Junor’s book shocked Diana’s loyalists, who were outraged by the complicity of Charles’s staff. Throughout his life, Charles had never been able to give and take. Thinking only about himself, he resented suggestions of equality with his wife. Diana’s supporters recalled his jealousy of her popularity during their first visit to Australia in 1983. Junor, they noted, had omitted from her book the argument between Charles and Diana on their plane after it landed at Alice Springs about who should go down the steps first (Charles won). Later that day, the roaring welcome that the children in the crowds gave to Diana had infuriated the prince. ‘I should have had two wives and just walked in the middle,’ he said grumpily to an aide.
At first, Diana had not grasped her husband’s feelings of resentment, and when she did, she fuelled them. At a music college during their second visit to Australia in 1988, Charles scraped a bow over a cello, whereupon Diana glided across to a piano to play perfectly a favourite piece by Grieg. To the media’s bemusement, Charles looked crestfallen. She had stolen his show. While she glowed as the global icon, he was the middle-aged man typically photographed on a Scottish estate, dressed in tweeds, resting against a shepherd’s crook.
To combat that image, Junor described incidents that appeared to be fuelled by Charles’s desire for revenge. The book mentioned the speculation about Diana’s death threats to Camilla in telephone calls, and her attempted suicide while pregnant with William. However, she omitted any description of Diana’s misery during her honeymoon on Britannia after she heard Charles talking on the phone with Camilla, conversations also overheard by the ship’s crew. Nor was there any mention of Diana’s acts of vindictiveness: that Charles had entered their suite on the yacht to find her in tears cutting up a watercolour he had just completed (a version of that episode would be included in Junor’s admiring biography of Camilla in 2017). The book had only minimal sympathy for the neglected twenty-year-old bride. Undoubtedly, Diana had fabricated and exaggerated Charles’s drift towards adultery, but equally Junor did not reveal the complete truth about his relations with Camilla. In 1973, while waiting for Andrew Parker Bowles’s proposal, Camilla had many admirers but only two other serious boyfriends. Andrew, she knew, was not passionately in love with her, but he was charming, good-looking and well-connected. As a close friend would say, he was a thirty-three-year-old officer who needed to marry. Camilla was the best of the bunch as a potential wife, fun and good with people, yet he expected his bachelor life to go on as before.
One week before their wedding, Charles had telephoned Camilla from his Royal Navy ship. Sounding desperately lonely, he asked whether she was sure about marrying, but did not propose himself. After ending the call, Camilla immediately repeated the conversation to her fiancé. They both laughed, knowing that Charles felt isolated and depressed as a result of his sister Anne’s marriage to Mark Phillips.
In hindsight, even Andrew Parker Bowles would realise that he could never have been loyal to Camilla. Despite his Catholicism and his intention to be a good husband, he started his adulteries earlier than he had anticipated. Not long after their wedding, Camilla discovered her husband’s affairs. She was upset but resigned. Her feelings for Charles changed only after Andrew abandoned her during long foreign trips. Even then, she was not genuinely in love with Charles. Many friends were convinced that she continued to love Andrew, but was flattered by the prince’s attentions.
The much-trumpeted newspaper serialisation of Junor’s book was accompanied by a statement from Charles’s office that he had ‘not authorized, solicited or approved’ it. Junor would confidently contradict that assertion, and offered details of the help she had received, with Charles’s authority, from his staff.
For his part, Mark Bolland denied providing any material critical of Diana, but Robin Janvrin did not believe him. In his opinion, Bolland’s fingerprints were all over the book, which marked a sharp escalation of the campaign to make Charles’s relationship with Camilla acceptable to the British public. As another Buckingham Palace official sniped, Charles reigned over ‘an old-fashioned court filled with a sack-full of snakes’. In the midst of the Junor headlines, ITV reported that Charles would be ‘privately delighted’ if the queen abdicated. Shortly after, following an unrecorded hour-long conversation with the prince, Gavin Hewitt reported on the BBC that Charles was frustrated by Buckingham Palace’s withholding of power. Janvrin was incandescent. Not only were the tabloids using Junor’s book to reignite stories about Charles’s adultery, but simultaneously his birthday party at Highgrove for 350 people was spawning headlines about the queen’s ‘snub’ – her rejection of his invitation because of Camilla’s presence. Further to enhance his client’s reputation, Bolland circulated a comment from Mario Testino, Diana’s favourite photographer, who when asked whether Camilla should be queen, replied, ‘Definitely. Have you met her? She’s a great person. If you meet her, you want to hang out with her.’
In Janvrin’s opinion, Bolland’s operation was out of control. Charles contacted his mother from Bulgaria to protest his innocence about the abdication report. His denial was suspicious to those around the queen who knew of his impatience to be king, while Bolland’s declaration of innocence was discounted. The tabloid headline-writers were ecstatic.
Janvrin’s anger reflected the queen’s bewilderment. The monarchy, her advisers believed, did not need spin like Downing Street. During a visit to St James’s Palace, Janvrin told Stephen Lamport that there was no reason for Charles to campaign so energetically to promote Camilla. Bolland was acting as a free agent rather than as part of the team, and by standing between the tabloids and the royals he risked getting ‘run over’ for his misjudgement.
Lamport could have honestly pleaded ignorance. He was unable to manage Bolland, who with the two principal plotters excluded him from their discussions. To keep face, he volunteered that, whenever relevant, Janvrin would be kept informed about Charles’s plans, and that his opinion would be taken into account. He added that Bolland might not be a desirable presence, but he was effective, and said that Charles would like to introduce Janvrin to Camilla, who by chance was in the building. ‘Certainly not,’ replied Janvrin – any meeting would need the queen’s permission. With that, he walked out of the palace. Charles was furious.
In an effort to calm the storm, David Airlie took Bolland for lunch at White’s, his club in St James’s. The older man counselled that things were done in a certain way, and that Her Majesty would be grateful if he could stick to the rules. In his defence, Bolland contended that Stuart Higgins, acting as an adviser to ITV, had distorted a conversation between them. ‘Stuart screwed me up,’ he said, and refused to speak to the former journalist again. ‘But it was a tricky week,’ he admitted.
Reports of the lunch at White’s reached Camilla. She feared that her agent was ‘moving to the dark side’ and taking orders from Buckingham Palace. Bolland rushed to reassure her, and in turn Charles, who on reflection decided there was no alternative but to treat Janvrin as an ally. Bolland was dispatched to tell the courtier about a weekend party Charles was hosting at Sandringham. Among the guests would be Jacob Rothschild, Peter Mandelson and Susan Hussey, a trusted friend and lady-in-waiting to the queen. Under pressure from Camilla, Charles agreed that she should also be invited. The tabloids would undoubtedly highlight her presence in the queen’s home despite the monarch’s disapproval. To Bolland’s relief, instead of protesting, Janvrin consulted the queen, who agreed that as it was a private party, she did not need to be involved.
Janvrin also averted another argument, this time about Michael Fawcett. Charles had insisted that Fawcett supervise the preparations for his official birthday party at Buckingham Palace. The queen, who still disliked Fawcett, objected, but Janvrin persuaded her that he ‘must be kept onside’ because of his importance to Charles.
Shortly after this, the plotters delivered their coup: a major birthday