BOMBSHELL BOOK THAT REWRITES CHARLES AND DIANA HISTORY

TO MARK Prince Charles’s 70th year, his latest biographer has accompanied him for the past 18 months on official tours around the world. In addition to scrutinising him at close quarters, Robert Jobson — a royal reporter for nearly three decades — not only spoke to many current and former courtiers and staff but also interviewed the Prince himself. The result is a book full of groundbreaking new material, which includes everything from Charles’s political views to his less-thanperfect relationship with his sons — and what he really felt in the run-up to his wedding to Princess Diana . . .

THe Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana spencer was watched by 750 million people around the world — at the time the biggest viewing audience for any event in television history.

Back then, it looked very much like a romantic fairytale come to life. But in fact, as we were to learn years later when Diana secretly co-operated with a book about her life, just a few weeks before she walked up the aisle she was having second thoughts.

‘Well, bad luck, Duch,’ her sisters said, using her childhood nickname. ‘Your face is on the tea towels, so you’re too late to chicken out.’

What we haven’t known until now is what Prince Charles himself was feeling. And the sad truth, I can reveal, is that he already knew that the marriage was doomed. It hadn’t taken him long — just a few meetings with Diana — to realise that they were totally incompatible.

During the weeks leading up to the wedding, he told friends, he would try to talk to her about his work commitments and what kind of day he’d just had — and Diana would stare back at him blankly. she seemed incapable of grasping the intellectual thread of what he was saying.

Then for no apparent reason, he recalled, she’d suddenly well up and burst into tears.

A sympathetic man, Charles was at a total loss. Why was Diana so upset? Had he said something wrong?

Then there were alarming and irrational mood swings and temper, which the Prince found impossible to deal with.

The more he saw of his volatile fiancee, the more Charles knew in his heart that he’d made a terrible mistake.

As He confided to close friends some years later: ‘I desperately wanted to get out of the wedding in 1981, when during the engagement I discovered just how awful the prospects were, having had no chance whatsoever to get to know Diana beforehand.’

On one occasion, Charles was reduced to tears as he recounted his frustrations over the calamitous episode.

That the Prince went ahead with the marriage, despite his firm conviction that it was a mistake, is something he deeply regrets to this day.

Moreover, he has agonised over this for years. Through his inability to call off the wedding, he believes that he let down not only himself and Diana, but the monarchy itself.

Charles obviously loves his sons, the result of his and Diana’s union, and he acknowledges that there were periods in the marriage when he and Diana felt a bond between them — such as after the birth of Prince William.

He also respects Harry and William’s love for their late mother and the way they have cherished her memory. Nevertheless, the marriage unquestionably led to deep unhappiness for both Charles and Diana. Why, then, did this ill-suited couple so quickly get engaged? According to Diana, they had met only 12 times and barely knew one another. Part of the reason was that Charles was 32 when they started dating, and pressure was beginning to mount on him to take a wife.

To the watching world, Diana seemed the perfect candidate — virginal, aristocratic and wonderfully photogenic.

It was a fraught time for the 19year-old, as the world’s media hounded her in ways that would be totally unacceptable today. To escape them, she started risking her life by racing through red traffic lights.

What had begun as a few exploratory dates was rapidly turning into a highly dangerous scenario. And Charles felt responsible. It didn’t seem right to him that he had a team of armed scotland Yard police protection officers looking after him, while a defenceless young woman had nobody. But there was little he could do.

HIs Father, the Duke of edinburgh, was equally concerned, and wrote to Charles saying that the situation was unfair on Diana. He should either propose to her or release her.

some have said that the letter was curt, and that Charles later bitterly resented his father for bullying him into an unsuitable marriage. This is untrue.

‘It was measured and sensitive,’ said Charles’s cousin, Lady Pamela Hicks, who claimed to have read the Duke’s letter herself.

More important, insiders say

Charles does not blame his father or mother at all for his unhappy marriage. Nor does he blame them for his inability to back out of the engagement.

Despite some misgivings, he proposed to Lady Diana Spencer on February 3, 1981.

‘It was like a call to duty, really,’ Diana revealed in audio recordings used in the documentary Diana: In Her Own Words. ‘He sat me down and said, “Will you marry me?” I thought the whole thing was hysterical, getting married. It was so grown up. And I laughed. I remember thinking: “This is a joke.” And he was deadly serious.’

In truth, neither of them was actually in love with the other, although both may have been temporarily enamoured with the idea of being in love.

Diana enjoyed the concept of being swept off her feet by a charming prince, while Charles certainly found her very attractive.

Had he had more forethought, he might have realised that the media frenzy over their ‘romance’ would merely escalate after the engagement. As it was, he soon realised that he and Diana had precious little in common — but felt it was impossible to back out.

‘Things were very different in those days,’ Charles has told close friends. ‘The power and influence of the media driving matters towards an engagement and wedding were unstoppable.

