SCHEMING HYSTERIC
Charles and Camilla’s plot to slur Diana as a
IN PUBLIC, Camilla Parker Bowles kept her mouth shut — but in private she let rip, referring to Princess Diana as ‘that mad cow’ and calling her a ‘wretched woman’. Today, in the fourth part of our exclusive serialisation of a new biography of Prince Charles, a top investigative author exposes how the prince’s mistress orchestrated a secret battle to win hearts and minds.
AFTER her marriage broke down, Princess Diana used every weapon in her arsenal to vilify her husband’s mistress, an upper-middle-class housewife from Wiltshire.
She briefed media contacts against her, famously confronted her at a high-society party and then went on television, eyes dramatically rimmed with kohl, to denounce her as a marriagewrecking adulteress.
And how did Camilla Parker Bowles react to this extraordinary barrage? She kept her head down, taking care to be neither seen nor heard in public. Yet behind the scenes, she was not only seething but preparing to launch a counter-attack.
Her friends, at least, were never in any doubt about what Camilla thought of her lover’s young wife. In the early days of the marriage, she’d dismissively called the Princess ‘a mouse’. Later, she’d refer to her as ‘that mad cow’.
Indeed, Camilla’s true feelings about Diana could be gleaned simply by asking to use the guest lavatory at her home, Ray Mill, in Wiltshire. While Charles’s loo in nearby Highgrove featured cartoons of himself, her own was festooned with unflattering cartoons of his wife.
In the one and only confrontation between the two women, Diana’s anger was evenly matched by the older woman’s fury — but Camilla was better at hiding it.
Both she and her husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, had been among the guests invited to a smart birthday party in 1989 at Lady Annabel Goldsmith’s house in Ham, near Richmond. Then, Diana had arrived unexpectedly.
WHILE the rest of the room fell suddenly silent, she challenged Camilla to leave Charles alone. Anxious to avoid a public scene, Camilla controlled her emotions. Then, coolly, she took the Princess to task for ‘unacceptable behaviour in a private house’.
In private, however, she let rip. Diana, she told friends, was poorly placed to complain. After all, Camilla herself had just one lover, while the Princess was ‘working her way through the Life Guards’.
It was an astonishingly bitchy remark, but Diana was equally adept at underhand thrusts. ‘Charles is obsessed by Camilla’s t**s, and I haven’t got t**s as big as Camilla’s,’ she told one journalist. THE Princess was already well ahead in the battle for hearts and minds when her secretly recorded interview was shown on Panorama in 1995. ‘Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,’ she said.
This devastating indictment effectively forced Camilla into seclusion for a year, while Charles doggedly continued with his scheduled appearances.
Soon after the Panorama programme, he visited a market in Croydon, South London, where he ate jellied eels and met locals in a pub. The media totally ignored his visit.
Yet, on the same day, spectators and journalists had besieged Diana at a Paris fashion show, and she’d ended up dominating the world’s headlines. Dejected, the Prince ordered his private secretary 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’d throw an object at the radio. The set frequently had to be repaired.
Unlike Charles, however, Camilla was gearing up for a battle. Her lover’s approval ratings in the polls had crashed to less than 10 per cent, and she knew the future looked bleak.
The way things were going, she feared, Charles risked buckling under the pressure — or even failing to inherit the crown.
So in 1996, she turned to Hilary Browne-Wilkinson, the solicitor who’d recently handled her divorce from Andrew Parker Bowles, asking for advice on what could be done.
This led to a dinner at St James’s Palace with Charles, BrowneWilkinson and her husband. Camilla didn’t hold back. Diana, she told her guests, was a ‘wretched woman’ who was creating havoc by refusing to adopt a dignified silence.
Her solicitor agreed, talking sympathetically about Camilla’s frustration at being cast as a selfseeking adulteress while Diana basked in popular esteem.
‘I’m not this awful person,’ Camilla complained. ‘I just wish someone would do something about it.’
It was Browne-Wilkinson who suggested hiring Mark Bolland, the well-connected 29-year-old director of the Press Complaints Commission, as a spin-doctor. Prodded by Camilla, the Prince agreed.
When the two men met, Bolland was offered the post of assistant private secretary. His sole purpose, Charles told him, would be to reverse Camilla’s image as his privileged, fox-hunting mistress, make her acceptable to the public and overcome the Queen’s hostility to them being together.
Later, Camilla took Bolland aside to offer some friendly advice. ‘Never push Charles too hard,’ she said. ‘Always remember his terrible childhood, and how he was bullied at school and by his parents.’
