Marriage changed Camilla. Responding to Charles’s order that she receive special treatment, the staff in Clarence House learned to bow to ‘Your Royal Highness’, always to reply ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ and to ensure that all her demands were satisfied. Before visiting friends, she adopted Charles’s habit of sending her hosts a list of her likes and dislikes, especially foods. On her arrival, she might expect a curtsey. In the splendour of choosing to live in any of her husband’s six homes, she was not concerned that his annual household costs had risen to over £5 million. (When choosing where to stay, she described the Castle of Mey on the north coast of Scotland as gloomy. She could just tolerate Birkhall, but preferably without guests, not least because she had been forbidden to change anything. To overcome Charles’s order, she had scanned the Farrow & Ball colour chart for identical matches so that Charles would not notice any new paint.) She was not heard to commiserate with the queen, who she knew could not afford to redecorate and rewire dilapidated parts of Buckingham Palace and Windsor, although some of the interiors of both buildings, beset by leaky roofs, crumbling masonry, antiquated plumbing, draughts and asbestos, had not been repainted since the coronation in 1953.
Instead of her usual pub lunches, she enjoyed driving with an armed escort to meet friends in expensive restaurants. She was a happy woman in control of her life, married to the queen’s heir. She imposed limits on the number of her solo public engagements – her principal task, she would say, was to keep Charles happy. No one doubted that since their marriage her husband looked more relaxed. With a tease or a chide, without stirring his anger, she supported his ambition to win public acceptance. To reinforce his wife’s higher profile, Charles requested that flags should fly on public buildings on her birthday. Soon after their wedding, they stood together at Trooping the Colour and at a ceremony to commemorate the fallen in the world wars.
Unfortunately, despite Clarence House generating favourable media comment about Camilla, the polls were still against her becoming queen. Beyond Charles’s control, two downmarket TV dramas based on his infidelity were in production. According to the eager promoters, Camilla would feature in one as a ‘screaming bitch’ and would describe herself as a ‘slut’, while Andrew Parker Bowles would be presented as a philanderer and Princess Margaret as an alcoholic, bisexual nymphomaniac. Even Gyles Brandreth, a monarchist former Tory MP, had proposed a documentary to Channel 4 based on the Camillagate tapes, portraying her as Charles’s ‘surrogate mother’. The popular quip that the age of deference had been replaced by soap opera was being reinforced in the most literal way.
Charles as usual appeared undaunted and undeterred. He unexpectedly agreed to the Foreign Office’s proposal that he and Camilla make an eight-day state visit to New York, Philadelphia and Washington to meet President George W. Bush. The government needed to promote British tourism following the foot-and-mouth outbreak and in the aftermath of the bombings in London in July that had killed fifty-two people. Bush was receptive to the idea. In the wake of the Iraq war, his tardy response to Hurricane Katrina and the rising price of oil, he hoped that a royal visit might improve his own low ratings. The mutual interests of the British and American governments meant that the minimal affection between the two men was ignored. For four years, Charles had deliberately not visited America. Only two years earlier, angry about the Iraq war and Bush’s dismissal of climate change, he had stayed away from the state meal at Buckingham Palace during the president’s visit. That snub was disregarded, and the Foreign Office reluctantly agreed to charter a large jet. To offset Camilla’s fear of boredom, Robert Higdon promised her ‘a good time’.
Rightly concerned that the media would compare their visit to the epic White House dinner twenty years before, featuring Diana’s memorable dance with John Travolta, Camilla insisted on tipping the programme in her favour as much as possible. In addition to a combined twelve Foreign Office members and police protection officers, Charles and Camilla brought sixteen staff, including Hugh Green, Camilla’s hair stylist, Julia Biddlecombe, her make-up artist, and a wardrobe assistant to care for the fifty dresses selected from hundreds sent to Clarence House for approval. Camilla was determined that she should look her best.
No one expected America’s arbiters of style to become excited about the middle-aged couple. The country’s anger about Charles’s mistreatment of their beloved Diana was easily reawakened, and Charles suspected that he had ceased to be of great interest. But no one anticipated New York’s merciless response to the duchess’s physical appearance.
