A new plot, allegedly inspired by Galen Weston, a Canadian billionaire, had sought to oust Geoffrey Kent from Charles’s inner circle. Weston was irritated that Charles played for Kent’s polo team, and that Kent, rather than Weston, was the team captain. Their rivalry had spilled out into a dispute about a joint property development near Palm Beach. Now Weston was seeking to persuade Charles to dump an ally. Venomous spats among courtiers were not unusual for Charles. Despite the generosity shown to him by Kent, a global networker, Charles rarely reciprocated loyalty. ‘We don’t have close friends,’ he had told a member of the polo team. ‘The royal family does not allow anyone to become too familiar and be privy to our secrets.’
During a helicopter trip – a moment chosen so the police escort could not overhear – Bolland had spoken to the prince about his benefactor’s fate. ‘He’s been a good and generous friend,’ agreed Charles. ‘Tell Stephen not to do anything. I’ve changed my mind.’ Stephen Lamport, Charles’s senior private secretary and Bolland’s superior, was accustomed to cutting off those who had displeased his master, and readmitting those who were pardoned.
Charles’s decisions were often influenced by money, and in recent years Camilla had adopted the same criterion. The previous month, she and Charles, her two children and over twenty friends had sailed around the Aegean on the Alexander, the world’s third largest private yacht. They were the guests of Yiannis Latsis, a foul-mouthed Greek shipping billionaire whose fortune, some gossiped, was based on black marketeering, collaboration with the Nazis, and bribing Arabs for a stake in the oil trade. Six weeks later, after her introduction to Edmond and Lily Safra in New York, Camilla discovered that the billionaire banker also owned a luxury yacht, as well as an eighteen-acre estate in the south of France, La Leopolda, valued at over $750 million.
‘Is there any chance,’ Camilla had asked Higdon, who had made the introduction, ‘that I could stay at Lily Safra’s?’ An invitation to visit St James’s Palace was duly issued to Safra, and soon afterwards Michael Fawcett was arranging Camilla’s holiday on the estate.
Her current trip to New York was part of Charles’s campaign to win over the British people; but in 1999 that struggle was far from won.
2
Charles’s campaign to make Camilla accepted had started in 1996, one year before Diana’s death, a period that marked a new peak in the public’s disgust with the lives in the royal palaces. A succession of scandalous books, tapes and television interviews had reduced the prince’s approval rating to less than 10 per cent. Fearful that he would not inherit the crown, and even worse, that he might buckle under the pressure, Camilla had discussed his plight with Hilary Browne-Wilkinson, the solicitor who had managed her divorce from Andrew Parker Bowles. Soon after, Charles and Camilla invited Hilary and her husband, Nicolas ‘Nico’ Browne-Wilkinson, a senior judge, for dinner at St James’s Palace. The third guest was Fiona Shackleton, Charles’s divorce lawyer, at that time a decisive influence in his life.
‘You must deal with your media image,’ Nico Browne-Wilkinson told Charles.
Nico’s wife offered a solution. While working at the Press Complaints Commission she had met Mark Bolland, the Commission’s twenty-nine-year-old director and in his private life the partner of Guy Black, a Cambridge graduate and political adviser. Bolland, Hilary Browne-Wilkinson said, was charming and well-connected, and had good relations with London’s senior media executives. He was also an outsider. Unlike other palace officials, he had been educated at a grammar school in Middlesbrough and had gone neither to Oxbridge nor the army, but had read Chemistry at York University. His understanding of the real world made him an ideal choice to promote Camilla and secure the public’s acceptance of her relationship with Charles. Hilary was supported by Fiona Shackleton, who said Bolland should be appointed as soon as Charles’s divorce was finalised.
By the end of the evening, Charles and Camilla were half-persuaded. Both Shackleton and Hilary Browne-Wilkinson appeared relieved. Dabbling in that world, with access to the heir to the throne, was a fizzy experience for both lawyers. Charles’s reliance on such people signalled his anguish. In 1996 he was searching for scapegoats to blame for a decade of horror. Prone to grasp at any excuse, he agreed with the latest judgement of his inner circle of friends that Richard Aylard, his private secretary, was mainly responsible for his plight.
In their opinion, Aylard’s cardinal error had been to encourage Charles two years earlier to open his heart to the journalist Jonathan Dimbleby for a biography and a two-hour television documentary.
Over the previous months Aylard had spent nearly every day and many nights responding to his employer’s cries for protection from criticism, sacrificing his own private life and his marriage. To overcome Charles’s bouts of depression, he had encouraged him to cooperate with Dimbleby. When the resulting book and film proved a personal disaster, Charles refused to accept any blame for pressing Aylard to arrange the extraordinary access to his secrets.
The Dimbleby project had been born from Charles’s anger that he was being treated as a mere ribbon-cutter rather than as the heir to the throne. His status had been devalued among courtiers in Buckingham Palace and some cabinet ministers by his refusal to end his relationship with Camilla. At that time, the very notion that the couple might marry was ridiculed by a country that had lost respect for the man who had betrayed his wife Diana. Unless Camilla was ousted, the critics agreed, Charles could not remain the queen’s automatic successor. Inaction might even jeopardise the monarchy itself. The huge majority of the public reflected the homily of Walter Bagehot, Britain’s nineteenth-century constitutional expert: ‘We have come to regard the monarchy as the head of our morality.’ Charles failed that test.
His fate had been dictated by a series of humiliations, not least by Diana’s disclosures in Andrew Morton’s 1992 book Diana: Her True Story. Morton’s revelations had broken through the carapace of lies about the royal marriage. Diana had portrayed her estranged husband as an unloving and unfaithful father without a care for anyone except himself. ‘It is so very awful,’ Charles wrote to Nancy Reagan, the former president’s wife; ‘very few people would believe it.’ Through Dimbleby, Charles wanted to right the balance but also to retaliate, to have his revenge against a wrecker.
First he agreed to the queen’s insistence that he and Diana formally separate. The announcement was to be made by John Major, recently re-elected as prime minister.
A strong prime minister would not have tolerated the warfare between Charles and Diana, and would have halted the books and briefings. Instead, Major believed that his duty was to reconcile the two and restore the public’s trust. Sympathetic to Diana’s side of the case, he did not underestimate his task, particularly after a private flight when Diana had emerged from the plane’s lavatory covered in blood. There was no explanation other than that she was psychologically unwell.
Major’s intentions were obstructed by Buckingham Palace. Robert Fellowes, the queen’s private secretary, gave no clear guidance about the royal family’s attitude. Until the circumstances were compelling, Fellowes judged, the queen would remain reluctant to interfere. Her inactivity magnified the ineptitude of her advisers. ‘The trouble is that Charles is a Hanoverian,’ a senior civil servant observed, ‘and now that he’s delivered “an heir and a spare” and has done his duty to the nation, he thinks he’s entitled to live the way he wants.’ In the coded language of the official classes, he added, while Diana Spencer could trace her family’s British ancestors back to 1478, the Windsors had been invented only in 1917. Their history became irrelevant when the queen’s hand was finally forced by Diana’s secret cooperation with Morton and her untruthful denials of that pact to Fellowes.
At Charles’s request, Aylard had insisted to Major that