Did Charles have a fling with Camilla lookalike?
WITH her tousled blonde bob and county-set looks, bubbly entrepreneur Sue Townsend has been hailed as a ‘younger, more comely’ version of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. Intriguingly, it emerges the two well-groomed women also shared a claim on Prince Charles’s affections in the run-up to his 1996 divorce from Princess Diana.
According to a new biography of the Prince — the most searching account since Jonathan Dimbleby’s revealing book two decades ago — Townsend enjoyed a ‘close’ relationship with Charles in the months before his marital split. Adding fuel to the fire, Townsend, now 67, does not deny their attachment was romantic.
Petite Townsend was single at the time, after splitting from boyfriend Peter Windett. When asked by U.S. biographer Sally Bedell Smith whether her relationship with Charles became romantic while she worked for his Duchy Originals organic food business, Townsend said: ‘I don’t think we’ll go down that road, really. I used to spend quite a bit of time with the Prince, so there we are.’
And she added: ‘I don’t think I’ll go into it. I don’t mind if you write that, “Yes, we were close, but it was a long time ago.”’
Townsend co-founded the soap company Crabtree & Evelyn before becoming a director of Duchy Originals in May 1996, three months before Charles’s divorce was finalised. The gogetting marketing executive was paid £120,000 a year to help boost the charitable company’s flagging sales.
Despite clashing with another blonde close to the Prince — icy lawyer Fiona Shackleton, a trustee of the Prince’s charity — Townsend was so favoured by Charles she was introduced to Princess Anne, enjoyed trips in his Aston Martin convertible and reportedly accompanied him on holiday.
Sharing a further intimate anecdote in the new biography Prince Charles: The Passions And Paradoxes Of An Improbable Life, Townsend reveals that Charles thought the Queen’s red geraniums outside Buckingham Palace were ‘horrid’, and that he is ‘grander’ than his mother.
‘He just hates those rows of red geraniums,’ she says in the book. ‘That will change when he becomes king.
‘He has such high taste, so above everyone else. One reason the Queen is so popular is that she is much more ordinary in her tastes. People can relate to her, but he harks back to an earlier, grander era.’
Unfortunately, Townsend’s friendship with Charles was ‘ruptured’ by a disagreement in the days after Diana’s death in August 1997 over Townsend’s decision to close the Highgrove gift shop for a week out of respect.
‘I don’t think he thought it through,’ Townsend said of Charles’s reluctance to halt trading. ‘Nothing like that had ever happened before.’
Following the rift, Townsend sold her shares in Duchy Originals and moved to Italy, where she set up a new brand of luxury bath and home products called Ortigia.
Prince Charles’s spokesman declined to comment.