By comparison with Diana, carped the city’s stylists, Camilla was Frump Tower versus the Fashion Princess. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post was particularly vitriolic. Amid remarks about horses, mutton and dumplings, there was not a kind word for Camilla’s dresses or teeth. Mark Bolland, still in attack mode, joined the chorus. ‘She’s a horsey home-wrecker,’ he wrote, observing that Camilla had an unsuitable hairstyle, too much make-up, and overdid the jewellery. An old and not particularly attractive couple, wrote another columnist, was hardly likely to encourage tourism to Britain. Higdon’s ‘spectacular reception’, held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was mentioned only to list those celebrities who chose not to appear. At best, the media reaction was somewhere between lukewarm and indifferent.
Their next stop was Washington. Higdon’s presence alongside the prince was alarming the Foreign Office. Charles’s emissary, the diplomats heard, had alerted his network of ninety donors to keep the weekend free. Contrary to the FO’s wishes, Charles planned to use his trip to raise money for his charities.
Higdon was already unpopular among British officials and charity executives in London. While one former British ambassador in Washington dubbed him ‘the Loiterer’, another senior official called him ‘Creepy, because he was getting a high salary and not raising enough to justify himself.’ In 2004, Higdon’s personal income increased by 33 per cent in one year to £310,000 (£194,000 in salary, £106,000 in bonuses, £10,600 in benefits), yet the foundation had given only £1 million to charities in America. That left £3.8 million in the American Foundation’s bank account. No one could explain why Charles had not distributed more.
So far, Higdon’s proximity to the royal couple had protected him. His perfect manners, charm and good looks disarmed would-be critics. Nevertheless, to reinforce any supervision that Tom Shebbeare was able to impose, Leslie Ferrar, an accountant, was appointed to oversee his activities. But Higdon had more worrying enemies. The Daily Mail probed his background to discover the family home in Florida, a shabby building inhabited by his father and mother, respectively a car salesman and a bank clerk: far from the plush Ivy League background their son had always suggested.
Among America’s meritocrats, Higdon’s rags-to-riches story was laudable. After all, he had raised money for Ronald Reagan’s presidential library, and he remained Nancy Reagan’s preferred social escort. On that basis, he managed Margaret Thatcher’s international travel and raised money for her foundation too. But those relationships were no more than past glories when he arrived with Charles and Camilla in Washington expecting to escort Nancy Reagan to President Bush’s state dinner in the White House. Searching the seating plan, he could not find his name. ‘It blew my mind,’ he said, ‘that I wasn’t invited. They didn’t want to acknowledge my role. I was so humiliated.’
Bolland, as ever, felt he knew what had happened. ‘Higdon was cut out because Buckingham Palace people are mean. The system doesn’t encourage people to be nice to each other. Someone said, “Who’s Robert Higdon? Let’s keep him out.”’ The insult was made worse when President Bush’s wife Laura asked Camilla, ‘What would we do without Robert?’ Her guest agreed, but proved powerless that night against what another victim called ‘the cruel snobs around Charles’.
Higdon was left to pick up scraps: ‘It was a horrible guest list. Most of those invited were undistinguished unknowns.’
Among the ‘unknowns’ was Joseph Allbritton, the former chief executive of Riggs Bank, which had recently been fined $25 million for its disregard of money-laundering laws. The bank also later pleaded guilty to a series of illegal transactions with the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Allbritton had, however, given a £190,000 donation to Charles’s foundation, and loaned his Gulfstream jet. In return, thanks to Higdon, he had spent a night at Highgrove.
Without any true stars at the dinner, most agreed that the event was dull. That was not the fault of the guests of honour. Over the previous five years, President Bush had hosted just five state dinners (compared to the Clintons’ thirty-one in eight years), because he did not drink, did not dance, and preferred to be in bed by 9 p.m. Everyone departed relatively happy – although neither Charles nor Camilla commiserated with their prize fundraiser.
