William was furious when aides snubbed Kate’s mum
WHILE Prince Charles’s relationship with his parents was set in a permanent frost, his connection with his sons was almost as uneasy. One of his most painful recollections was of a visit to Kensington Palace while Diana was alive, and the boys were still small. As soon as Harry saw his father, he ran towards him — then suddenly stopped short.
‘Mummy says I mustn’t,’ he cried, just as Charles was about to hug him.
There was only one conclusion to be drawn: Diana had poisoned the boys’ minds towards their father.
After her death, the brothers had to cope with a continuing onslaught of public revelations about their parents’ adulterous relationships. Grieving for his mother, William would say, was especially difficult because ‘it was so raw’, and there was minimal privacy.
And then there was Camilla. Charles’s relationship with his sons certainly wasn’t helped by her presence — which was a constant reminder of their mother’s torment.
For months, staff at Clarence House noticed that William and Harry entered the building through the servants’ quarters, in order to avoid both their father and Camilla.
In the opinion of some of his staff, Charles’s lifestyle had blinded him to his sons’ personal troubles, and he was largely unaware of their coolness towards his mistress.
Harry was the more worrying. Ever since his confession to smoking cannabis at Highgrove as a teenager, Charles had struggled to control him.
Paparazzi had sold photographs of Harry emerging bedraggled with a topless model from Boujis nightclub in South Kensington; then chasing Chelsy Davy, his Zimbabwean girlfriend, across Africa; and misbehaving at endless parties.
As William grew up, it became clear that he too was a very different royal from his father. Since leaving university, he had neither shared his father’s interests nor offered to continue his charities. Specifically, he refused involvement in The Prince’s Trust.
After his own marriage, William chose to retreat with Kate to Norfolk, where they could preserve their privacy. They also preferred to spend Christmas with her parents rather than at Sandringham with the other royals.
The distance between Highgrove and Norfolk isolated the Prince from his grandchildren, and allowed Kate’s mother, Carole Middleton, to take charge.
Charles began to fear that he was being usurped by the Middletons, and several of the Queen’s courtiers picked up on this. As a consequence, they decided to ignore Carole Middleton on social occasions.
This so infuriated William that he consulted with his grandmother. To counter the hurtful snubs against Carole Middleton, the Queen then made a point of inviting a TV cameraman to film her driving the former air hostess around the Balmoral estate.
Meanwhile, Charles had decided, as neither of the boys showed any interest in classical music, he’d invite Kate to her first opera — Bellini’s La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker) at Covent Garden.
It should have been a wonderful night out. As usual, Michael Fawcett had organised for dinner to be sent from Clarence House and served in the Royal Box during the interval on Charles’s personal china, using his personal silver cutlery.
Sadly, however, even the Prince had to admit the production was ‘awful’, and his hope that Kate might be converted to classical music was lost. Like William, she preferred Phantom Of The Opera. Once she’d married William, Charles grew worried that the public’s attention was switching to them.
To his disappointment, the Canadian government had asked for his proposed tour of the country to be delayed, so that his son and new daughter-in-law could visit first.
For her part, Camilla was unconcerned about Kate taking the limelight.
‘She didn’t give a damn,’ noted Robert Higdon, the chief executive of Charles’s charity foundation in America. ‘[But] Charles saw Kate and William as the new stars and feared he’d be in trouble.’
Camilla also dismissed the presumption that Kate would be the first commoner Queen.
‘That’ll be me,’ she’d say with a laugh.