‘To have withdrawn, as you can no doubt imagine, would have been cataclysmic. Hence I was permanently between the devil and the deep blue sea.’

As it was, the failure of the marriage led not only to personal misery, but also a severe denting of his popularity.

When his marriage fell apart, public opinion gravitated towards the Princess. She had married as a 20-year-old still addicted to the romantic novels of Barbara Cartland, and in retrospect seemed to be the victim of a cold-hearted older man who had wilfully wrecked her life.

FOr Charles’s detractors, his lifetime of service and his often visionary interventions — such as decrying the use of single-use plastics and calling for a halt to the destruction of rain forests, long before those issues became popular — weighed far less in the balance than his apparent neglect of Diana.

His adultery with Camilla was also cited as the reason he would make an unsuitable king — despite Diana’s own adultery with at least three other men.

Charles long ago accepted there is no point in fighting against this distorted portrayal of his character, particularly in the wake of Diana’s tragic death. There is nothing he can do, he feels, to change the minds of his critics.

What frustrates him, though, is that one version of history — Diana’s version — has become so engrained in the popular psyche that it has gone down as ‘historic fact’.

In his view, this version is a tissue of lies peddled by a Machiavellian princess to a sympathetic media. Or, in his unusually strong words to an impeccable source: there were ‘unbelievable and pernicious lies aided and abetted by somebody rather close to me [Diana]’ who he believes ‘lived hand to mouth with the Press’.

After years of soul-searching, say people in his circle, he’s decided that at least a few falsehoods from the Diana years should be corrected.

‘The most extraordinary and pernicious of these,’ Charles told a close friend, ‘is that first of all I secreted Diana on board the royal train.’

This story, which appeared in November 1980, three months before their engagement, claimed that she’d sneaked onto the train for an illicit tryst with the Prince. It caused an immediate furore.

Diana herself was deeply shocked and upset, knowing it couldn’t have been her as she’d been miles away, tucked up in bed. Had her boyfriend been two-timing her, she wondered?

It was at this point that the Duke of Edinburgh despatched his ‘marry her or leave her’ letter to Charles. In December 1980, Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, wrote a letter for publication in The Times, protesting in the strongest terms about the ‘lies and harassment’ that her daughter had been forced to endure.

‘She [Diana] had denied with justifiable indignation her reported presence on the royal train,’ she added.

In fact, there’d never been a tryst of any kind on that train. The story is an ‘extraordinary’ fabrication that has haunted the Prince ever since it was first circulated.

It irritates him to this day, quite possibly because its publication helped convince him that he needed to propose in order to protect Lady Diana’s honour.

Later, the paper that had carried the story claimed that it had had an impeccable source — one of the local policemen assigned to watch the train overnight in the sidings.

But Charles has told friends: ‘The truth is the Daily Mirror [it was actually the Sunday Mirror] had mistaken a private secretary’s blonde secretary for Diana.

‘The Press obstinately stuck to this story. Then, years later, they pushed the invention even further, claiming it was the Duchess of Cornwall [I had secreted aboard the royal train] after all.’ It is the falsehoods that centre on the Duchess of Cornwall that have particularly upset him.

He told a friend: ‘One of the worst lies of all is that the Duchess was smuggled into Buckingham Palace the night before our wedding in 1981.

‘The idea that this could even have happened and that I could have done any such thing is beyond belief, and yet this monstrous nonsense has persisted.’

He added: ‘There are doubtless endless other lies and inventions.’

The BBC compounded another myth involving the Duchess. In 2001, a story on its website called Camilla ‘the woman who has in the past suffered such indignities as . . . having bread rolls thrown at her by Diana fans’.

Six years later, another story — in the Daily Telegraph — claimed: ‘Her unpopularity was such that an irate shopper was reported to have thrown a bread roll at her in a supermarket in Wiltshire.’

Every time this is repeated, the Prince gets riled. As he’s told friends, it’s ‘another persistent lie that the Duchess had bread rolls thrown at her by angry shoppers.

‘This was, in fact, a totally fabricated media exercise stunt which involved actresses throwing bread rolls at one another.

‘A lookalike actress was employed and placed in the store in Chippenham.’

Other persistent myths include the ‘fact’ that Charles was so pampered that he even had his toothpaste squeezed on to the toothbrush for him.

At a royal dinner one night I sat next to Michael Fawcett, the Prince’s former valet, most trusted aide and supposed squeezer of the royal dentifrice.

The story, he said, still irks him. ‘It is just not true,’ he told me. I believed him.

adapted from Charles at Seventy: thoughts, Hopes and dreams by Robert Jobson, published by John Blake on November 1 at £20. © Robert Jobson 2018. to order a copy for £16 (offer valid to November 4, 2018; p&p free), visitmailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640.