Instead, the prince was puzzled by two newspaper breaches of his privacy. First, the News of the World had discovered that Harry had banned Camilla from being present at a parents’ night at Sandhurst, where he was training to be an officer. Charles was surprised that a journalist could somehow know about his private phone discussion with Harry. Second, the Mail on Sunday had obtained nine of his private journals, which recorded his thoughts about a range of subjects. The newspaper’s source was Sarah Goodall, an ex-personal assistant in his private office, angry that she had been summarily dismissed. The paper planned to publish one of the journals, about his 1997 trip to Hong Kong for the transfer of power to China, which was titled ‘The Handover of Hong Kong or The Great Chinese Takeaway’. In the journal, Charles referred to the Chinese leaders he met as ‘appalling old waxworks’. The paper justified the breach after Charles missed the state banquet that was being hosted by the queen for Hu Jintao, the Chinese president.
Charles’s excuse for that absence was the delayed departure on his chartered jet from Washington. Few in London believed the clash of timing was a coincidence: his track record with China was well known. Two years earlier he had refused to go to the state banquet at Buckingham Palace for President Jiang Zemin. Shortly before, contrary to Tony Blair’s wishes, he had met the Dalai Lama, a sworn enemy of China. Charles’s preoccupation with the lack of democracy in the country ignored the protocols of government. As king, he would be expected to visit China or host its president, regardless of his opinions. More important, he also ignored the rapid economic growth and social progress in China and Tibet under Jiang’s and Hu’s governments. Stuck with opinions forged twenty years earlier, Charles was not recognising the new social harmony that Mao’s successors were introducing to forge better relationships with other countries. If his behaviour continued, relations with China would suffer.
Peat heard about the Mail on Sunday’s intention to publish the Chinese journal and called Peter Wright, the editor, to protest that it could not appear without Charles’s agreement. Wright mentioned the legal arguments in favour of publication in the public interest. They disagreed whether the journal was private or not, although neither disputed that at least thirteen copies had been distributed and read by some forty people – later estimates were that seventy-five politicians and media figures had in fact already read the journal.
After their conversation, Peat did nothing to stop the newspaper’s plan. On 13 November 2005, millions of people read Charles’s denunciation of the Chinese leaders and his dismissive remarks about Tony Blair’s focus groups. Only after the prince’s confidential thoughts had been broadcast around the world did Peat consult lawyers. ‘It’s a matter of principle,’ he said belatedly. ‘Like anybody else, the prince is entitled to write a private journal without extracts being published.’ He was advised to apply for an injunction to stop publication of future extracts as ‘a breach of copyright and breach of confidence’. Once again, he failed to anticipate the potential damage of a courtroom battle.
In his submission, Peat explained his employer’s role: ‘The Prince of Wales avoids making public statements on matters which are the subject of disagreement between political parties. He does not campaign on contentious issues but occasionally raises questions about matters which he regards as being of public concern.’ The prince had not, he emphasised, ‘bombarded ministers with his views but has written to them from time to time on issues which he believes are important’.
The Mail on Sunday possessed evidence to contradict that statement. Not only did Charles’s journals substantiate the description of his duties on his own website – to ‘protect national traditions, virtues and excellence’ – but his letters to ministers clearly sought to change policy. In its defence, the paper denied that Charles was entitled to prevent legitimate scrutiny of his secret defiance.
The moment Mr Justice Blackburne, in charge of the hearing, began speaking in the courtroom, the Mail’s lawyers assumed defeat. The judge suggested that Charles’s privacy had indeed been infringed. Fighting against an apparently royalist judge, the newspaper argued that the public had the right to know about Charles’s attitude towards China. To support that argument, the paper delivered a bombshell.
In a statement offered to the newspaper, Mark Bolland delivered his payback for all Charles’s ingratitude. ‘The prince,’ he said, ‘was aware of the political and economic importance of the state visit.’ Charles was motivated to make a public stand ‘against the Chinese – hence the decision to boycott the banquet’. Driving in the dagger, he drew a parallel with Charles’s ‘deliberate snub’ of a 1999 state banquet ‘because he did not approve of the Chinese regime and is a great supporter of the Dalai Lama whom he views as being oppressed by the Chinese’.
