Finally, researching this book has been an unexpected pleasure, not only because I have come to understand so many previously unknown conflicts and hitherto imperfectly reported events, but also because Charles emerges as an exceptional character. Easy to like and easy to dislike, he is the unique product of Britain’s genius – a rebel prince, eventually to become a rebel king.
1
Her anger was uncontrolled.
‘I won’t stop it. It’s my life and it’s the right thing to do.’
From a suite in New York’s Carlyle Hotel, Camilla Parker Bowles was laying down the law. Her outburst was directed not only at the Prince of Wales but also at his friend Nicholas Soames, the Conservative MP and grandson of Winston Churchill. At the other end of the line, Charles was three thousand miles away, fretting in his study at Highgrove, his Gloucestershire home. He had just passed on the news that Soames had been protesting about her high-profile visit to America.
‘There’s too much publicity,’ Soames had told Charles. ‘It’s that bloody man Bolland.’
‘Well,’ the heir to the throne had replied, ‘let’s all have a meeting with Mark when he returns and he’ll explain everything.’
Thirty-three-year-old Mark Bolland was in theory the prince’s assistant private secretary, his job since 1996, but in reality he was far more than that – the orchestrator of how Charles and Camilla appeared to the world. He stood now in the Carlyle suite witnessing their argument. Also present was Michael Fawcett, Charles’s trusted servant of over twenty years, again far more than a valet. Both men admired Camilla’s scathing dismissal of Charles’s pleas. In Bolland’s opinion, the London media reports about Camilla’s hectic itinerary in Manhattan justified his gamble to defy Buckingham Palace’s demand that she remain unseen and instead propel her into the spotlight.
‘We have to break eggs to push it,’ he had warned Charles before finalising plans for the four-day trip. ‘Things don’t happen by themselves.’ Charles’s doubts had been dismissed by Camilla, who was determined to emerge from the shadow of her predecessor’s glorious conquering of America in 1985. The fifty-two-year-old Camilla was not pulling back. She handed the phone to her media adviser.
Ever since he was hired, a year before Diana died, Bolland had enjoyed a good relationship with Charles. His sole purpose, his employer had stipulated, was to reverse Camilla’s image as his privileged, fox-hunting mistress, make her acceptable to the public and overcome the queen’s hostility to their being together. At the outset, in 1996, there were constant arguments about how Charles’s relationship with Camilla would end. Three years on, she smelt success. ‘Why can’t I meet your mother?’ she had asked. More frequently she would snap, ‘You’re off to the theatre with friends, so why can’t I come?’ Or, ‘You’re off on Saturday to stay with people who are my friends too, so I should be with you.’ To satisfy her, Bolland’s tactics had hit a new level. ‘We were turning up the gas,’ he would say, ‘because the queen was unmovable.’
‘The strategy,’ he explained to Charles, ‘is to scare the horses a bit. To move the dial.’
‘Go ahead,’ Charles agreed.
Back in London, the Sun had responded to Bolland’s overtures with the headline ‘Camilla Will Take New York by Storm Today’, and had listed the celebrities ‘clamouring for invitations to lunch and dinner’. Further to promote her, Bolland had revealed to the paper that the revered TV personality Barbara Walters was invited to one dinner, while Edmond Safra, a billionaire banker, would give a drinks party and the formidable New York socialite Brooke Astor would host a lunch – at which film star Michael Douglas would describe to Camilla the curing of his sex addiction at an Arizona clinic. In Bolland’s currency, Camilla’s appearance on the newspaper’s front page was a triumph.
Soames had protested about such orchestration. ‘Charles,’ he complained, ‘is not a political campaign. He is not a political party.’ Bolland’s tactics also shocked Robin Janvrin, the queen’s private secretary. The Sun’s threat to campaign against the queen, he protested, was typical of the divisiveness masterminded by Bolland.
Over lunch with the publicist, David Airlie, one of the queen’s most respected advisers, had voiced similar unease. Bolland had retorted, ‘Well, give me the alternative of how we will achieve what we want.’
‘Don’t make it too obvious,’ was Airlie’s advice.
‘What’s the alternative?’ Bolland repeated.
Airlie grimaced but made no suggestions. Employment by the palaces, Bolland understood, brought out the worst in even the best of people.
Accompanied by her loyal assistant Amanda McManus, Camilla had flown to New York on Concorde. Their tickets had been bought by Geoffrey Kent, the financier of Charles’s polo team and the founder and owner of Abercrombie & Kent, the millionaires’ travel agent. Bolland was waiting at Kennedy airport, having flown ahead to supervise the final preparations. Among those helping him were Peter Brown, a well-connected British PR consultant, and Scott Bessent, a rich financier who worked with George Soros.
As soon as Camilla touched down, Bessent flew her to his home in East Hampton to give her two days to recover from jet lag (even the three hours it took Concorde to cross the Atlantic could upset her). He would provide a helicopter to fly her from there to Manhattan. Robert Higdon, the chief executive of Charles’s charity foundation in America, was then meant to introduce the team to Camilla’s hosts, but in the aftermath of a tussle among the courtiers he had been abruptly excluded. Languishing in the hotel lobby while Camilla raged at Charles, Higdon nevertheless negotiated for her visit to be hyped in New York’s society columns. ‘Camilla and Charles knew that I was being beat up by the others,’ said Higdon, ‘but the Boss and the Blonde kept me because they knew the money I was bringing in.’ Charles might not have warmed to him, but he could not do without his money-raising talents.
Over the previous four years Higdon had developed huge affection for Camilla, who, he told a journalist, ‘has more self-confidence than anyone I know. Unlike Charles, who is doubtful and whiney, she’s so tough. She never questions anything.’ That judgement was about to change.
The tension led to disagreement between Charles and his four horsemen Bolland, Kent, Brown and Bessent. Their confidence in the value of publicity had been eroded.
‘It wasn’t the right time,’ concluded Higdon. ‘It didn’t feel right for Camilla. It was too soon.’ She was ‘not great’ with Americans. Even worse, she was lazy. ‘For her to get up in the morning and survive until nightfall is a major effort. It was even hard for her to get out of bed. She tries her best to do nothing during the day.’ On the American trip, ‘the biggest problem was persuading her to dress up for a big occasion. The effort was overwhelming. Camilla was pissed off by the whole thing. It was horrible, a disaster.’
While Camilla argued on the phone, Peter Brown was fretting in Brooke Astor’s luxurious Park Avenue apartment. The guest of honour was already thirty minutes late. ‘She’s gossiping with you-know-who,’ Brown confided to one of the guests, unaware of the true circumstances. But when Camilla did finally arrive, no sign of any argument was visible. That skill offset her limitations, and was adored by Charles.
On public occasions she did her best to shine. Three days before flying to New York she had appeared to enjoy a dinner for fifty guests in the Chelsea home of the Greek shipping and steel magnate Theodore Angelopoulos and his wife Gianna, and a few days earlier she had been jolly at Geoffrey Kent’s fifty-sixth birthday party, despite her intense dislike of two of her fellow guests, Hugh