Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail. Tom Bower
got a bunch of cuckoos in this building wanting a pay cheque.’ He blamed Fawcett for taking too much interest in his fundraising, and continued, ‘You can be so much more and do much more if you have a global vision.’ Charles agreed to his reorganising the foundation.
Shortly after, Lamport telephoned Higdon to tell him, ‘We need a fundraising dinner for HRH during the handover in Hong Kong.’ The target, he said, was $1 million. Higdon now understood that every foreign trip organised by the British government for Charles would be, whatever else was intended, an attempt to raise money for his charities – ‘So I became Mr Cash Cow.’ Against the odds, he managed to corral a group of local plutocrats.
To set the table for the dinner, Fawcett had brought a full set of eighteenth-century china and glasses to Hong Kong, which would replace the governor’s nineteenth-century equivalents. He had also brought a set of special bells used by Charles to summon his staff. After arranging the table decorations, Fawcett turned to the seating plan. The potentially largest donors would be closest to the prince. To ensure that everything went smoothly during the dinner, Fawcett stood behind Charles, protecting him from careless hands spilling wine or food, and waiting, as ever, for the royal click of the finger should his boss need something – the china cup filled with his special tea, an orchestra at short notice, or even, thinking ahead to another event, a private plane. Based on such knowledge and trust, Fawcett was Charles’s Rasputin, empowered to outflank everyone. For that reason, the queen had no time for him. At a dinner in Holyrood, she cringed when his name was mentioned. Fawcett appeared unenthusiastic about Higdon’s role. Any competitor for Charles’s attention aroused his antagonism, even those who were helpful. ‘I was the new enemy,’ Higdon recalled after he had successfully met his $1 million target.
One group that Fawcett ignored was politicians, and among the Blairite luminaries to whom Charles was naturally attracted was Peter Mandelson, a principal architect of New Labour’s electoral success. Known as ‘the Prince of Darkness’, Mandelson sought an introduction to Charles with the help of Carla Powell, the wife of Margaret Thatcher’s foreign affairs adviser Charles Powell. Powell had invited Camilla to a dinner at which Mandelson made a pitch for a relationship with Charles.
Camilla’s favourable report back sealed the ambition of Labour’s spin maestro. He was invited to lunch at Highgrove the month after the Hong Kong trip. Charles’s ostensible reason was to urge him to discourage Labour’s proposed ban on fox-hunting. Pleased that their guest seemed sympathetic, Camilla treated Mandelson as an ally. Recalling election night, she told him that she had worn a red dress at dinner with friends, telling them, ‘I’m dressing for the future.’ Now the conversation drifted to the problems caused to the government by the recent messy divorce of the foreign secretary Robin Cook. After listening to Mandelson’s uncharitable judgement of his beleaguered opponent, Charles mentioned his prime concern. What, he asked, did ministers think about him, the Prince of Wales? In a reassuring manner, Mandelson replied that they saw him as hardworking and civilised, with a deep social conscience. He then grasped the nettle: ‘Some people have gained the impression you feel sorry for yourself, that you’re rather glum and dispirited. This has a dampening effect on how you are regarded.’
Charles reeled. But Mandelson had not finished, and turned to the prince’s relationship with Camilla: ‘You will need to be patient. Let things find their own level and not force the pace.’
Again Charles looked stunned. After Mandelson had left, he beseeched Camilla, ‘Is that true? Is that true?’
‘I don’t think any of us can cope with you asking that question over and over again for the next month,’ she replied.
‘Well, then,’ said Charles, ‘how about for just the next twenty minutes?’
Humour was often the saving grace between them. Camilla was Charles’s rock, and nothing would deter him from hosting a grand party to celebrate her fiftieth birthday in July 1997. The news aroused Diana’s bile and Robert Fellowes’s fury. According to reports from Buckingham Palace, Fellowes intended to ask the queen not to allow the event. That news encouraged Charles to order Fawcett to plan a spectacular celebration. While he would not remarry, the prince told his former brother-in-law, he would not abandon Camilla. On the contrary, he wanted the world to appreciate her as much as he did. He reported back to Camilla that Fellowes had surrendered.
The birthday party was successful, but the obstacles to progress were confirmed by a BBC poll after a TV show, You Decide. Sixty thousand viewers voted that Charles should not be crowned if he married Camilla. Few voted in his favour.
Undeterred, Charles wanted a final reckoning with Diana. In the war of books, he contemplated cooperating with Penny Junor, a well-known journalist sympathetic to his cause and familiar with some of Camilla’s Wiltshire set. Junor’s book would focus on presenting Camilla in a favourable light, but would also disparage Diana and portray Charles as the victim of a sick wife. To protect himself from the kind of recriminations that had followed Jonathan Dimbleby’s book, Charles decided that any cooperation with Junor should be channelled through Bolland.
He also agreed with Bolland’s idea that Camilla should host a fundraiser on 13 September for the National Osteoporosis Society (Camilla’s mother had suffered and died painfully from the condition). This would be the beginning of a five-year campaign to transform her from adulteress into a suitable wife for the heir to the throne – and future queen. Invitations were sent to 1,500 people, including pop stars and other celebrities. Everything seemed set.
In his wildest dreams, Charles could not have anticipated that a car crash in Paris would destroy his plan and place Camilla ‘in deep freeze’. As Robert Higdon summed up, ‘Suddenly, I discovered that I was working for the most hated man in the world.’
4
At 6 a.m. on Sunday, 31 August 1997, Higdon, calling from America, reached 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 Diana’s death, her former husband was paralysed by guilt. One of the queen’s courtiers would say that even his sons were critical of him for what had happened. Others would point to those same advisers and the royal family itself for encouraging the marriage, and then allowing it to veer out of control. No one had imagined that after a decade of crisis the royals’ plight could get so much worse.
Over the following days, the reports about Charles’s reactions were contradictory. His critics among the queen’s courtiers in Scotland recounted that he dithered about going to Paris until the queen said, ‘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, until the monarch was silenced by Robin Janvrin’s question, ‘Would you rather, Ma’am, that she came back in a Harrods van?’ The majority of the media, relying on Bolland, who was at Balmoral, reported that Charles had taken control. They either concealed or were ignorant of his reluctance to fly to Paris. As the media’s only ‘eyewitness’ source, ‘Bolland could spin what he liked,’ one journalist griped.
There was no precedent for managing the death of a global icon who was no longer a member of the royal family but was nevertheless the mother of the future heir to the throne. The same courtiers who had mismanaged the announcement of Charles and Diana’s separation in 1992 struggled to decide whether the flag over Buckingham Palace should, contrary to tradition, be flown at half-mast for Diana’s death, and whether she should be buried privately or after a state funeral in Westminster Abbey.
That Sunday morning, none of those involved – Robert Fellowes, Robin Janvrin, Charles Anson and Stephen Lamport – could judge if Diana’s death