To inflame the wound, Bolland described how Charles routinely meddled in political issues, and wrote in extreme terms to ministers, MPs and others in power. The prince, he said, saw himself as a ‘dissident working against the prevailing political consensus’. While employed in St James’s Palace, Bolland had read ‘highly politically sensitive correspondence’ from Charles that denounced elected leaders ‘in extreme terms’. The prince ‘bombarded’ ministers with letters, and secretly briefed the media on delicate matters of diplomacy – or, to cite a particular instance, on GM foods through the Daily Mail. ‘The prince’s very definite aim in all this activity, as he explained to me, was to influence opinion.’ Although Charles knew that he ought to avoid contentious subjects, he ignored that requirement ‘if he felt strongly about particular issues or government policies’.
In order to promote himself, said Bolland, Charles had asked Richard Aylard when he was private secretary to portray him as ‘a wise man, a thinker and a changer of views’. Later, he had ignored Stephen Lamport’s cautionary advice to be silent, and instead had either ‘authorised friends and employees such as myself to make the prince’s views known’. Masterful in news management, ‘the prince was delighted at the coverage’ he had engineered in 1999 to publicise his boycott of the Chinese president’s visit. ‘In a democracy,’ Bolland concluded, ‘the price of political activism must be transparency.’ The public, he believed, was entitled to know Charles’s opinions.
The judge was not convinced. Moreover, in restricting the evidence of Charles’s interference in British politics, he prevented the newspaper offering as further proof of the heir’s calculated political warfare his opposition to various government policies in fields including education.
Since the early 1990s, Charles had publicly criticised the ‘intellectual fanaticism’ of political correctness. He openly accused ‘fashionable theorists’ of peddling trendy dogmas, ignoring Shakespeare and creating a cultural and moral void where children were not taught the three Rs. Thirty per cent of school leavers were either illiterate or innumerate. ‘Our language has become so impoverished, so sloppy and so limited,’ he said in 1999, ‘that we have arrived at a wasteland of banality, cliché and casual obscenity.’ Criticising Tony Blair’s government, he compared the virtues of traditional educationalists to ‘the new Establishment’ that was ‘overbearing, arrogant and destructive’. The result was ‘an entire generation of culturally disinherited people’.
Praised by conservatives, Charles was derided by the left. ‘He is talking rubbish,’ said Labour’s London mayor Ken Livingstone. ‘This is Sun-speak,’ scoffed Labour cabinet minister Clare Short.
Instead of retreating, Charles intensified his criticism. The Labour government’s education policies, he riposted, represented the ‘brutal vandalism’ of the ‘roots of our tradition’. The result was the ‘destruction of our cultural, historical and moral heritage’. No hardbitten Tory could have been more damning.
‘I think he should think carefully before intervening in that debate,’ said Charles Clarke, the Labour secretary of state for education, in 2004. ‘He doesn’t understand what’s going on in British education.’ Because of his class and privilege, Clarke added, alluding in part to Charles’s support for fox-hunting, the prince was ‘old-fashioned and out of time’.
Charles immediately counterattacked. In a speech at Lambeth Palace he criticised the ‘travesty of the truth’ of Britain’s ‘demoralised’ education system. ‘For the last thirty years,’ he said, ‘I have done all I can to give young people who have limited opportunities a chance to succeed. That is what my Prince’s Trust is all about.’ Which politician, he asked, could claim to help hundreds of young people every day, benefiting 500,000 of them over thirty years? The Labour Party, he said, had failed the working class: ‘There has often been a very patronising view, an old-fashioned view, that says that certain people can’t do certain things.’ In his efforts to show that there was an alternative to uninspired teachers burdened by red tape, excessive testing and constantly changing curricula, Charles had for some years invited a hundred English and history teachers to a summer school in Devon to instil pupils with the value of good manners, reading and the classics. ‘I know that my ideas are sometimes portrayed as old-fashioned,’ he said. ‘Well, they may be. But what I am concerned about are the things that are timeless, regardless of the age we live in. Also, I have been around long enough to see what were thought of as old-fashioned ideas have now come into vogue. Ambition is a good thing.’
