The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

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We went stalking together, we got hot, we got tired, she fell into a bog, she got covered in mud, laughed her head off, got puce in the face, hair glued to her forehead because it was pouring with rain … she was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything, naturally young but sweet and clearly determined and enthusiastic about him, very much wanted him.

Imagine his surprise, therefore, when after their engagement she seemed suddenly to hate everything he had thought she loved. He was quite at a loss to understand the change in Diana and thought it must be his fault in some way; that the prospect of marrying him was all too ghastly. And yet he spoke to no one about his anxieties; and when concerned friends tried to talk to him, he refused to listen. Pulling out would have been unimaginable: the humiliation, the hurt, the headlines, the castigation; but in retrospect, it would have been infinitely less painful and less damaging to everyone involved, including the monarchy, than going through with a wedding that he knew was a mistake. At the very least he should have discussed it. As one relation says, ‘In his position he bloody well should have spoken to people because he had to think of the constitutional side as well as the private side. He had chosen Diana with both sides in mind, but equally he needed to think of the consequences for both if it was going to go wrong.’

The trouble is that the Prince of Wales is fundamentally a weak man, and that is what has so incensed the Duke of Edinburgh over the years. He wanted a son in his own image – a tough, abrasive, plain-talking, unemotional man’s man – but those qualities bypassed his first son and settled instead on his daughter. Charles has a generous heart, he cares hugely about the underdog, because, for all his palatial living, he is one, he identifies. He wants passionately to make the world a better place, to stop people feeling hopeless and helpless, to stop modernizers from destroying our heritage, chemicals from destroying our environment, ignorance and greed from destroying our planet, red tape from destroying our lives. He is admirable in so many ways, but he has never been a strong character and has never been able to cope with confrontation. Blisteringly angry at times, certainly, demanding, yes, and on the sporting field no one could question his courage, but he has never been brave when it comes to taking tough decisions. He gets others to do it for him. Perhaps it is because he has always been surrounded by strong women: his grandmother, his mother, his sister – even his nanny. Helen Lightbody was such a terrifying woman that the Queen kept out of the nursery while she was in charge. By the time the Queen had the two younger children Helen Lightbody had gone and Mabel Anderson, her deputy and a much easier character, was in charge, and she and the Queen were good friends and brought the children up together. As a result the Queen had much more contact with Andrew and Edward than she ever had with Charles and Anne, and is still infinitely closer to them today.

In marrying Diana, for all her emotional turmoil and frailty Charles had found himself with another strong, determined woman. He didn’t understand her rages – one day during their honeymoon, when they were staying at Craigowan Lodge, a small house on the Balmoral estate, she lost her temper and went for him with a knife which she then used to cut herself, leaving blood everywhere. That night as he knelt down to say his prayers – as he regularly does – Diana hit him over the head with the family bible. He has never been to the house since. He just couldn’t fathom the emotional rollercoaster, the demands, the insecurities; he couldn’t cope, needed others to help, which of course infuriated her more. Michael Colborne was the first of a long string of members of the Prince’s staff who had to mediate with Diana while Charles backed away. Even during the honeymoon he was summoned to Balmoral to talk to Diana because she was so bitterly unhappy. She was already caught in the grips of an eating disorder, bored by the countryside, made miserable by the rain and baffled by the Prince’s desire to spend his days shooting and fishing. And what was he doing while Colborne spent more than seven hours with Diana while she raged, cried, brooded in silence, ranted and kicked the furniture by turns? He was out stalking with his friends.

That night both men were taking the train back to London; the Prince had an engagement in the south, Diana was staying at Balmoral. As Colborne waited in the dark by the car, a brand-new Range Rover, he could hear a fearsome row going on inside. Suddenly the door flew open and Charles shouted ‘Michael’ and hurled something at him, which by the grace of God he caught before it was lost in the gravel. It was Diana’s wedding ring; she had lost so much weight it needed to be made smaller. The Prince was in a black rage all the way to the train; the new car wasn’t quite as he had specified and so he took it out on Colborne, calling him every name under the sun. Exhausted and defeated by his day with Diana, Colborne simply stared out of the window and let the abuse wash over him. Once on the train, the Prince summoned him. Colborne had just ordered himself a triple gin and was in no hurry to respond. The Prince offered him another. ‘Tonight, Michael,’ he said, ‘you displayed the best traditions of the silent service. You didn’t say a word.’

And for the next five hours or more they sat together and talked about the Prince’s marriage; not yet two months old it was already a disaster. He was mystified by Diana’s behaviour, simply couldn’t fathom what was going on or what he could do to make her well and happy.

