She made a beeline for Kate’s uncle

AT PRINCE WILLIAM’S wedding, Camilla went out of her way to meet Kate’s notorious uncle. The tattooed and shavenheaded Gary Goldsmith was still trying to live down the fact that he’d been caught cutting lines of cocaine by reporters at his house in Ibiza — known as Maison de Bang Bang. At the wedding, he said: ‘Camilla made a beeline for me.’ Startled, he plucked up the courage to say: ‘I’m sorry for the bad press.’ Camilla smiled. ‘Don’t think twice about it’ she said. ‘I get the same myself.’ In fact, she and her sister Annabel used to joke that their brother Mark Shand was their very own ‘Casa Bang Bang’. He was no millionaire, but he was unpredictable, as he was the first to admit, and when he died after a fall in April 2014, Camilla was devastated. She had never been as close to Mark as Annabel, but since her marriage to Charles they had made up for lost time. Charles adored Mark’s madcap stories and passion for saving elephants. He loved having him to stay at Birkhall, where he would leap into lochs and swim across them. Their fondness for one another had brought Camilla closer to her brother, but Mark had said, ruefully, about a year before his death, that he had never once in his life had lunch or tea with Camilla by himself.