Up to that point, he was echoing traditional Conservative policy – and winning public support. But then he overreached himself. Bad education, he said, resulted from ‘a profound malaise, a deep disease, a disintegration and disfunctioning of the natural harmony in the human existence [because] the soul was declared as a moribund and derided concept’. Such proselytising was relevant when assessing Charles’s impartiality, especially once he became king.
In the Mail on Sunday case, the trial judge restricted any exposure of that bias, and rejected Mark Bolland’s evidence. Both Mr Justice Blackburne, and subsequently the judges in the Court of Appeal, ruled that Charles’s copyright and confidentiality of a ‘private’ document had been breached. His personal rights, said one judge, ‘outweighed the significance’ of the newspaper’s right to freedom of expression under the same Human Rights Act that Charles had called ‘rubbish’. Few others in Britain would have been similarly protected; but despite the ruling the damage was done.
Three months later, Charles was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary, The Meddling Prince. The accusation stung. On the night the programme was broadcast, he hosted a dinner at Clarence House. The contrast between the rarefied atmosphere in his home on The Mall and the tough counterattack orchestrated by his new spokesman Paddy Haverson, formerly employed at Manchester United FC, reflected Charles’s unapologetic rejection of his critics. Michael Peat issued a lengthy statement denying that the heir to the throne was a meddler. The prince, he said, ‘cares deeply about the well-being of the United Kingdom and everyone in it, and wants to add value to his position by helping people and making a difference’. Some, he went on in a statement crafted by his employer, sought Charles’s silence, but he wanted to ‘make an active contribution to national life’ for those who ‘might not be heard’. There was a difference, he said, between being the sovereign and being the heir, and between political issues and public policies linked to Charles’s charities: ‘It would in my view be more damaging if the Prince of Wales did not take advantage of his position to help with issues which matter to ordinary people but which have not found their way on to political agendas.’
Within Clarence House, the statement seemed reasonable, but beyond the palace, officials and politicians were not impressed. Unlike any other political player, Charles demanded the right of influence, but refused to be held to account. Sometimes his meddling led to significant change. His agitation against GM crops had contributed to the multinational biotechnology corporation Monsanto’s termination of GM research in Britain. His condemnation of modernist architecture had also borne fruit. Other interferences had accomplished little or nothing. In a letter to the environment minister, he urged the Royal Navy to patrol areas where the illegal overfishing of the Patagonian toothfish was starving the ‘poor old albatross’. More pertinently, he asked another minister to finance the preservation of two Antarctic huts built by Shakleton and Scott. But there were also political protests – some winning popularity with the public. He asked the education minister to improve the standards of school food, and Tony Blair about the limitations of Lynx helicopters operating in high temperatures in Iraq. The delay in the helicopter’s replacement, he complained, because of ‘significant pressure on the defence budget, is one more example where our Armed Forces are being asked to do an extremely challenging job (particularly in Iraq) without the necessary resources’. In his reply, Blair admitted the helicopter’s ‘limitations’ – which he had failed to do in Parliament.
In another letter to the prime minister, Charles supported the controversial badger cull, intended to combat the spread of bovine tuberculosis. ‘I for one cannot understand how the “badger lobby” seem to mind not at all about the slaughter of thousands of expensive cattle and yet object to a managed cull of an overpopulation of badgers – to me this is intellectually dishonest.’ Disregarding the prince’s familiar lament about the farmers, Blair did not support the cull. In another letter to Downing Street, Charles expressed his anger that the Office of Fair Trading was a ‘serious obstacle’ to developing dairy cooperatives ‘of the necessary size and influence’. Unlike the equivalent agencies in Denmark and Germany, he believed, the OFT had misinterpreted EU competition rules. (British civil servants were regularly accused of ‘gold-plating’, or unnecessarily adding to the complexity of directives from Brussels.) The supermarkets’ stranglehold was reducing the prices paid to farmers. ‘It would be splendid,’ Charles wrote, ‘if the government could find innovative ways to give the necessary lead’ to encourage the purchase of British agricultural produce to support British farmers ‘so the countryside will survive’.