NINE (#ulink_106771d7-2880-552b-aead-c8389f613ed3)

Not Waving: Drowning (#ulink_106771d7-2880-552b-aead-c8389f613ed3)

It was never the case that Charles didn’t care. Couldn’t cope, yes; and as the months and then the years went by with no let-up from the unpredictability of Diana’s behaviour, he became hardened and at times downright callous in his attitude towards her. He had found her a top psychiatrist; he had done what he could to appease her. He had cut out of his life the friends she disliked or of whom she was suspicious; good, loyal friends, some of them friends since childhood – and, in typical style, he took the easy way out and did it without telling them. They were left to wonder what had happened when phone calls, letters and invitations to Highgrove and Balmoral simply stopped. He even gave away his faithful old Labrador Harvey because Diana thought he was smelly. None of this seemed to make any difference; and when she burst into tears or launched into a tantrum, nothing he could say seemed to calm her. So he gave up. When she made dramatic gestures he walked away, when she self-harmed he walked away. Not because he didn’t care but because he couldn’t help; he felt desperate, hopeless and guilty and to this day he feels a terrible sense of failure for not having been able to make his marriage work.

That is not to say that there was no happiness. There were moments of intense pleasure, the children brought huge joy and there was laughter and jokes and fun, but not enough to counter the difficulties, and as time went by the gulf between them became no longer bridgeable.

Diana had needs that Charles couldn’t begin to address. Anyone who has lived with someone suffering from an eating disorder (which was very probably in Diana’s case a symptom of a personality disorder and therefore even more complex) knows all too well what an impossible situation he was in. Anorexia and bulimia test and sometimes destroy even the most stable relationships and balanced homes. And all that we know of her behaviour – from her staff, her friends and even her family – fits every description that has ever been written about the disorders. The Prince didn’t stand a chance. And yet to outsiders Diana looked like the happiest, most equable girl you could hope to find. She seduced everyone with her charm and coquettishness, men fell like ninepins, she was playful and funny and oh so beautiful, so young, so glamorous. Just what the Royal Family needed to invigorate it and make it seem relevant to swathes of young people who didn’t see the point of it. She captured the hearts and minds of the nation. No wonder no one wanted to believe that behind closed doors Diana was deceitful, demanding and manipulative, and that the laughter was replaced by tears and tantrums. Much easier to believe that it was all a story put about by the Prince’s friends to discredit Diana. And when Diana accused him of doing as much herself, because the woman he really loved was Camilla Parker Bowles, there was nothing more to be said. Nothing would convince the majority of the British people that Charles was anything other than a villain who used Diana as a brood mare to produce the heir and spare he needed; that their marriage was a sham from the start and the woman he really loved, and continued to bed throughout, was Camilla.

Camilla Parker Bowles has seen a turnaround in her fortunes since Diana died. Having been arch-villain and probably the most hated woman in Britain for a good chunk of the 1990s, people now rather admire her. They have bought into a touching love story. Charles was a bastard for what he did to Diana, so the script goes, but this is a woman he has loved since he was twenty-three. They missed their opportunity to marry then, but the flame still burned bright and now, in middle age, they have finally found happiness together. It doesn’t alter their view of what Charles did to Diana, but Diana has now been dead for nearly eight years, Camilla has behaved with dignity and discretion throughout, he has been true to her (if not to Diana), he’s a pretty decent chap in every other respect: they deserve some happiness.

It’s neat but it’s not the truth, and it is important to state this if only for the sake of William and Harry, who must infer from this version of events that the father they love used, abused and destroyed the mother they also loved. He did not and the impression of their marriage that Diana left on the world, via Andrew Morton and Panorama, and repeatedly rehearsed in documentaries, is grievously unfair.

The Prince of Wales has plenty of shortcomings but he is not a liar; his great misfortune is that he has never been able to be even faintly economical with the truth. There are so many occasions when the smallest, whitest lie would have saved him a great deal of trouble – starting with that fateful answer on the day of his engagement to Diana about whether he was in love. It has come back to haunt him regularly, as for many years did his admission that he talked to plants. And when I interviewed him in 1986 and asked him whether having a wife to talk to who had done ordinary, everyday things before her marriage was an advantage in helping him know how the other half lives, he said he didn’t really talk to Diana about that sort of thing, but conversations with Laurens van der Post were very stimulating from that point of view. His Private Secretary, Sir John Riddell, almost visibly clutched his head in his hands. But the most disastrous example was during his television interview with Jonathan Dimbleby when he was asked about his infidelity. The question didn’t come out of the blue, and his reply was very well thought out.