Bolland took this advice on board. Although he’d later be blamed for underhand machinations, he never embarked on a project without consulting Charles and Camilla. In fact, much of what he did would be at their suggestion.
And it quickly became clear that Camilla was often the one pulling the strings. Just a few weeks into Bolland’s new job, she was contacting him — as well as Browne-Wilkinson and Charles’s lawyer Fiona Shackleton — up to six times a day to discuss the next steps in their campaign to improve her image.
And when Charles called Bolland with instructions, it would often be immediately after he’d had an agitated exchange with Camilla.
‘You know, Mark,’ the Prince would say, in what became a familiar routine, ‘I think people should be told about . . .’
At other times, he’d be fixated on the harm he felt his ex-wife had done to him, and make derogatory remarks about her sanity.
Diana, he would say, was badly educated, without any O- or Alevels, and lacked self-discipline; nor did she have any interest in theatre, poetry, music or opera. (In fact, she loved opera and ballet, and played the piano daily.)
Yet despite all Charles and Camilla’s best efforts, her star remained undimmed. At the end of 1996, in a poll of 3,000 people, Charles was voted the most hated royal, just above Camilla.
Media spin was not enough: something more had to be done. After some discussion, the Prince decided to co-operate with Penny
Junor, a journalist who was planning to write a book sympathetic to Camilla. Bolland agreed to be the go-between on most issues, but excluding Diana.
And, to launch Camilla, she was to host a fundraiser on September 13, 1997, for the National Osteoporosis Society (her mother had suffered from the condition). And this would mark the start of a fiveyear campaign to transform her from adulteress into a suitable wife for the heir to the throne.
Invitations were duly sent to 1,500 people, including pop stars and other celebrities. Everything seemed set. Then came news of Diana’s car crash in Paris.
HOURS after Diana’s death, Robert Higdon — the chief executive of Charles’s charity foundation in America — called an acquaintance at Balmoral, where the Royal Family was staying. ‘What shall we do?’ he asked. ‘Nothing,’ came the reply. ‘Our worries are over.’
Elsewhere in the castle, Charles was chanting: ‘They’re all going to blame me, aren’t they? The world’s going to go completely mad.’
In the hours after the Princess’s death, he was paralysed by guilt. One of the Queen’s courtiers claimed that even his sons were critical of him for what had happened to their mother.
According to some courtiers, Charles dithered about going to Paris until his mother told him: ‘I think you should get out there.’
OTHERS recalled that he insisted, against the Queen’s wishes, on flying to France to bring back the body. The media, relying on Bolland, who was at Balmoral, reported that the Prince had taken control.
As the nation mourned, Charles became increasingly angry about the status his ex-wife had gained in death. She was being mythologised, despite being ‘a nutter’.
As for Camilla, she retreated to Ray Mill. ‘She’s a wreck,’ Charles told a friend.
In the past, he also remarked — half-jokingly — he would have been sent into exile and his lover committed to a dungeon.
To Camilla herself, he wailed that she shouldn’t have to ‘suffer all these indignities and tortures and calumnies’. Both of them knew, however, that the campaign to make her acceptable had to be suspended.
‘Emphasise service, one’s duties and contribution,’ Charles told his staff. ‘And please keep pushing them.’
Ten months after Diana’s death, however, Camilla was heartily fed up with being left in the cold. She was mollified, however, when Charles arranged for Prince William to meet her — in defiance of the Queen, who still disapproved of her.
William was assured that the meeting would remain private, but Camilla’s assistant accidentally leaked it. In the furore that followed, all bets were off: some even blamed Charles’s mistress indirectly for his wife’s death.
This could not be tolerated. Orchestrating another fightback, Camilla and Bolland arranged for a journalist that Camilla knew to
write a flattering article about her in The Sunday Times.
Among other things, it ‘revealed’ that, at a recent meeting at Buckingham Palace, the Royal Family had agreed as a priority to normalise Camilla’s position in the royal household.
In fact, her name hadn’t even been mentioned during the meeting.
Next, Charles, Camilla and Mark Bolland met at Highgrove to construct another campaign. The first hurdle, they agreed, was to demythologise Diana by portraying her as a manipulative hysteric.
And, here, they were fortunate. Since Diana’s death, Penny Junor had recast her book to portray the Princess as an unbalanced and unfaithful wife, suffering from borderline personality disorder, who had compelled Charles to return to his true love.
When told this, Charles agreed. ‘We must get this out,’ he said.