As ever unapologetic about his campaigns, Charles admitted in a television interview that he was a nuisance: ‘I mind deeply about this country and the people here.’ But often his attempts to galvanise interest in his work were fruitless. After Blair won his third election victory in May 2005, Charles’s hope for forging a better relationship with the government foundered on the prime minister’s unpopularity over the Iraq war. Blair was fighting his own battles, particularly to resist his chancellor Gordon Brown’s demands for his resignation, and had little interest in managing a smooth succession from the queen to Charles.
Even less important was the prince’s precarious relationship with the Commonwealth. But the queen had become concerned. After another conversation with Don McKinnon in late 2005, she summoned her son, who had just returned from a fundraising trip in the Gulf, to a meeting with Robin Janvrin. The issue was duly discussed, after which Janvrin told McKinnon, ‘We’ve been thinking that he might visit Malta.’
‘Malta’s down the street,’ snapped McKinnon. ‘He needs to go further.’
Janvrin asked whether Charles should host the banquet at the next Commonwealth heads of state meeting in Uganda in 2007.
‘That’s going too fast. He’d irritate everyone. He can go to receptions but not replace the queen.’ McKinnon’s impatience was aggravated by the announcement from Clarence House of another foreign trip by Charles and Camilla – but not to a Commonwealth country. On their first wedding anniversary, Charles had agreed to visit Egypt and then, in a familiar deal, to travel on to India. The agreement papered over strained relations between him and the Foreign Office officials appointed under Blair. Reflecting the prime minister’s own attitude, the new breed considered the royals a waste of time. Often appointed on the grounds of politically correct diversity rather than exceptional talent, the new officials clashed with the older, traditional FO staff about Charles’s insistence on private planes, especially for flights to Europe. After one particularly nasty spat, he had reluctantly agreed to fly commercial in Europe. On his return, he refused ever again to take a BA plane. ‘He wanted the convenience and not to mix with hoi-polloi,’ observed one mandarin.
Charles nevertheless did make some concessions. In 2006 Clive Alderton, the FO’s representative in Calais, was appointed to arrange his foreign trips rather than Peat. To ‘slowly’ introduce the prince across the Commonwealth, civil servants from India and South Africa were seconded to work in Clarence House. Charles’s charities were also to be used to ease his introduction to Commonwealth countries. Finally, he agreed to visit Pakistan with Camilla in late 2006.
Just as they arrived in the region, Pakistani forces attacked a suspected terrorist base. Diverted to a safer area, and accompanied by boorish officials and indifferent journalists, Charles was greeted by few local people for a tour of an organic farm and an archaeological site. McKinnon was unimpressed. ‘That was for the Foreign Office, not the Commonwealth,’ he said. Soon after, Charles briefly visited Sierra Leone. ‘That trip spread the angel dust for Britain, not the Commonwealth,’ McKinnon noted this time. Eleven weeks later, Charles and Camilla started a ten-day trip to five countries in the Arabian Gulf.
Charles’s sympathy for Islam was well established. In 1986 he had written to Laurens van der Post after a visit to Saudi Arabia and Qatar: ‘This tour has been fascinating and have learnt a lot about the Middle east and Arab outlook … Also begin to understand their point of view about Israel. Never realised that they see it as a US colony. I now appreciate that Arabs and Jews were all Semitic people originally + it is the influx of foreign, European Jews (especially from Poland, they say) which has helped to cause great problems. I know there are so many complex issues but how can there ever be an end to terrorism unless the causes are eliminated? Surely some US president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby in US? I must be naïve I suppose!’
