Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail. Tom Bower
asbestos – both once hailed as scientific wonders but eventually proven to have potentially fatal side-effects – as an omen for GM crops.
Forewarned about the prince’s attack, Blair told Alastair Campbell, ‘We’re going to have running troubles with Charles because on many issues he’s more traditional than the queen.’ In the hope of securing an armistice, the two drove to Highgrove in the September sunshine. By then, Blair’s acerbic spokesman had become hostile towards Charles. The begrudging agreement by Highgrove’s staff that Campbell could use the swimming pool – which he found ‘a bit manky and with too many leaves floating around’ – did little to improve his temper. The visit, he declared, was ‘a journey back so far back in time it felt extra-planetary’.
After his swim, Campbell was offered lunch in the staff canteen. Inside the house, Blair was sharing a meal with his host, who for over fifteen years had championed a number of unfashionable causes, a category which until recently had included environmental protection. Ignoring Tory ministers’ mockery, he had warned about the failure to combat acid rain, protested against farmers burning straw, demanded a ban on CFC gases to protect the ozone layer, forecast ‘the problems and dangers of possibly catastrophic climate changes through air pollution’, warned about plastic bags and bottles polluting the seas, and lamented the mass extinction of species as a result of the loss of tropical forests. All his campaigns, Charles believed, had been dismissed by lethargic politicians and ignorant officials. Almost without exception, they had ignored the threats to mankind. The latest of that breed, he suspected, was Tony Blair.
Dealing with the royal family was difficult for any politician. To have a direct conversation with someone with unusual preoccupations was inevitably uphill, but a dialogue with Charles was especially perilous. The various self-deprecating cartoons of the prince in the guest lavatory did not signal democracy in the household, but rather the owner’s vanity. Blair understandably wanted to know in advance where any discussion would end. There was no answer. His caution proved justified when four weeks later a newspaper published an account of their meeting. Blaming the ‘national disgrace’ of using unproven technology for ruining farmers in ‘an arms race against Nature’, Charles publicly urged Britons to boycott GM crops – or, as environmental campaigners described them, ‘Frankenstein foods’.
The indiscretion surprised Blair. Not only did Charles explicitly oppose government policy, but, as Mark Bolland witnessed, ‘he didn’t care’ about a public disagreement. Far from upholding traditional royal impartiality, Charles thought only about his ‘duty’, discounted the government’s problems and ignored the danger of his overt prejudice. Blair asked Peter Mandelson to caution the prince, and in a telephone call from New York, Mandelson, who believed that Charles’s views ‘were anti-scientific and irresponsible in the light of food shortages in the developing world’, told the prince that his remarks were ‘unhelpful’. He congratulated himself that his royal hearer did ‘tone down his public interventions on the subject’, but his success was temporary.
Charles now switched his attention to Camilla. The discretion about their relationship, he decided, had to end. Camilla wanted to be seen with Charles at the theatre, go on holiday with him openly, and establish a bond with his sons; but a relationship akin to marriage could be considered only after the public had accepted her. Her principal opponents remained the queen and the queen mother. Neither would allow her to be in the same room with them, yet both welcomed her ex-husband to receptions, race meetings and house parties. To show their affection for him, a palace official had lobbied that he should be promoted from colonel to brigadier, and appointed director of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps. Both suggestions were approved. In protest, the army’s senior vet resigned, a rare exception to the universal enchantment with the new brigadier.
Charles could not understand the queen’s sympathy for Diana and her antagonism towards Camilla. After all, Diana’s theatrics in the media had damaged the family, while Camilla had remained utterly discreet. Why, he asked, could his mother not approve of a traditional Englishwoman who loved the countryside and horses? Camilla’s case had been raised by the Earl of Carnarvon, the queen’s racehorse trainer and close friend. His efforts as a go-between having proved unsuccessful, he switched to the queen’s side. Princess Margaret had also tried on Charles’s behalf, but her sister had replied that she wanted neither to meet nor to talk about Camilla. Few understood the reason for her disapproval: the queen was nervous that the character exposed in the Camillagate tapes was that of a shrewd mistress. ‘Oh darling, I love you,’ Camilla had gushed. The much less savvy Diana never made such over-the-top declarations. Carried away by a gust of tenderness towards himself, Charles complained that neither Diana nor his mother ever sympathised with his needs.
Exasperated by what he termed an intolerable situation, and egged on by Princess Margaret, he approached his mother late one night while he was staying at Balmoral and asked that she soften her antagonism so he could live openly with Camilla. He assumed that the queen, who rarely interfered or directly forbade anything, even the Dimbleby project, would not object.
But on that evening she had had several Martinis, and to Charles’s surprise she replied forcefully: she would not condone his adultery, nor forgive Camilla for not leaving Charles alone to allow his marriage to recover. She vented her anger that he had lied about his relationship with what she called ‘that wicked woman’, and added, ‘I want nothing to do with her.’ Met with a further hostile silence, Charles fled the room. In his fragile state, her phrase – ‘that wicked woman’ – was unforgettable. Tearfully, he telephoned Camilla. She in turn sought consolation from Bolland, who later received a call from Charles with a verbatim report of his conversation with his mother. Shortly after the confrontation, an opinion poll found that 88 per cent of Britons opposed their marriage.
Not everything was bad news. Good fortune had pushed disagreeable characters to one side. ‘Kanga’ Tryon, Charles’s Australian former girlfriend, had died suddenly after a period of declining health, so removing one potential source of mischief; and Charles Spencer, Diana’s brother and an outspoken critic of Charles, had damaged his own reputation with an acrimonious divorce.
With two irritants removed, Charles decided to defy the queen and take a small but critical step towards Camilla’s acceptance. On 12 June 1998 he introduced Camilla to William at St James’s Palace. On the eve of his sixteenth birthday, his son assumed that the twenty-minute meeting would remain private, but in what turned out to be a genuine mistake Camilla’s assistant leaked it. In the tabloid storm that followed, Camilla found herself implicated in Diana’s death. To fight back, she and Bolland arranged that Stuart Higgins, a former editor of the Sun, would write a flattering article in the Sunday Times. At the recent Way Ahead Group meeting, Higgins wrote, the royal family had agreed as a priority to normalise Camilla’s position in the royal household. That was inaccurate: she had not even been mentioned during that summer’s meeting. But the distortion, approved by Charles, chimed with his campaign during the weeks before his fiftieth birthday. In Downing Street no one was fooled. Alex Allan, the prime minister’s private secretary, had written about the obstacles that faced Charles and Camilla, and concluded that nuptials were unlikely.
Disregarding the resentment towards them, Charles, Camilla and Bolland met at Highgrove to construct another campaign. The first hurdle was to demythologise Diana by radically changing her image and portraying her as a manipulative hysteric. The vehicle was to be Penny Junor’s book. The author’s plan had changed since Diana’s death. Instead of focusing on Camilla, Junor intended to shatter the image of the late Princess of Wales as the put-upon innocent and to cast Charles as a helpless victim, with neither parents nor friends to provide support. The publication of Charles: Victim or Villain? was timed to coincide with his birthday in November. Enriched by dramatic disclosures, the book described Diana as ‘sick, irrational, unreasonable and miserable’ on account of her bulimia, and therefore an unbalanced and unfaithful woman who compelled Charles to return to his true love. ‘[Charles] had to put up with years of tantrums and abuse,’ wrote Junor. He ‘cut his friends out of his life at Diana’s insistence, and even gave away the dog he loved in an effort to make Diana happy’.
Junor questioned Diana’s sanity by quoting a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, arrived at by scouring the internet, for an explanation