It’s neat but it’s not the truth, and it is important to state this if only for the sake of William and Harry, who must infer from this version of events that the father they love used, abused and destroyed the mother they also loved. He did not and the impression of their marriage that Diana left on the world, via Andrew Morton and Panorama, and repeatedly rehearsed in documentaries, is grievously unfair.
The Prince of Wales has plenty of shortcomings but he is not a liar; his great misfortune is that he has never been able to be even faintly economical with the truth. There are so many occasions when the smallest, whitest lie would have saved him a great deal of trouble – starting with that fateful answer on the day of his engagement to Diana about whether he was in love. It has come back to haunt him regularly, as for many years did his admission that he talked to plants. And when I interviewed him in 1986 and asked him whether having a wife to talk to who had done ordinary, everyday things before her marriage was an advantage in helping him know how the other half lives, he said he didn’t really talk to Diana about that sort of thing, but conversations with Laurens van der Post were very stimulating from that point of view. His Private Secretary, Sir John Riddell, almost visibly clutched his head in his hands. But the most disastrous example was during his television interview with Jonathan Dimbleby when he was asked about his infidelity. The question didn’t come out of the blue, and his reply was very well thought out.
‘Were you,’ asked Dimbleby, ‘… did you try to be faithful and honourable to your wife when you took the vow of marriage?’
‘Yes,’ said the Prince, and after a brief and rather anguished pause said, ‘until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.’
On that occasion his Private Secretary, Richard Aylard, had reinforced the Prince’s determination to tell the truth, and it was the rest of the world that held their heads in their hands and gasped with incredulity. The Duke of Edinburgh was incensed, the rest of the family flabbergasted, the Queen’s advisers and courtiers stunned, the Prince’s friends appalled, and the blame fell squarely on Richard Aylard for having allowed Charles to make what many regarded as the worst mistake of his life. At the time many people thought it might cost him the throne.
‘It wasn’t being honest to Jonathan that was the problem,’ protested Aylard in his defence. ‘If you want to start placing blame, the fault was getting into the relationship in the first place.’
There is no doubt that Camilla has been an important figure in the Prince’s life since he first fell in love with her at the age of twenty-three. They are the greatest of friends, they have all sorts of interests and enthusiasms in common and they love one another very dearly; it is clearly a warm, comfortable relationship and hugely beneficial to them both, but it hasn’t been an exclusive, obsessive relationship since Charles was twenty-three. He has fallen in and out of love many times since then – probably never more deeply than with Camilla – but he has fallen in love none the less. She was certainly one of the women he was seeing when he started going out with Diana but it was never going anywhere. Camilla was married; even if she had been divorced he could never have married her, not in 1981; a divorcee with two children becoming Princess of Wales? It was unthinkable. Besides, what woman in her right mind would want to?
When Charles first started looking upon Diana as a possible candidate for marriage he talked to Camilla about her; he asked all his close friends what they thought of Diana, and Camilla was one of those who tried to befriend her and welcome her to the group. She invited Charles and Diana to spend weekends at her house. There was nothing sinister in any of this. The fact that Camilla knew Charles was going to propose and hence wrote a friendly note to Diana to await her arrival at Clarence House on the day it was announced wasn’t sinister either. Look at almost any episode of the American TV sitcom Friends: soliciting friends’ approval of the latest girl/boyfriend is par for the course. But the Princess took it as proof that something was still going on between them, and read into Camilla’s friendly invitation to lunch the latter’s desire to find out whether she was going to hunt when she moved to Highgrove, and therefore whether she would be in the way of their plans to meet.
There were no meetings, and virtually no contact until several years into the marriage, and certainly no sex, as the Prince so painfully and honestly explained, until the marriage had irretrievably broken down. And by that time he was close to irretrievably breaking down, too. Towards the end of 1986 he started making contact with friends once again, those he had shut out of his life at Diana’s request some years before. As he wrote to one of them:
Frequently I feel nowadays that I’m in a kind of cage, pacing up and down in it and longing to be free. How awful incompatibility is, and how dreadfully destructive it can be for the players in this extraordinary drama. It has all the ingredients of a Greek tragedy … I fear I’m going to need a bit of help every now and then for which I feel rather ashamed.
He was in such a chronic state of depression by then that they feared for his sanity, and it was Patty Palmer-Tomkinson who engineered a reunion with Camilla, knowing how much she had meant to him in the past. Camilla herself was not particularly happy; she and Andrew Parker Bowles were the best of friends but their marriage was an empty shell with Andrew in London escorting pretty girls all week and Camilla minding the home, dogs, horses and children in the country. At first she and Charles started to talk on the telephone, he pouring out his heart to her, she listening sympathetically, warm, understanding and supportive; then they met at Patty’s house in Hampshire and started seeing each other again, and gradually the relationship developed and they took up where they had left off more than six years before. Camilla was a lifeline for Charles; she brought light and laughter into his life which for a long time had been so very dark.
This was not the outcome Charles had either wanted or anticipated. For years he had longed to be married, to have for himself the family atmosphere that he experienced in his friends’ houses, to have children running around and a companion with whom to share his life. He was lonely; he was surrounded by valets, footmen, butlers, private secretaries and police protection officers. He was never on his own, but ‘he was one of the loneliest men you’ll ever meet. They all are,’ says Michael Colborne. ‘They go out to banquets and dinners and great dos, but when they get home at night they go up to their rooms and they are on their own. There’s no one to have a drink with. They are very independent people; even their friends are mostly acquaintances.’ Charles wanted a soulmate. In a thank-you letter to a friend written on Boxing Day in 1981, when Diana was first pregnant, he wrote, ‘We’ve had such a lovely Christmas – the two of us. It has been extraordinarily happy and cosy being able to share it together … Next year will, I feel sure, be even nicer with a small one to join in as well.’
It had either been a rare moment of calm or wishful thinking. Not long afterwards she was throwing herself down the stairs in a desperate cry for help. The whole situation was a vicious circle. Diana’s chronic need for love and reassurance meant she wanted Charles to be with her 100 per cent of the time – more than that; she wanted his full attention 100 per cent of the time. It was an impossible demand. If she didn’t get it, she raged, and the more she raged the further she pushed him away. Even the most slavishly devoted partner would have found her demands unreasonable; he found them impossible. He was Prince of Wales, he had letters to write, papers to read, speeches to deliver and a diary full of engagements and ceremonial duties stretching ahead for ever. He could have given up all his sporting activities if he had wanted to, but he would never have been able to abandon his work; he simply couldn’t be the husband Diana wanted.
The interesting question is whether he could have been a satisfactory husband for any woman. Charles wanted a wife, he wanted a companion to share his life with, and he needed a wife because