Seven years later, in a speech in Oxford, he had expressed the hope that the West could overcome its ‘unthinking prejudices’ against the Muslim religion. After describing Islam’s mystical power to unify man and nature, religion and science, mind and matter, he said that it ‘can teach us today a way of understanding and living in a world which Christianity is poorer for having lost’. He appeared particularly to commend those aspects of Islam that influenced European society before the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century, despite European rulers’ deliberate impoverishment of Muslims. In Charles’s admiration of the pre-industrialised world, he was not bothered that, whereas 68 per cent of Englishmen were literate when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, an era when only 3 per cent of Muslims could read. The reason was that ownership of a printing press in Egypt, and across the Ottoman Empire, was a capital offence. To stifle democracy, a new means of communication had been suppressed, casting doubts over Charles’s admiration for Islam. At the same time, both the prince and Michael Peat rejected invitations to visit Israel.
While Charles had often spoken about resolving the ‘misunderstanding’ between the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, he seemed willing to ignore Islam’s rejection of Western ideas of liberty and equality and, more important, the separation of religion from the state. He had even proposed to build a mosque near a new duchy development of 1,200 homes in Cornwall – even though no Muslims lived in the area. His uncritical sympathy alarmed the Anglican Church. Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, cautioned that the heir to the throne should recognise the value of Britain being a Christian country: ‘You cannot defend every faith, because there are very serious differences between them.’ His objections were ignored.
Charles was enthralled by the Arab world, and particularly by the Saudi royal family. In Riyadh his fellow royals hailed him as a trusted friend, especially Prince Khaled Al-Faisal. In 2001 the two princes had jointly exhibited their paintings, and Khaled had been invited to dinner at Highgrove to raise money for the Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies. To Britain’s Arabists, Charles was a hero who compensated for Tony Blair’s indifference towards the Gulf rulers. Whereas the prime minister disliked autocratic monarchs, Charles made a distinction between Chinese and Saudi Arabian oppression. Unlike others in the West, he had refused to support Salman Rushdie, the author of the novel The Satanic Verses, after his life was threatened by a fatwa imposed by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. Charles not only disapproved of liberals’ defence of Rushdie’s perceived jeer at Islam, but in August 2005 he had flown to Saudi Arabia for King Fahd’s funeral, even though the monarch had done little to stop Saudi-financed terrorists murdering Europeans and Americans.
Charles’s influence was clearly limited. He had failed to persuade the Saudi government to release Sandy Mitchell, a British medical technician imprisoned and tortured for thirty-two months on trumped-up charges of planting terrorist bombs. Nevertheless, he was entranced by membership of the Club of Kings, and by his hosts’ generosity. On a previous trip, Prince Khaled had given Charles a Rolex Daytona watch, which he duly turned over to Michael Fawcett; Camilla received jewels including a ruby-and-diamond necklace. During the same visit he also accepted a multi-million-pound donation for his foundation.
Charles was aware that winning similar popularity among Britons would be more difficult. One year after the wedding, less than 20 per cent approved of Camilla becoming the next queen, while another poll showed that 53 per cent would prefer William to succeed as king.
But then there was a ray of hope, as twenty years of tabloid persecution abruptly ended. On 9 August 2006, Clive Goodman, the News of the World’s royal correspondent, was arrested for phone hacking, and shortly afterwards the source of his scoops about Charles, Harry and other royals was exposed – namely, listening to the recorded messages on their mobile phones. Goodman would eventually be convicted and jailed. Charles stopped offering cups of tea or lunch to the editors of the Mirror, Sun and Mail. Without fear of exposure, the royal family would have a chance of appearing quite normal.
The improvement had started four months earlier. On 21 April 2006 the queen celebrated her eightieth birthday with twenty-six members of her family at a dinner party in Kew Palace hosted by Charles and organised by Fawcett. The tensions between the queen and her eldest son had subsided. His tribute at the meal to ‘darling Mama’ and the ‘many wonderful qualities she has brought to almost an entire lifetime of service and dedication’ was reported without the simultaneous publication of awkward revelations.
