‘There’s no plan for an interview,’ replied Bolland, aware that Diana’s ability to manipulate the media was legendary.
Her suspicion about the Camilla campaign was shared in Buckingham Palace. For the first five months of Bolland’s job, Robert Fellowes and Charles Anson, the queen’s press secretary, regarded him as benign. While both distrusted the media, they assumed that, given his previous employment at the Press Complaints Commission, Bolland would continue to guard William and Harry’s privacy. Their own priority was to protect the monarchy, not least from Charles heaping greater disrepute upon his own family and endangering his succession. But once both realised that the new man did not share their view of Camilla, Fellowes spoke about destabilising Bolland’s campaign by hiring a private detective to find evidence that he was gay. The plan was ill-conceived. ‘You can just ask him,’ Fiona Shackleton told Fellowes, ‘and he’ll admit it.’
The report to Charles about that conversation inflamed his bitterness towards Buckingham Palace’s officials, particularly Fellowes. His ex-brother-in-law, he knew, wanted to end his relationship with Camilla. In retaliation, Charles ordered Bolland to tell Fellowes and Janvrin that the queen ‘needed to move with the times’. Unsurprisingly, he was ignored. Of the besieged lovers, Fellowes judged: ‘Those two are the most selfish people I have ever met.’
At the end of 1996, a BBC TV programme about the royals and their companions called The Nation Decides echoed this view. In a poll of three thousand people, Charles was voted the most hated royal, just above Camilla. The popular dislike was personal. A further telephone poll in January 1997 found that 66 per cent of Britons supported the monarchy, slightly less than in previous years.
Finding a permanent solution to the conundrum of Charles, Diana and Camilla was the elephant in the room at the 9 a.m. daily meetings in Buckingham Palace, where the private secretaries and other advisers to the royal family met over coffee to discuss events and problems. Once mundane matters had been agreed, the officials forlornly considered the War of the Waleses. Charles, Fellowes suspected, was unwilling to surrender or even compromise. His judgement was right: Charles fought to win, regardless of any collateral damage. Like Fellowes, the influence of the other officials at the meeting was limited. All deferred to the queen. She could have summoned Charles and Diana to order both to cease manipulating the media, or asked Robin Janvrin, trusted by Diana as an honest broker, to mediate a ceasefire. Or she could have issued an ultimatum to Charles to choose between the crown and Camilla. Instead, she ignored the problem.
The queen’s fence-sitting reflected her doubts about Charles’s judgement, and also the erosion of her own self-confidence. Five years earlier, her ‘annus horribilis’ speech, written by Robert Fellowes, had revealed how vulnerable she was. Suffering from the divorce of three of her four children and having witnessed Windsor Castle engulfed in flames, she told Britons, ‘No institution – city, monarchy whatever – should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty.’ Her honesty had won widespread affection. Nevertheless, as 1997 began, she still felt battered.
‘I cannot believe what’s happened to me,’ she confessed to an adviser after describing the state of her family and her continuing struggle with Charles.
‘It’s common today,’ was the consoling reply.
Philip, her most loyal friend, offered little comfort. He merely encouraged distrust of Charles without making any meaningful suggestions other than to reinforce the queen’s anger towards Camilla.
On Charles’s behalf, Stephen Lamport was in no position to offer a solution. A cautious man seconded from the Foreign Office, he was regarded as indecisive. Cast as middle-class, Lamport knew that his income, home and perks would be terminated at a moment’s notice if the prince were displeased. ‘Stephen,’ a courtier explained to a newly appointed official, ‘hasn’t got much money, so his job is important for him.’ Every obedient courtier, irretrievably bound by Charles’s temperament and outbursts, would search his employer’s face for signs of that hour’s attitude. Charles’s rages or frosty blanking could be calculated to assert his supremacy over every official, or just reflect that moment’s volatility. Lamport was employed to obey if his advice was rejected, not to take responsibility. Loyal to the monarchy, he agreed to be led by his new deputy; after all, Bolland was acting on Charles’s behalf with Camilla’s approval. Whenever Patrick Jephson complained that Bolland was ‘monstering the media’, Lamport would reply: ‘I can find no evidence.’ His sharpest reproach to Bolland was ‘We don’t do that sort of thing.’ Both men understood their terms of employment – with Charles, only unquestioning obedience was acceptable.
3
On 1 May 1997, ‘spin’ won New Labour’s landslide victory. Charles, like every powerbroker, was in awe of the conjurer of those arts, Tony Blair.
The two men had first met at a dinner in 1995 at St James’s Palace. Blair was hardly a passionate royalist. Only the previous year, he had advocated a smaller, Scandinavian-type monarchy, curbing the rights of the royal family to engage in public controversy. The queen, he suggested, needed to decide whether the monarchy should ‘retreat into isolation and the old hierarchical order, or seek to become more like a normal family’. His ideas, popular in the Labour Party, had been criticised by Charles for seeking to transform the family into something ‘more pompous and harder to approach’.
Despite their differences, Charles and Blair soon arranged further meetings. Familiarity had not lessened the prince’s cynicism about those in government. Concerned for his two passions, the environment and education, he believed politicians to be dishonest, especially about young people’s supposed inability to read and enjoy Shakespeare. ‘I don’t see why politicians and others should think they have the monopoly of wisdom,’ he said. Unintentionally, he aspired to emulate the status which Samuel Johnson had attributed in 1783 to his unconventional predecessor, the future George IV: ‘the situation of the Prince of Wales was the happiest of any person’s in the kingdom, even beyond that of the Sovereign … the enjoyment of hope – the high superiority of rank without the anxious cares of government, – and a great degree of power, both from natural influence wisely used, and from the sanguine expectations of those who look forward to the chance of future favour’.
Charles had travelled a long way since his first serious encounter with senior functionaries, in 1970. ‘I pointed out,’ he wrote after an extended meeting with President Nixon in Washington that year, ‘that one must not become controversial too often, otherwise people don’t take you seriously.’ But he added, ‘To be just a presence would be fatal.’ He refined that thought after flying with Ted Heath and three former prime ministers to the funeral of Charles de Gaulle later the same year. ‘Perhaps the most important lesson,’ Dimbleby concluded from his conversations with Charles, ‘was that his future would be frustratingly circumscribed unless he chose to make more of his role than precedent strictly required – or observers expected.’ Twenty-three years later, Charles told an aide, ‘I have always wanted to roll back some of the more ludicrous frontiers of the Sixties in terms of education, architecture, art, music and literature, not to mention agriculture.’ In middle age, he felt underused and under-appreciated by successive governments. Instead of ceremonial duties, he wanted to promote British culture and industry.
Tony Blair had no interest in Charles’s ambitions. Outside the prince’s hearing, he did not conceal his feelings about the royal family. At best, he gave the impression to his senior staff that he would ‘wing it’ with the royals, while officials at St James’s Palace concluded that Blair preferred to keep away from those he did not know or particularly like. Nevertheless, he played the part, and was not immune to being impressed. After his first royal audience, he recounted with awe how the queen was ‘clued up on current affairs’.
On his first visit to Balmoral, Blair wore a tweed suit and instructed Cherie, although anti-royalist, to be on her best behaviour. He judged the heir to the throne to be a