‘Were you,’ asked Dimbleby, ‘… did you try to be faithful and honourable to your wife when you took the vow of marriage?’

‘Yes,’ said the Prince, and after a brief and rather anguished pause said, ‘until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.’

On that occasion his Private Secretary, Richard Aylard, had reinforced the Prince’s determination to tell the truth, and it was the rest of the world that held their heads in their hands and gasped with incredulity. The Duke of Edinburgh was incensed, the rest of the family flabbergasted, the Queen’s advisers and courtiers stunned, the Prince’s friends appalled, and the blame fell squarely on Richard Aylard for having allowed Charles to make what many regarded as the worst mistake of his life. At the time many people thought it might cost him the throne.

‘It wasn’t being honest to Jonathan that was the problem,’ protested Aylard in his defence. ‘If you want to start placing blame, the fault was getting into the relationship in the first place.’

There is no doubt that Camilla has been an important figure in the Prince’s life since he first fell in love with her at the age of twenty-three. They are the greatest of friends, they have all sorts of interests and enthusiasms in common and they love one another very dearly; it is clearly a warm, comfortable relationship and hugely beneficial to them both, but it hasn’t been an exclusive, obsessive relationship since Charles was twenty-three. He has fallen in and out of love many times since then – probably never more deeply than with Camilla – but he has fallen in love none the less. She was certainly one of the women he was seeing when he started going out with Diana but it was never going anywhere. Camilla was married; even if she had been divorced he could never have married her, not in 1981; a divorcee with two children becoming Princess of Wales? It was unthinkable. Besides, what woman in her right mind would want to?

When Charles first started looking upon Diana as a possible candidate for marriage he talked to Camilla about her; he asked all his close friends what they thought of Diana, and Camilla was one of those who tried to befriend her and welcome her to the group. She invited Charles and Diana to spend weekends at her house. There was nothing sinister in any of this. The fact that Camilla knew Charles was going to propose and hence wrote a friendly note to Diana to await her arrival at Clarence House on the day it was announced wasn’t sinister either. Look at almost any episode of the American TV sitcom Friends: soliciting friends’ approval of the latest girl/boyfriend is par for the course. But the Princess took it as proof that something was still going on between them, and read into Camilla’s friendly invitation to lunch the latter’s desire to find out whether she was going to hunt when she moved to Highgrove, and therefore whether she would be in the way of their plans to meet.

There were no meetings, and virtually no contact until several years into the marriage, and certainly no sex, as the Prince so painfully and honestly explained, until the marriage had irretrievably broken down. And by that time he was close to irretrievably breaking down, too. Towards the end of 1986 he started making contact with friends once again, those he had shut out of his life at Diana’s request some years before. As he wrote to one of them:

Frequently I feel nowadays that I’m in a kind of cage, pacing up and down in it and longing to be free. How awful incompatibility is, and how dreadfully destructive it can be for the players in this extraordinary drama. It has all the ingredients of a Greek tragedy … I fear I’m going to need a bit of help every now and then for which I feel rather ashamed.

He was in such a chronic state of depression by then that they feared for his sanity, and it was Patty Palmer-Tomkinson who engineered a reunion with Camilla, knowing how much she had meant to him in the past. Camilla herself was not particularly happy; she and Andrew Parker Bowles were the best of friends but their marriage was an empty shell with Andrew in London escorting pretty girls all week and Camilla minding the home, dogs, horses and children in the country. At first she and Charles started to talk on the telephone, he pouring out his heart to her, she listening sympathetically, warm, understanding and supportive; then they met at Patty’s house in Hampshire and started seeing each other again, and gradually the relationship developed and they took up where they had left off more than six years before. Camilla was a lifeline for Charles; she brought light and laughter into his life which for a long time had been so very dark.

This was not the outcome Charles had either wanted or anticipated. For years he had longed to be married, to have for himself the family atmosphere that he experienced in his friends’ houses, to have children running around and a companion with whom to share his life. He was lonely; he was surrounded by valets, footmen, butlers, private secretaries and police protection officers. He was never on his own, but ‘he was one of the loneliest men you’ll ever meet. They all are,’ says Michael Colborne. ‘They go out to banquets and dinners and great dos, but when they get home at night they go up to their rooms and they are on their own. There’s no one to have a drink with. They are very independent people; even their friends are mostly acquaintances.’ Charles wanted a soulmate. In a thank-you letter to a friend written on Boxing Day in 1981, when Diana was first pregnant, he wrote, ‘We’ve had such a lovely Christmas – the two of us. It has been extraordinarily happy and cosy being able to share it together … Next year will, I feel sure, be even nicer with a small one to join in as well.’

