To Camilla, the van Cutsems’ sentiments were irrelevant. She refused to be marginalised. Neither she nor Charles troubled themselves to understand the dilemmas caused by their relationship.
Camilla had become accustomed to her life of luxury. At her behest, Michael Peat provided a chauffeur-driven car, while at Charles’s insistence she flew only on private jets. This lifestyle only encouraged her habit of unpunctuality. Frequently Charles shouted from the bottom of the stairs at Clarence House, ‘Come on, get a move on.’
‘Where are we going?’ she would ask as she rushed down.
‘Haven’t you read the brief?’ he would snap, as if to a slow learner.
Emilie van Cutsem naturally heard on the grapevine about this wine merchant’s daughter’s struggle to get to grips with her duties. The stories reinforced her resistance to Charles’s demand that Camilla’s status should not be diminished in the cathedral. In the end, to placate Camilla’s fury, Charles sent his apologies: on the day of the wedding he was required to visit the families of troops of the Black Watch. The snub to Camilla fed the rumour machine. Her ‘rusting reputation’, carped her enemies, was not going to be saved by the appointment of Peter Mimpriss, a lawyer, to build up her charity work.
This second spat with the van Cutsems also revealed the state of Charles’s relationships with his family. For months, his staff at Clarence House had noticed that William and Harry entered the building through the servants’ quarters, so as to avoid Charles and Camilla. In their opinion, Charles’s lifestyle had blinded him to his sons’ personal troubles, as well as to their coolness towards Camilla. Harry was the more worrying. Ever since his confession two years before to smoking cannabis in Highgrove with people he met at a local pub, Charles had struggled to control ‘the party prince’, as the media had dubbed him. Paparazzi had sold photographs of Harry emerging bedraggled with a topless model from Bouji’s nightclub in South Kensington; then chasing Chelsea Davy, his Zimbabwean girlfriend, across Africa; and finally being ordered to return early from a holiday in Argentina for misbehaving at endless parties. Just six weeks after arriving back, on the eve of going to Sandhurst, he appeared at a fancy-dress party in Nazi uniform. The photographs were published just before a commemoration service for the more than one million people murdered at Auschwitz. ‘Prince Harry,’ said Colonel Bob Stewart, a popular army commander and future Conservative Member of Parliament, ‘must be an enormous idiot with minimum common sense.’
Apparently oblivious to his younger son’s continuing misery over Diana’s death, Charles focused on countering the bad publicity. He appointed James Lowther-Pinkerton as his sons’ private secretary. Acting as a guardian, the former SAS officer was expected to care for the two boys around the clock, and supervise their visits to nightclubs.
Charles’s treatment of this domestic turbulence appeared perfunctory. It was mirrored by his maladroit attempt to remedy constitutional problems. Despite his best efforts, Don McKinnon had failed to convince the prince that he would not automatically become head of the Commonwealth on his mother’s death: ‘I didn’t get through to Peat about the importance of Charles showing that he understood the Commonwealth. The well-dressed, well-spoken flunkies around him never had an answer except, “He has a very busy schedule.”’
Peat’s indifference was aggravated by Charles’s official visit with Camilla to Jordan in 2003, and by another trip to Saudi Arabia with a last-minute stop in Bam, a city in north-eastern Iran, after an earthquake had killed forty thousand people. This was home territory for Charles: he wanted to highlight a joint charities’ appeal for the seventy-five thousand people left homeless and to praise Iran for opening up its nuclear programme for inspection. In return, his hosts lauded his pro-Islamic sentiments and presented him with a sack of pistachio nuts.
McKinnon heard that Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, had encouraged the visit as a way to improve relations with Iran, so he asked Straw to goad Charles into showing the same enthusiasm towards the Commonwealth. ‘He doesn’t listen to us at all,’ Straw replied. Charles, he explained, had not even visited the USA for four years, because his Arabist sympathies made him critical of American policy. McKinnon turned again to Peat. ‘We’ll look into it,’ said that important functionary, in what McKinnon described as his ‘mirror policy’, namely ‘looking at himself’. Charles’s private secretary, McKinnon had found, was ‘never the easiest man to deal with’.
Unsurprisingly, the combative New Zealander found it even harder to arrange the next meeting between Charles and the high commissioners. ‘We’ll give you dates when we’re available,’ Peat replied. McKinnon interpreted this as ‘Charles is at the centre of the world and he will be chosen head of the Commonwealth regardless of the circumstances.’
‘They don’t know him,’ he again told Peat.
‘I know the prince better than you,’ came the reply, ‘and he knows the Commonwealth. And they know him, particularly that he’s funny.’
‘Look at his travel schedule!’ McKinnon produced a list of Charles’s foreign trips over the previous ten years. ‘He only goes to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, plus many visits to Transylvania and the Middle East. It looks ugly and it is ugly. It’s all to Arab countries so he can collect money for his charities. They’re dictatorships. Why does he prefer to meet dictators and not democratically elected leaders of the Commonwealth?’
‘He doesn’t like long-distance flights.’
‘All the Commonwealth is long-distance,’ replied McKinnon. ‘What about going to Sierra Leone?’ He pointed out that a visit to a country where a brutal civil war had just ended thanks to British intervention would show the prince’s sympathy for its people’s suffering.
‘No,’ said Peat. ‘He has a very busy schedule. And it’s all decided by the Foreign Office.’ His manner seemed calculated to make McKinnon feel an idiot.
‘It’s the ghastly British brush-off,’ the New Zealander decided. It wasn’t just Peat. Foreign Office officials, he knew, would tell him, ‘The prince decides where he will go, not us.’
