Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail. Tom Bower
the monarchy, and perhaps even jeopardised it.
By the time Charles had accompanied Diana’s body back to London, the four advisers still underestimated the scale of the public’s distress. The prime minister’s description of Diana in his TV address as ‘the people’s princess’, compared with the queen’s seclusion in Balmoral, increased the nation’s dissatisfaction. As the outrage grew, the queen’s advisers searched forlornly for solutions. Unexpectedly, they found themselves relying on Tony Blair.
The prime minister had placed himself in an awkward position, as over the previous months he had built a rapport with Diana. Blair’s delusion about a special relationship, born of his desire to politicise the princess as New Labour, had irritated Charles, but he enjoyed receiving telephone calls during which she would comment on a photograph or one of his statements: according to him, they showed that ‘she had a complete sense of what we were trying to achieve’. Sympathetic to her challenge to the Windsors’ traditionalism, Blair was unconcerned that Diana gave the queen, as he wrote in his memoirs, ‘good cause to be worried’. Yet, in the days after Diana’s death, he and his Downing Street aides helped the family and their advisers overcome unfortunate obstacles.
Advised by Robert Fellowes, the queen did not adjust her principles. The monarchy, she knew, although buffeted by challenges, would survive if she focused on reaching the agreed destination, namely a funeral that satisfied the nation. By contrast, Charles’s inner circle was conflicted. Just when the public longed for him to lead by example, he was indecisive. ‘Why do you have to make everything a matter of principle?’ Fellowes had once exclaimed to a man who even in mourning considered the world was being unfair to him. To Charles, Fellowes and his family were especially intolerable. Fellowes’s wife, Jane Spencer, was Diana’s older sister. Diana’s eldest sister, Sarah McCorquodale, had been widely reported as Charles’s official girlfriend in the late 1970s, but her time as his accepted companion was terminated after an indiscreet remark she made to a journalist. The combination of those old antagonisms and Charles’s torrid relationship with Diana complicated Blair’s discussions with the queen and Fellowes.
It did not help that the prime minister did not fully understand the conflicts within the royal family. Speaking with limited deference, he saw his duty as ‘to protect the monarchy’ from the public’s rage. The courtiers’ initial gratitude turned into suspicion. Blair did not understand that governments do not own the monarchy. Thirteen years later, he admitted that he had presumptuously lectured the queen: ‘I talked less sensitively than I should have about the need to learn lessons.’
Despite the heated emotions, a state funeral was belatedly agreed for 6 September, bringing the immediate frenzy to an end. The first-class post across the country was held back for an hour to await the issuing of two thousand invitations to the grand event. When the deadline was missed, the nation’s entire fleet of Post Office vans was commandeered for their special delivery.
On the eve of the funeral, as thousands of grieving spectators bedded down along the route and outside the Abbey, the only unresolved detail was whether Charles and his sons would walk behind Diana’s coffin on its one-hour-and-forty-seven-minute journey from St James’s Palace. During an earlier discussion with Blair’s aides, Prince Philip, speaking on the phone from Balmoral, had exploded about the spin doctors’ insensitivity: ‘Fuck off. We are talking about two boys who have lost their mother.’ The question was finally resolved over the family dinner on the night before the funeral. To break the deadlock, Philip said to his grandsons, ‘Well, if you don’t go, I won’t.’ The boys decided to walk behind the coffin with their grandfather, their father, and Diana’s brother Charles, the ninth Earl Spencer.
While the Windsors debated, Charles Spencer visited the Abbey to rehearse the words he would deliver from the pulpit the next day. He had written an outspoken rebuke to the royal family, but after spotting a lurking palace official he decided to remain silent. His idea that Tony Blair rather than Prince Charles should read the lesson had been rejected, which made him only the more determined. At the funeral the following morning, his accusations against an astonished royal family divided the nation. Some were outraged at Spencer’s impudence, while others praised his courage. The art historian Roy Strong, taking his cue from the public’s loud applause which could be heard inside the Abbey, wrote that the people ‘want a monarchy but they want it human and compassionate. The present cast suddenly looked past its sell-by date.’
Spencer’s feelings of enmity towards Charles continued during Diana’s interment at Althorp, the Spencer family home, at the end of the day. Afterwards, according to Paul Burrell, the earl’s speech was being replayed on television in the room where the prince was offered tea. As the ex-brothers-in-law talked together, Charles volunteered that while Spencer had inherited his title as a young man, he himself had already had to wait decades before becoming king. When details of the conversation appeared in the press, Spencer was accused of leaking the exchange, and Burrell of fabrication because there was allegedly no television in the room.
By the following morning, Spencer’s denunciation of the Windsors was overshadowed by the testimony of those who recalled that Diana had accepted Harrods owner Mohamed Fayed’s invitation to holiday in France only after her brother, citing potential media intrusion, had withdrawn his agreement that she and her children could spend the summer on the Althorp estate. The desperate mother, according to her admirers, had been abandoned by both her families.
Charles was more melancholic than ever. His popularity rating was stuck at 4 per cent. Critics mocked him without appreciating his insight into the truth. He was receiving, he complained, no credit for carrying the intolerable burden of duty to serve the irredeemably ‘awful’ monarchy, and feared the public’s reaction when he finally emerged from his seclusion at Highgrove. Determined to believe that life without guilt was possible, he decided that his task was to resurrect himself and his lineage. Buoyed by the solid support he always received from the queen mother, he would never renounce the crown. While the queen offered continuity, dignity and traditional values, his fate depended on somehow using Diana’s death as a catalyst to overcome his unpopularity.
Disliking Blair’s announcement that the royal family intended to ‘change and modernise’, conjuring up visions of a Scandinavian bicycling monarch, Charles was seeking a formula for reinvention without abandoning the trappings and advantages of royalty. During discussions at Highgrove, he asked his staff, ‘How can we get the public to understand what we do? We need to be more accessible. But we must still keep our distance, and must not be like the public.’ In reply, Tom Shebbeare, the chief executive of the Prince’s Trust, suggested that Charles should speak publicly about Diana. Charles frowned. He shared his family’s anger that his ex-wife was being mythologised despite being, in his words, ‘a nutter’.
Dignity demanded that the battle of the Waleses should be buried. Other than uttering praise of Diana, Charles would remain silent. Simultaneously, any activity that risked him being portrayed as the ‘playboy prince’ was to end, and the campaign to have Camilla made more acceptable suspended. ‘Emphasise service, one’s duties and contribution,’ Charles told his staff. The media should be directed towards his various initiatives to do good for the country. ‘And please keep pushing them,’ he ordered. In parallel, Stephen Lamport was told to ask Peter Mandelson and Anji Hunter, the prime minister’s adviser in Downing Street, to arrange for Blair to make speeches in praise of Charles.
‘Nothing happens by chance,’ Mark Bolland concurred. ‘Everything has to be engineered.’
Mandelson duly briefed Jon Snow, the Channel 4 news presenter, that it was Charles’s initiative to fly the flags at half-mast, and that only after he had argued his case with the queen and Robert Fellowes was Charles allowed to organise ‘a full royal funeral at Westminster’. The resulting impression, said a satisfied Bolland after Snow’s ‘exclusive’ broadcast, was ‘Charles at the helm’. As requested, Tony Blair added his blessing during a television interview, stating that despite the Church’s disquiet about his divorce, Charles would not only be king, but also the supreme governor of the Anglican Church.
‘The world is run by some very nasty, powerful people,’ Charles had written to Jonathan Dimbleby. ‘Enemies of mine’, he warned, would become