It had either been a rare moment of calm or wishful thinking. Not long afterwards she was throwing herself down the stairs in a desperate cry for help. The whole situation was a vicious circle. Diana’s chronic need for love and reassurance meant she wanted Charles to be with her 100 per cent of the time – more than that; she wanted his full attention 100 per cent of the time. It was an impossible demand. If she didn’t get it, she raged, and the more she raged the further she pushed him away. Even the most slavishly devoted partner would have found her demands unreasonable; he found them impossible. He was Prince of Wales, he had letters to write, papers to read, speeches to deliver and a diary full of engagements and ceremonial duties stretching ahead for ever. He could have given up all his sporting activities if he had wanted to, but he would never have been able to abandon his work; he simply couldn’t be the husband Diana wanted.

The interesting question is whether he could have been a satisfactory husband for any woman. Charles wanted a wife, he wanted a companion to share his life with, and he needed a wife because he was heir to the throne and had a duty to procreate; but he had no need of a wife in the sense that most other men need wives. Everything was already done for him: his meals were cooked; his clothes bought, laundered and laid out for him; his bath run, his toothbrush pasted; his shopping done; his house furnished, cleaned and polished; and if he wanted four boiled eggs for breakfast and his car brought round to the front door a minute ago, it happened.

Michael Colborne had warned Diana that in four or five years with this sort of lifestyle she would change; she would become an absolute bitch. The Prince of Wales had known no other lifestyle and was perforce supremely selfish. It may be that he would have taken out of a marriage rather more than he put into it. Very few people have ever disagreed with him, still less said ‘No’ to him, or told him anything he didn’t want to hear. He has never had to consider anyone else’s plans or preferences – and still doesn’t. His staff work all hours and are expected to jump when they are called whatever the time of day with little apparent thought for their families.

Materially he was spoilt but emotionally he was needy. And though he longed for a home, a family and security, as she did, like Diana he had never known a normal one and therefore had no model to work from. His parents loved him – there is no doubt about that – and friends remember the Queen sitting him on her knee at teatime when Charles was a small boy and playing games with him but she didn’t spend the hours in the nursery that she did with the two younger boys because she was intimidated by Helen Lightbody, and any sort of overt affection stopped as he grew older. The Duke was and is a bully, and was equally sparing in his affection. He was rough with Charles, and, according to witnesses, frequently reduced the boy to tears. As a result Charles was frightened of his father and always desperate to please him, without ever apparently succeeding. Even now in his fifties, Charles is still eager to please his parents and earn their approval, and much of the time still feels he’s failing. Hard to feel anything else when your father repeatedly makes sarcastic and cutting comments either to you or about you.

The Queen and the Duke were appalled by The Prince of Wales, the book Jonathan Dimbleby wrote about the Prince in 1995 following the disastrous film, and hurt by the picture he drew of his childhood. The Prince had given Dimbleby unprecedented access – which turned out to be decidedly foolish – allowed him free rein with private letters, diaries and even official papers and had given him many hours of his time. One former courtier was utterly bemused that his advisers had ever let it happen:

They released Jonathan Dimbleby and the Prince of Wales on to the Scottish moor together at 9.30 and they came back breathless and excited at 4.30; and when you go for a very exhausting walk with anybody – if you went with Goebbels – after a time the blood circulates, the joints ease up, the breath gets short – you’d pour out your heart to anyone, even Goebbels. Dimbleby has huge maieutic charm. Alan Bennett uses that word in his book Telling Tales; it means mid-wifely. Jonathan Dimbleby’s charms are huge so the Prince of Wales gave him all that stuff about how unhappy when he was a boy – the Queen never spoke to him, the Duke of Edinburgh was beastly to him – and it very much upsets them.

Everyone was told this book would finally show what a marvellous person he was; and people were bored out of their wits by Business in the Community and the Prince’s Trust; they wanted to know about their private life. We’re interested in who they’re going to bed with, except we got rather bored by that because we couldn’t keep up with it.

Superficially the Prince of Wales is a carbon copy of his father; it is as though he has modelled himself on the older man. They walk and talk the same way, hold their hands behind their backs in the same way, they enjoy the same sports, share the same interests, and are both involved in charities with much the same agendas. But according to the Duke of Edinburgh there is a fundamental difference. ‘He is a romantic – and I’m a pragmatist. That means we do see things differently. And because I don’t see things as a romantic would, I’m unfeeling.’