He next played a trump card. Within twenty-four hours of the queen’s death, he told Peat, the government would authorise a proclamation that Charles was her successor. He would be the new king. But, he warned, the government could not include in its statement that Charles was also the head of the Commonwealth, as it could not assume his acceptance by all fifty-two countries. At least one unidentified government or party, he predicted, would publicly repudiate Charles for political reasons. ‘We need to mitigate the risks by removing the Commonwealth from the proclamation.’
Jolted by this suggestion, Peat reported the conversation to the Foreign Office. McKinnon was summoned by Straw and asked to confirm that Charles would automatically become the head of the Commonwealth. McKinnon said he could not do that. ‘This is what you’re facing,’ he explained. ‘You need to work off the shoe leather to get acceptance of Charles.’ Under pressure in the aftermath of the Iraq war and the allies’ failure to find evidence of Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, Straw’s interest faded.
Next, McKinnon approached Downing Street. Preoccupied with his own survival, Tony Blair agreed that the Commonwealth should be omitted from the proclamation. On hearing the news, Charles was shocked, and the queen surprised. How much time might they have before they reached the precipice and were embarrassed? Elsewhere in Buckingham Palace, a committee chaired by the Duke of Norfolk was scheduled to refine plans for ‘London Bridge’, the code name for the queen’s funeral. Charles risked a smooth succession slipping from his grasp.
Another unresolved constitutional obstacle was his relationship with the Anglican Church. Repeated attempts to persuade him to repair the damage caused by his comments to Jonathan Dimbleby about his Accession Oath had been rebuffed. Unhelpfully, Charles still insisted on making a pledge to be defender of faith rather than of the faith. Rowan Williams, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, had been one of many to remind him publicly that, despite his adultery, he would be expected to pledge himself to be the defender of one faith and, as head of the Anglican Church, to assert the primacy of Protestantism in England.
Charles’s refusal to retreat on that fundamental issue irritated Downing Street. Compared to Robin Janvrin and others at Buckingham Palace, Charles was seen, according to a senior government official, as ‘a millstone and a dragging anchor and not a driving force’. Until he agreed to the usual wording, his ambition to marry Camilla would be stymied by Whitehall.
To negotiate a solution, Downing Street established a committee, described as a ‘workstream’, under the civil servant Anthony ‘Wally’ Hammond. During the negotiations, Charles finally realised that pursuing this fight was damaging. He retreated and agreed to say the historic oath. As consolation, he would be free to hold a multi-faith ceremony after his coronation. The committee was disbanded.
Removing that obstacle did not improve relations with Buckingham Palace. Taking his lead from his master, Peat urged his officials to avoid fraternising with the queen’s staff. ‘You’re wasting your time,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of fuddy-duddies over there. They don’t know what’s happening in the real world.’ Charles particularly disliked symbolic customs such as the gentlemen at arms and the yeomen. Their ceremonial parades with pikes and axes pleased the queen, but he regarded them as evidence of Buckingham Palace being stuck in the Dark Ages. He dismissed the monarch’s birthday parade as a waste of money. Inspecting the guard was, for him, a chore to be got rid of despite the traditionalists’ protests. He had even laughed when a historian suggested that the coats of arms on Windsor Castle’s ceiling should be repainted. His disdain divided his household.
The conundrum about whether Charles was a moderniser or an autocrat was aired in public at an employment tribunal hearing in November 2004. Two years earlier, Elaine Day, Mark Bolland’s assistant, had complained about her promotion prospects. In a memorandum, she had expressed her dismay that after five years’ employment she was undervalued. Bolland forwarded her typewritten complaint to Charles. The prince was unimpressed. As an outspoken opponent of the modish prizes-for-all philosophy, he supported success based on talent, aspiration and work. ‘What on earth am I to say to Elaine?’ he had replied by hand to Bolland. ‘She is so PC it frightens me rigid.’ Predictably, he vented his anguish. ‘What is wrong with everyone nowadays? What is it that makes everyone seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their technical capabilities?’ After denouncing the ideological corruption of proper education, he continued: ‘This is all to do with [the] learning culture in schools. It is a consequence of a child-centred system which admits no failure and tells people they can all be pop stars, high court judges, brilliant TV personalities or even infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary effort or having natural abilities.’
To Charles’s misfortune, Day had spotted the prince’s reply on Bolland’s desk, and used it to support her case that humiliation and sexual discrimination were common at St James’s Palace. Charles only later became aware that, when sending his formal replies to letters, Day occasionally enclosed a photocopy of his notes on the original message in the same envelope. Her employment, he realised, had been a mistake.
Day had filed her complaint the previous April, and now published Charles’s handwritten note. The media blasted the heir’s elitist attitudes, cosseted as he was by valets, butlers, cooks, secretaries, gardeners and chauffeurs. Day’s complaint appeared to be given added weight by the abrupt departure of Rupert Lendrum, an equerry, and other staff. Charles’s focus switched once again to Michael Fawcett. ‘I can’t do without him,’ he told Sarah Goodall, who was employed as his clerk for twelve years but was later also fired – because, she believed, Camilla suspected that she had become too close to Charles. The blame for managing the ‘shambles’ fell on Peat, who according to Malcolm Ross, the comptroller in the lord chamberlain’s office at Buckingham Palace, offered Charles solutions without properly considering the human and financial cost.
Day lost her case. In every case that came before judges or tribunals in the period covered by this book, Charles was always the successful party, suggesting an inherent royalism amongst England’s judiciary. To the prince, with the public as unrelentingly hostile as ever, they appeared the exception.