‘What more do I have to do?’ Charles tearfully asked Sandy Henney, a media adviser on his staff, and Aylard, her superior. ‘What’s the solution?’ He took the advice on offer, then made his decision: first, he ordered Aylard to announce that he had no intention of remarrying. Second, he followed Henney’s suggestion: ‘Push the PR to show “business as usual”. Project your work, sir.’
One of his first initiatives was to visit a market in Croydon, in south London. After walking through the stalls eating jellied eels, he met locals in a pub. As with his earlier trip to Caernarvon, the media ignored his visit. On the same day, spectators and journalists besieged Diana at a Paris fashion show, and for twenty-four hours she once again dominated the world’s headlines. There were times in her years in the limelight when she was the most photographed person in the world.
Charles realised that in media terms it was no contest, and ordered Aylard to send him only cuttings with good news. ‘Mama down the road,’ he told a visitor, ‘reads newspapers; I don’t. It would drive me mad.’ Instead he listened to Radio 4’s Today programme while on his exercise bike. Occasionally, enraged by an item, he threw an object at the radio. The set was always being repaired.
The modern world continued to infuriate him. At a conference to promote the Prince’s Trust, the umbrella for all his charities, he was introduced to young people using computers, which he disliked. ‘Show His Highness how Google works,’ one girl was asked. ‘Tap in “Prince of Wales”.’ The first item to appear was about a Prince of Wales bar in Seattle, on America’s west coast. Charles did not appreciate the general laughter.
Highgrove was his sanctuary, although even there he was not totally safe. One day Bruce Shand, Camilla’s father, paid a visit. The Mayfair wine merchant told the prince that Aylard’s announcement that Charles would not marry again had upset both Camilla and himself. ‘You can’t treat my daughter like this,’ he said. ‘She’s neither fish nor fowl.’
The entire House of Windsor also seemed ranged against him. At Christmas 1996, Charles brooded over his suspicion that his brothers, Edward and Andrew, were plotting his downfall. Andrew, he believed, had been spreading poison about Camilla to the queen and Prince Philip; now, mindful of Diana’s prediction on Panorama that he would not be king, Charles convinced himself that Diana and Sarah, Andrew’s estranged wife, were hatching plans to replace him as heir by announcing that on the queen’s death or abdication Andrew would be Regent until William was eighteen, when he would take over. ‘Andrew wanted to be me,’ Charles later told Bolland. ‘I should have let him work with me. Now he’s unhelpful.’ As for Anne, his sister had aggravated the situation; instead of mediating between her siblings, she had criticised Charles for his adultery. ‘She’s one to talk,’ he said, irritated by her Goody Two-Shoes image. ‘Look at her past.’ Anne, he declared, had enjoyed an intimate friendship with Andrew Parker Bowles at the same time that Charles was with Camilla.
By the end of the Christmas holiday, Charles had decided to ignore his parents and continue his relationship with Camilla. Once his divorce was finalised, he would no longer suffer the indignity of meeting her only in secret. Succumbing to the public’s displeasure was beyond the price of duty. Convinced that the nation’s hostility would diminish if her virtues were explained, he telephoned Alan Kilkenny, the public relations consultant who in late 1994 had helped guide Camilla through her divorce, to ask for assistance.
Kilkenny had already been advising Charles to shed his ‘uncool’, fogeyish image. As usual with such requests, Charles expected Kilkenny to work without payment. The publicist might expect a Cartier clock embossed with Charles’s crest, but nothing more. The prince’s plan for Camilla’s divorce had been discussed at a meeting between himself, Dimbleby (present as a close friend), Camilla and her sister Annabel Elliot, Annabel’s husband Simon, Aylard and Kilkenny at the home of Patty and Charlie Palmer-Tomkinson. The Palmer-Tomkinsons lived seventy miles from Highgrove and were close friends, particularly after an incident in Switzerland in 1988, when an avalanche had swept Charles and his skiing party towards a cliff edge. Andrew Parker Bowles was not told about the summit.
The plan backfired when news of the Parker Bowleses’ divorce was leaked and private photographs of the family, stolen from their home, were published. Over the following months Kilkenny did his best, but by the middle of 1996 Charles feared that Camilla’s cause was being pushed ‘the wrong way and too hard’.
Undecided what to do next, he had lost confidence in Aylard and forged an even closer relationship with Fiona Shackleton. Educated at Benenden, the tall, blonde, loquacious lawyer had earned a reputation as one of Britain’s best and most expensive divorce specialists. Now she, Hilary and Nico Browne-Wilkinson agreed: the solution was to oust Aylard and to appoint a really first-class public relations consultant.
At the ensuing dinner in St James’s Palace, the three lawyers did not limit themselves to discussing Charles’s reputation. Hilary Browne-Wilkinson also spoke sympathetically about Camilla’s frustration that, while Diana basked in popular esteem, she was cast as the self-seeking adulteress. ‘I’m not this awful person,’ Camilla complained. ‘I just wish someone would do something about it.’
Over the previous fifteen years, she had been forced to reassess her opinion of her rival. At the beginning of Charles’s marriage, in 1981, she had called Diana a ‘mouse’. But that evening with the Browne-Wilkinsons she spoke about a ‘wretched woman’ who was creating havoc by refusing to conform to her society’s expectations in dignified silence.
Charles felt the same anger. While he spoke to the public about medicine, architecture, education and the environment and was generally ignored, Diana won global adulation by hugging children suffering from Aids, visiting hospices and sponsoring an anti-drugs campaign. ‘Clip her wings,’ Aylard had told the Foreign Office.
‘Good God, the games they play,’ was Diana’s reaction after an invitation from the British ambassador to Japan for her to visit the country had been cancelled. ‘We want to put her in her box,’ Aylard openly told Patrick Jephson, Diana’s private secretary.
Yet despite all attempts to reduce Diana’s glow, her star remained undimmed. And on her own Diana had been remarkably successful in frustrating Charles’s efforts to make Camilla acceptable. Repeatedly, she had called amenable journalists to pour scorn on her former husband and his mistress.
Agitated by her slurs, Charles and Camilla finally agreed that Mark Bolland should be appointed as soon as Charles’s divorce was finalised. Hilary Browne-Wilkinson intimated that she had secured the support of David English, the legendary editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail group. Bolland’s appointment was supported by Shackleton, who spoke out after having secured the approval of Robert Fellowes, not only the queen’s private secretary but Charles’s former brother-in-law. Prodded by Camilla, Charles agreed; Bolland would serve as his assistant private secretary under Aylard, and would also be Camilla’s adviser, friend and provider of the prize gossip she adored.
Entrusting his fate to someone like Bolland was the last throw of the dice for the supreme aristocrat. Charles’s big hope was that Bolland possessed the allure and the media contacts – both of which Kilkenny and Aylard had lacked – to mastermind the revolution he needed. Inevitably, his close friend Patty Palmer-Tomkinson wanted to vet the proposed appointment. Invited to the Browne-Wilkinsons’ for lunch in the extended kitchen of their terraced house in Islington, north London, Palmer-Tomkinson exposed the social gulf between the prince and his proposed saviour: ‘So where do you normally eat dinner?’ she asked with genuine bewilderment. Shortly after, Bolland’s appointment was formally approved. ‘Charles