Publicly, however, he claimed in a statement that he had ‘not authorised, solicited or approved’ Junor’s book.
ALTHOUGH Charles was at last seeing Camilla openly again, few were aware of the peculiarity of their domestic arrangements.
Day to day, she preferred to live 17 miles from Highgrove in Ray Mill, a slightly shabby farmhouse bought after her divorce for £850,000. The Prince’s home, she complained, was too tidy and perfect.
‘It’s too small and too “Charles”,’ she told her friends. ‘I can’t touch a thing,’ adding that ‘Charles is always working, working, working’.
So Camilla alternated between staying overnight at Highgrove or St James’s Palace, and returning to Ray Mill — which also suited Charles. He even chose to sleep in a separate bedroom when they were under the same roof.
If she happened to be at Ray Mill when Charles had a sudden bout of melancholia or self-doubt, Camilla would be summoned by his valet, Michael Fawcett. Regardless of the hour of the day or night, she’d drive to Highgrove.
Thankfully, she could always make him laugh — or, in her words, ‘jolly him along’.
In return, Camilla no longer had to worry about surviving on the £20,000 a year she received in alimony. Charles paid off her overdraft, stabled her horses, provided a car and gave her increasing amounts of cash. Best of all, she didn’t have to find a job.
‘She has never worked in her life, commented Bolland, ‘and is terrified of being on public display. A member of her family described her to me as “the laziest woman to have been born in England in the 20th century”.’
In the opinion of some courtiers, however, Camilla was not lazy in one respect. She was tireless in her quest to establish herself.
DETERMINED to emerge from the shadow of Diana — who’d conquered America in 1985 — Camilla decided, with Bolland’s help, to make a solo trip to Manhattan.
Propelling herself into the limelight was a gamble, but it was preferable to giving in to Buckingham Palace officials, who wanted her kept out of sight. The ‘Dark Side’, she called them.
Charles himself was dubious about the four-day trip in 1999, just two years after Diana’s death. But he allowed Camilla to persuade him.
By the time she’d arrived in New York, however, the Prince was wavering again. This time, it was because his friend Nicholas Soames had warned him the visit was generating too much publicity.
But when Charles told Camilla what Soames had said, she reacted with uncontrolled anger. ‘I won’t stop it. It’s my life and it’s the right thing to do,’ she barked down the phone. Both Mark Bolland and Michael Fawcett were with her in her suite at the Carlyle Hotel at the time, but she didn’t care who witnessed the argument. In truth, they admired her scathing dismissal of Charles’s doubts.
The trip had been meticulously planned. First, a three-hour flight on Concorde; then, as soon as she’d touched down, she’d been whisked off by a rich financier to spend two days recovering from the journey at his home in East Hampton on Long Island. A poor traveller, Camilla always insisted on ‘acclimatisation’ after a flight — even one that took only three hours.
From East Hampton, a helicopter flew her to Manhattan, where Robert Higdon — chief executive of Charles’s charity foundation in America — was waiting.
After that, she plunged into a round of high-profile parties and charity events. Higdon arranged for the visit to be hyped in New York’s society columns. Privately, he felt that Camilla would have been better off staying at home. ‘It wasn’t the right time,’ he concluded. ‘It didn’t feel right for Camilla; it was too soon.’ She was ‘not great’ with Americans. Even worse, he claimed, she lacked get-up-and-go.
‘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,’ he said.
‘The biggest problem was persuading her to dress up for a big occasion. The effort was overwhelming. Camilla was p **** d off by the whole thing. It was horrible, a disaster.’
BUT, gradually, Camilla’s battle was being won. As the years passed, she appeared at various high-profile parties with Charles and was snapped accompanying him to the theatre.
The public, meanwhile, were drip-fed positive stories. That brooch she was wearing? It was a love-token given to her by Charles. Even trivial details were helping to alter perceptions.
No expense was spared to transform Camilla’s rather dowdy appearance with designer clothes. And her wisest tactic of all was to keep her mouth shut. So successful was the campaign that by 1999, 17 months after the Paris crash, Charles felt sufficiently emboldened to order his spin doctor: ‘Let’s risk the biscuit.’
After leaking details of where they’d be on a cold January night, they posed together for the first time, at the door of the Ritz Hotel in London.
Amid a thunderclap of flashing lights, more than 200 photographers and TV crews captured Camilla’s radiant smile. She had good reason to be happy. Having once been one of the most hated women in the kingdom, she was now well on her way to becoming a queen.
REBEL Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles by Tom Bower is published by William Collins. © Tom Bower 2018.