If Charles and his parents had only been able to talk, the history of the last two decades might have been very different and thus also the future security of the monarchy. Prince Philip might have spoken to Charles about the need to make up his mind about Diana rather than sending him a letter which was open to misinterpretation. Charles may have discussed his fears that this marriage was going to be a mistake during the five months of his engagement, so that they could have devised a dignified way of calling the whole thing to a halt. And if all else had failed and they had gone down the aisle and given the public the fabulous fairy-tale wedding that so lit up the world, he might have asked his parents for help when things started to unravel at such terrifying speed. Instead, he said nothing and they said nothing. And, sure as hell, no one else was going to say anything, even though everyone in Kensington Palace and St James’s Palace could see the disaster unfolding before their very eyes.

Sadly, the marriage was never going to have been bliss for either of them, that was clear from the start. There were too many differences, too many unrequited needs, too much loneliness; but they could have kept up a façade for the sake of their sons and the monarchy and the millions of people who had wished them well on their wedding day, identified, empathized and invested such hope in their union. By the time any talking happened it was too late. The Princess had gone public, she was out of control – and scaring even herself – and on course for destruction.

As a former courtier says, ‘You might have thought the Prince could have found a way of dealing with Diana. Have said, “Let’s have a high-level conference over tea to see how we’re going to manage this.” But it’s part of his psychology that he can’t do that, it’s all part of not giving a PR answer, not telling the smallest of white lies, when he should.’

TEN (#ulink_2b67c279-a5ca-5f34-8967-ccfac791866f)

Camilla and the Future (#ulink_2b67c279-a5ca-5f34-8967-ccfac791866f)

The Queen has long held the wish that the earth would open up and swallow her newest daughter-in-law. It is nothing personal – they scarcely met during all the years of controversy – and when they did know one another, in the days when Camilla was a regular guest at Balmoral, Sandringham and Windsor, she was very fond of her. Everyone was very fond of Camilla, particularly the Queen Mother. She was there in those days as the wife of Andrew Parker Bowles, who boasted the unlikely title of the Queen’s Silver-Stick-in-Waiting. It is a title from Tudor times – the incumbent kept close to the sovereign to protect him or her from danger and carried a staff of office, topped in silver. Camilla was easy, friendly, earthy and game for anything; she also loved horses and dogs – the perfect combination to endear anyone to the House of Windsor. But the Queen, like her former Private Secretary Robert Fellowes, believes that with few exceptions everything that has gone wrong for the monarchy in the last twenty years has been attributable to Mrs Parker Bowles. It is hard to disagree.

Whichever story you buy about the relationship – the Princess’s version, that there were three of them in the marriage, so it never stood a chance; or the Prince’s version, that he gave up Camilla before his engagement and there was no physical contact until more than six years later – Mrs Parker Bowles plays a central role. She was certainly the Prince’s lover before Diana appeared on the scene, and she was definitely in place again after 1987. He told us so. Whether activity in the intervening years was all in Diana’s imagination or not is largely immaterial. By 1992 the Princess of Wales was passionately jealous of her rival and wanted the world to know how unhappy she was about it. Her chosen method was through Andrew Morton, a charming, roguish former Daily Star journalist. He wrote a riveting book the like of which has never been seen before or since.

He once told me that he was able to write his book Diana: Her True Story in 1992 because of one I had written the previous year which had incensed Diana. That book was Charles and Diana: Portrait of a Marriage and in it I had said that the marriage was not a happy one for a multitude of reasons – something I had first mentioned in a biography of Charles four years earlier – and they were leading largely separate lives with separate friends, which was sad, but that it was a successful working partnership none the less. They both worked hard, both made a real difference in their charitable activities, were a terrific double act for the House of Windsor and were both excellent parents. Jonathan Dimbleby mentioned my book as a footnote in his own book three years later. He called it ‘a sensitive account of a working partnership which judged that the marriage was, in those terms, “actually very healthy” – a conclusion which, pre-Morton, did not seem so far from the truth as it would do with the benefit of hindsight’. What incensed Diana was the suggestion that, ten years into her marriage, she was happy with this situation; and she set out to tell the world what her life was really like.

