Charles and Camilla’s plot to slur Diana as a 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, Britain’s 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, Browne-Wilkinson 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