Similarly, in a television tribute Charles reminisced about his childhood and how his mother had visited him in the nursery at Buckingham Palace wearing her crown as she practised for her coronation. The programme was well received. Building on that slim success, Charles’s spokesman revealed that he had invited two hundred victims of terrorist attacks, including the survivors of the London bombs on 7 July 2005, to a reception at Highgrove. Charles had written personally to each family – as he had to the grieving relatives of victims of the Islamic attacks in New York in September 2001, and in Bali in 2002 and 2005.
This was often his way. One night after dinner in 2011, he and Camilla would fly from Scotland to London to tour the riot-damaged streets of Tottenham. At the request of William Castell, the former chairman of the Prince’s Trust, they met in a debris-strewn pub with broken windows. Two glasses of double malt whisky awaited the royal couple on the bar. Emerging from the wrecked building, they walked down Tottenham’s main street through the very groups of black youths who had wrecked the neighbourhood. ‘You come to this shit-hole after the riots!’ shouted one. ‘We love you!’
As always, however, it was a case of two steps forward and one back. In August 2007 Camilla informed Peat that she intended to be present at a memorial service in London’s Wellington Barracks to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death. Once the news leaked, there was uproar. All the old stories of adultery were recycled in the media until, five days before the service, she pulled out, releasing a statement that her presence would ‘divert attention from the purpose of the occasion’. Charles and the rest of the royal family flew from Balmoral to London, to be greeted by a silent crowd. To avoid joyless solitude in Scotland, Camilla asked Fawcett to contact Sir Donald Gosling, the former co-owner of National Car Parks. Fawcett’s personal relationship with the multimillionaire had provided many donations to Charles’s charities, and on this occasion he asked whether Camilla and three girlfriends could spend a week cruising the Mediterranean on his 250-foot yacht. Gosling rarely declined Fawcett’s requests, nor did he this time.
During the cruise, Camilla was said to grumble about the restrictions of married life. All week she had to listen to Charles’s laments about the world going wrong, and how he was either ignored or misunderstood. For relief at weekends she escaped to Ray Mill while Charles remained in Highgrove; only there could she feel comfortable.
That running sore, Diana, had repeatedly intruded into her life. Camilla wanted closure, and the opportunity suddenly arose. In October 2007 an inquest under the appeal court judge Lord Justice Scott Baker met to hear Mohamed Fayed give evidence that Diana and Dodi Fayed had been murdered by conspirators organised by Prince Philip and the royal family.
To avoid any accusations of prejudice, the exhaustive investigation of the crash by French officials had been ignored, and a new investigation headed by Sir John Stevens, the former head of the Metropolitan Police, was presented to the court. It concluded that the accident was caused by the car’s speeding drunken driver. Nevertheless, the judge gave Fayed licence to rummage through Diana’s love life and her miserable relations with her brother Charles Spencer. Fayed even mentioned her anger with Charles for hosting a fiftieth birthday party at Highgrove for Camilla in the summer of 1997. He also wanted the world to know of Diana’s gratitude to him for an invitation to holiday that summer in the south of France.
Fayed’s wholesale trashing of reputations climaxed with Paul Burrell telling the court about a handwritten letter Diana sent him in October 1993. It included once again the outlandish claim that Charles was plotting to kill her in a car crash so he could marry their sons’ nanny. Those suspecting that Burrell might have forged the letter were outflanked by a note by Lord Mishcon, Diana’s solicitor, in which he recorded that the princess had repeated the accusations at a meeting in October 1995, although Mishcon had waited until eighteen days after her death before informing the police. Nevertheless, after a six-month hearing, the jury would unanimously reject both Diana’s accusation and Fayed’s conspiracy theories – not least because, as the judge said, Fayed had not produced ‘a shred of evidence’ to support his slurs. The Egyptian was condemned as a fantasist.
The judgement about Diana was similarly divided. To some, she was the manipulative schemer described in Tina Brown’s recent biography, The Diana Chronicles. To others, she remained the victim of Charles’s cruelty. Either way, after the verdict Charles and Camilla hoped for the first time in over twenty years that her ghost had been laid to rest. But any respite was temporary.