Morton used to play squash with a doctor friend of Diana’s, James Colthurst, and he acted as a go-between. The full truth of Diana’s participation only came out after her death. She had spoken into a tape recorder at Kensington Palace during the summer and autumn of 1991 and Colthurst had delivered the tapes to Morton. The result was explosive: eighteen thousand words on tape and a publishing phenomenon. Diana: Her True Story, which ultimately led to the break-up of the marriage, rocked the monarchy to its foundations. It talked about Diana’s troubled childhood, her feelings of abandonment when her mother left, her bulimia, her husband’s indifference towards her, his obsession with his mistress. The authority of the text was bolstered by on-the-record quotes from some of Diana’s closest friends like James Gilbey (of Squidgygate fame) and old flatmate Carolyn Bartholomew. It talked about the Prince’s shortcomings as a father and the loneliness and isolation Diana had felt for so many years, trapped in a loveless marriage within a hostile court, made worse by a cold and disapproving Royal Family. The book was serialized in the Sunday Times. ‘Diana Driven To Five Suicide Bids By “Uncaring” Charles’ screamed the banner headline, while the Palace went into meltdown. So many incidents revealed in the serialization, such as those occasions on which the Princess had self-harmed, happened at Sandringham; plans over who took the children where were discussed in the privacy of their office. Morton’s sources were good; suspiciously good. And it wasn’t the first time that stories had inexplicably been leaked.

Robert Fellowes, treading difficult ground, not for the first or last time, as both Diana’s brother-in-law and the Queen’s Private Secretary, asked Diana if she had had anything to do with the book. Diana swore she hadn’t and Fellowes believed her. The Duke of Edinburgh also challenged her and again she denied it; lying, as it turned out in both cases. The chairman of the Press Complaints Commission therefore duly issued a statement condemning the serialization, and was left feeling very foolish and exceedingly angry when Diana went straight round to Carolyn Bartholomew’s house (having telephoned the newspapers to ensure photographers would be waiting) and in a public show of approval embraced her on the doorstep.

During Ascot Week, very shortly afterwards, while Morton’s book started vanishing from the shelves, the Queen, the Duke, Charles and Diana all sat down together at Windsor to discuss the situation and to see what could be salvaged from the marriage. This was the first time there had ever been a discussion of this kind. Parents of any couple having difficulties in their marriage would be naturally reticent about intervening, uncertain as to whether help would be welcome. But this wasn’t any couple. The breakdown of this marriage had huge implications for the monarchy and yet both the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had held back and chosen not to get involved. Andrew Morton was the first person to discover that the Princess had been suffering from bulimia, and the detail in his book was obviously unparalleled, but plenty had already been written about the state of the marriage; it was no secret that Charles and Diana were leading separate lives, seeing separate friends and that the marriage was in trouble. Calling a conference now was too late. Diana had gone public, and, intoxicated with the power she had over the husband who had cheated on her, she announced that she wanted a trial separation.

The Queen and Duke were sympathetic but were firmly against the idea of separation, and urged them both for the sake of the boys as well as Crown and country to try and find a way of making the marriage work. They all agreed to meet again the next day to talk further, but Diana didn’t show up.

Two months later the Sun published a transcript of an amorous late-night telephone conversation allegedly between Diana and James Gilbey. Dubbed ‘Squidgygate’ because of the way Gilbey repeatedly referred to her as Squidgy or Squidge, it reinforced Morton’s message. Between endearments, she railed against the Prince and his ‘fucking family’ and said, ‘I’m going to do something dramatic because I can’t stand the confines of this marriage.’

By Christmas her wish had come true. It had taken one final disastrous tour to Korea, and a botched weekend Charles had planned to have with the children at Sandringham, for the Prince finally to snap and agree there was no purpose in carrying on; the marriage was over and all hope that he and Diana might still be friends was also over. On 9 December 1992 the Prime Minister, John Major, announced their separation in the House of Commons. Julia Cleverdon, chief executive of Business in the Community, was with the Prince of Wales that day. She had worked closely with him for nearly ten years and in all that time, despite innumerable crises, she had never seen him so utterly miserable.

Diana took the moral high ground. She seemed oblivious of the fact that she too had been unfaithful during their marriage. In fact, she had been the first to do so, and had had not just one lover but a succession. Charles had been unfaithful with one woman. The problem was that it was Camilla Parker Bowles, the same woman he had admitted to having been in love with before he and Diana ever met. In yet another example of the Prince’s unfortunate compulsion to tell the absolute truth he had gone out of his way to explain this to Diana, to reassure her that now that he was engaged to be married there was, and would be, no other woman in his life. And when Diana asked him point-blank if he still loved Camilla, he didn’t say, as anyone with an ounce of common sense would have said, ‘No. You’re the one I love. She and every other woman I’ve ever known is history.’ He said ‘Yes’ and went on to explain that Camilla was very special to him, but then so were a number of other women.

For a man who is so sensitive and really quite clever at times, it was utterly crass. Diana was insanely jealous of her and it had nothing whatever to do with having a wobbly background and insecure childhood. Find me a young girl who is not jealous of her boyfriend or husband’s ex-lovers. Even if they have never met their predecessors they are jealous – jealous of the idea, jealous of the memories they have of each other; irrational, stupid, deeply destructive, I don’t deny, but true.

An old family friend, who had also married a man much older than herself, tried to calm Diana. Yes, he’d had girlfriends and some quite serious, but he was thirty-two, that was to be expected. The thing to hang on to, she said, was the fact that it was none of them that he had married – the one he wanted to marry was her.

There was just one glaring difference here between Diana’s situation and that of any other girl on the eve of her wedding; and Diana was no fool, she knew. Charles was Prince of Wales, he couldn’t marry them; he certainly couldn’t marry Mrs Parker Bowles – she was already married. As she said to Andrew Morton, ‘He’d found the virgin, the sacrificial lamb.’

And so she became obsessed. A suspicious, insecure girl by nature she imagined an affair where none existed, she imagined him on the telephone to Camilla all the time, discussing his marriage, discussing her. The suspicion and the jealousy ate away at her. She had found a bracelet on Michael Colborne’s desk, with GF engraved on it, that Charles had given to Camilla over lunch two days before the wedding. The GF stood for Girl Friday, his nickname for Camilla. It was with a collection of similar presents for other women who had been kind to him during his days as a bachelor. Diana simply saw it as a token of love and went berserk. Camilla gave Charles a pair of cufflinks and those were the ones he chose to wear on his honeymoon. Proof seemed to be everywhere. He might have stopped seeing her, she reasoned, but that didn’t mean he had stopped loving her. She told Morton that Charles and Camilla had slept together at Buckingham Palace two nights before the wedding. It was fantasy. The Queen had hosted a dinner and ball that night and Charles was up until the early hours with guests; Camilla was long gone; and on the following night he spent most of it talking to his mother’s lady-in waiting, Lady Susan Hussey, who he had known since the age of twelve. All sorts of wild ideas thrashed around inside Diana’s head and no amount of reassurance from her husband helped. She couldn’t exorcize the conviction that her husband loved someone else.

The Prince of Wales was utterly humiliated by Diana: Her True Story. It painted the blackest portrait; it not only called him a cold and faithless husband and a bad father, but it also questioned his fitness to be king. So much of it was demonstrably untrue and so many stories were a distortion of the truth. People who were witnesses to the events remembered them in essence, but they had a twist to them which always put the Prince in a bad light. He was adamant, nevertheless, that there should be no retaliation and instructed his friends to say nothing.

Charles has never publicly criticized Diana. Whenever I have pointed this out to people they say, ‘Ah, but he got his friends to do it for him.’ This is untrue. Some of his friends did feel that the injustice meted out to him by Morton’s book was intolerable and I, for one, was encouraged by several of them to try to redress the balance, but they were not thanked for their trouble and neither was I. I had been planning to make the television documentary that Jonathan Dimbleby finally made, to mark the Prince’s twenty-five years as Prince of Wales. I had had discussions with Christopher Martin, the producer of the Prince’s previous films – one on his views about architecture, the other about conservation called The Earth in Balance. Christopher and I had been to a private lunch at Highgrove to discuss it with him. Suddenly I was dropped from the project and discovered very much later the reason why. I had defended him too vigorously in the media.

What Morton’s book had done, as none other had done before it, was point the finger at Camilla Parker Bowles as the principal cause of Diana’s unhappiness. Diana had seriously considered calling off the wedding two days before she walked down the aisle, he said, because of Prince Charles’s ‘continuing friendship with Camilla Parker Bowles, the wife of a member of the Queen’s household’. Today the name Camilla Parker Bowles is almost as well known as that of the Prince of Wales, but until 1992 she was scarcely known outside her own circle of friends – and neither was her relationship with the Prince.

Morton’s book changed all that. It didn’t convince everyone that Charles and Camilla were having an affair. Some thought there was a chance that he had got it wrong, that it was just more tabloid tittle-tattle; but a substantial number of people did believe that what was written in Diana: Her True Story was true, and overnight Camilla’s peaceful existence in the heart of the countryside was shattered. The press set up camp outside her house and followed her wherever she went. She wasn’t safe even in her own garden; photographers were waiting with their long lenses. Hate mail began to arrive accusing her of breaking up the royal marriage. For someone with no experience of being the object of such hatred it was extremely unnerving. It also put her husband in a difficult situation, and wasn’t easy for her two children, Tom and Laura (then both in their teens), or for her elderly parents. But Morton was as nothing compared with what followed in relatively quick succession: the Camillagate tapes, the Dimbleby documentary and Panorama. The first two put an end to Camilla’s twenty-one-year marriage; the third brought the Prince’s marriage to an end.

ELEVEN (#ulink_cfe33a6d-097c-5fd3-848a-6c76119f84a8)

From Bad to Worse (#ulink_cfe33a6d-097c-5fd3-848a-6c76119f84a8)

Having watched the Royal Family from the sidelines all these years, I never cease to be amazed by their resilience. Crises have come and gone, crises that would have crippled most individuals, families, even institutions, but they simply keep going, keep on doing what they have always done, nine times out of ten not even acknowledging whatever has happened, and miraculously the crisis fades. It is a brilliant strategy for survival and probably the only one that could work for a family so remorselessly in the limelight from cradle to coffin. They have no alternative but to take the long view, and recognize that, long term, very little really matters. But after an intimate late-night telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla was taped, published in the British press and devoured by millions over their breakfast cornflakes, I did wonder how the Prince of Wales would recover from this one. The man wanted to be a Tampax. How do you hold up your head in public after everyone you meet knows that? He wanted to be a Tampax to be as close as he could to Camilla. It was a playful conversation any two people very much in love and missing one another might have had and, read in its entirety, the eleven-minute conversation was rather touching; but you would rather slit your throat than contemplate one solitary soul overhearing you, let alone millions of people all over the world.

The tape was a compilation of several different conversations held over several months in 1989, but that was irrelevant. No one could deny that the voices were authentic; the Prince’s humiliation and embarrassment were total. He knows that it will come back to haunt him – it will be dredged up at his coronation and at other serious moments in his life – and serve to humiliate his parents, his sons and Camilla’s family, too. And yet the day the tapes were published he had an engagement in Liverpool and, instead of finding some excuse to cancel, as any ordinary person would, he stepped out of his car that morning to face the waiting crowds as though absolutely nothing had happened. The courage it took was immeasurable; he had no idea what kind of reception awaited him, but to the intense relief of everyone with him there were no sniggers, no shouts, no catcalls and no absence of people. Yet for all his cool, it was one of the worst days of his life, made worse by the damage he knew he had inflicted yet again on the monarchy.

There were lurid headlines and cartoons in the press, wide condemnation of Charles, questions about his fitness to be king, and, in the mounting fever of puritanical indignation, demands from Cabinet ministers that the Prince give up Mrs Parker Bowles.

The contents of her mailbag, meanwhile, took on an even more unpleasant tone and the press presence and pressure at her house became even worse. She became the butt of jokes up and down the country, her children at boarding school were teased and tormented and her husband stood publicly cuckolded.

It was at this point, with the documentary underway, that Jonathan Dimbleby and the Prince’s adviser, Richard Aylard, discussed the question of the Prince’s adultery. With the Morton book published, two sets of tapes in the public arena and screeds written in the press, it was an issue that no film about the last twenty-five years could duck. Dimbleby would have to ask the question; what Aylard and the Prince had to decide was how best to reply? There were three options. The truth, a lie, or evasion. Aylard advised the first, which accorded with the Prince’s inclination. If he lied then sooner or later he would be caught out, argued the Private Secretary. The News of the World, he knew, already had both the Prince and Camilla watched and followed round the clock; it was only a matter of time before they were seen together or a disaffected servant sold his story. If he refused to answer the question on the grounds that it was a personal matter the surveillance would continue and the story would never go away until the media had evidence of an affair. After the ‘Camillagate’ tape, most people believed they were lovers, so why not be honest with the British public and admit the truth? The Prince wanted to tell the truth and Aylard encouraged him.

What they should both have foreseen was that the great British public was more interested in Diana’s truth. She had got hers in first and it had a far juicier ring to it. They heard the ‘Yes’, and completely ignored the rest of his sentence which came after an anguished pause, ‘the marriage having irretrievably broken down, us both having tried’, and concluded that Charles had been an adulterer from day one. When Aylard confirmed at a press conference the next day that the adultery to which the Prince had confessed had indeed been with Mrs Parker Bowles, her goose was finally cooked. Andrew Parker Bowles filed for divorce and, less than a year later, married his long-term girlfriend, Rosie Pitman. The public blamed Camilla for breaking up the royal family home, and the reputation of the monarchy was once again dragged through the mire.