Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail

One of his first initiatives was to visit a market in Croydon, in south London. After walking through the stalls eating jellied eels, he met locals in a pub. As with his earlier trip to Caernarvon, the media ignored his visit. On the same day, spectators and journalists besieged Diana at a Paris fashion show, and for twenty-four hours she once again dominated the world’s headlines. There were times in her years in the limelight when she was the most photographed person in the world.

Charles realised that in media terms it was no contest, and ordered Aylard 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 threw an object at the radio. The set was always being repaired.

The modern world continued to infuriate him. At a conference to promote the Prince’s Trust, the umbrella for all his charities, he was introduced to young people using computers, which he disliked. ‘Show His Highness how Google works,’ one girl was asked. ‘Tap in “Prince of Wales”.’ The first item to appear was about a Prince of Wales bar in Seattle, on America’s west coast. Charles did not appreciate the general laughter.

Highgrove was his sanctuary, although even there he was not totally safe. One day Bruce Shand, Camilla’s father, paid a visit. The Mayfair wine merchant told the prince that Aylard’s announcement that Charles would not marry again had upset both Camilla and himself. ‘You can’t treat my daughter like this,’ he said. ‘She’s neither fish nor fowl.’

The entire House of Windsor also seemed ranged against him. At Christmas 1996, Charles brooded over his suspicion that his brothers, Edward and Andrew, were plotting his downfall. Andrew, he believed, had been spreading poison about Camilla to the queen and Prince Philip; now, mindful of Diana’s prediction on Panorama that he would not be king, Charles convinced himself that Diana and Sarah, Andrew’s estranged wife, were hatching plans to replace him as heir by announcing that on the queen’s death or abdication Andrew would be Regent until William was eighteen, when he would take over. ‘Andrew wanted to be me,’ Charles later told Bolland. ‘I should have let him work with me. Now he’s unhelpful.’ As for Anne, his sister had aggravated the situation; instead of mediating between her siblings, she had criticised Charles for his adultery. ‘She’s one to talk,’ he said, irritated by her Goody Two-Shoes image. ‘Look at her past.’ Anne, he declared, had enjoyed an intimate friendship with Andrew Parker Bowles at the same time that Charles was with Camilla.

By the end of the Christmas holiday, Charles had decided to ignore his parents and continue his relationship with Camilla. Once his divorce was finalised, he would no longer suffer the indignity of meeting her only in secret. Succumbing to the public’s displeasure was beyond the price of duty. Convinced that the nation’s hostility would diminish if her virtues were explained, he telephoned Alan Kilkenny, the public relations consultant who in late 1994 had helped guide Camilla through her divorce, to ask for assistance.

Kilkenny had already been advising Charles to shed his ‘uncool’, fogeyish image. As usual with such requests, Charles expected Kilkenny to work without payment. The publicist might expect a Cartier clock embossed with Charles’s crest, but nothing more. The prince’s plan for Camilla’s divorce had been discussed at a meeting between himself, Dimbleby (present as a close friend), Camilla and her sister Annabel Elliot, Annabel’s husband Simon, Aylard and Kilkenny at the home of Patty and Charlie Palmer-Tomkinson. The Palmer-Tomkinsons lived seventy miles from Highgrove and were close friends, particularly after an incident in Switzerland in 1988, when an avalanche had swept Charles and his skiing party towards a cliff edge. Andrew Parker Bowles was not told about the summit.

The plan backfired when news of the Parker Bowleses’ divorce was leaked and private photographs of the family, stolen from their home, were published. Over the following months Kilkenny did his best, but by the middle of 1996 Charles feared that Camilla’s cause was being pushed ‘the wrong way and too hard’.

Undecided what to do next, he had lost confidence in Aylard and forged an even closer relationship with Fiona Shackleton. Educated at Benenden, the tall, blonde, loquacious lawyer had earned a reputation as one of Britain’s best and most expensive divorce specialists. Now she, Hilary and Nico Browne-Wilkinson agreed: the solution was to oust Aylard and to appoint a really first-class public relations consultant.

At the ensuing dinner in St James’s Palace, the three lawyers did not limit themselves to discussing Charles’s reputation. Hilary Browne-Wilkinson also spoke sympathetically about Camilla’s frustration that, while Diana basked in popular esteem, she was cast as the self-seeking adulteress. ‘I’m not this awful person,’ Camilla complained. ‘I just wish someone would do something about it.’

Over the previous fifteen years, she had been forced to reassess her opinion of her rival. At the beginning of Charles’s marriage, in 1981, she had called Diana a ‘mouse’. But that evening with the Browne-Wilkinsons she spoke about a ‘wretched woman’ who was creating havoc by refusing to conform to her society’s expectations in dignified silence.

Charles felt the same anger. While he spoke to the public about medicine, architecture, education and the environment and was generally ignored, Diana won global adulation by hugging children suffering from Aids, visiting hospices and sponsoring an anti-drugs campaign. ‘Clip her wings,’ Aylard had told the Foreign Office.

‘Good God, the games they play,’ was Diana’s reaction after an invitation from the British ambassador to Japan for her to visit the country had been cancelled. ‘We want to put her in her box,’ Aylard openly told Patrick Jephson, Diana’s private secretary.

Yet despite all attempts to reduce Diana’s glow, her star remained undimmed. And on her own Diana had been remarkably successful in frustrating Charles’s efforts to make Camilla acceptable. Repeatedly, she had called amenable journalists to pour scorn on her former husband and his mistress.

Agitated by her slurs, Charles and Camilla finally agreed that Mark Bolland should be appointed as soon as Charles’s divorce was finalised. Hilary Browne-Wilkinson intimated that she had secured the support of David English, the legendary editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail group. Bolland’s appointment was supported by Shackleton, who spoke out after having secured the approval of Robert Fellowes, not only the queen’s private secretary but Charles’s former brother-in-law. Prodded by Camilla, Charles agreed; Bolland would serve as his assistant private secretary under Aylard, and would also be Camilla’s adviser, friend and provider of the prize gossip she adored.

Entrusting his fate to someone like Bolland was the last throw of the dice for the supreme aristocrat. Charles’s big hope was that Bolland possessed the allure and the media contacts – both of which Kilkenny and Aylard had lacked – to mastermind the revolution he needed. Inevitably, his close friend Patty Palmer-Tomkinson wanted to vet the proposed appointment. Invited to the Browne-Wilkinsons’ for lunch in the extended kitchen of their terraced house in Islington, north London, Palmer-Tomkinson exposed the social gulf between the prince and his proposed saviour: ‘So where do you normally eat dinner?’ she asked with genuine bewilderment. Shortly after, Bolland’s appointment was formally approved. ‘Charles has introduced a cuckoo into the nest,’ Kilkenny would drily observe. ‘His brief is to get rid of Aylard.’

The wheels duly turned. Charles and Diana’s divorce was finalised on 28 August 1996. Days later, Bolland was introduced to Charles. ‘We need to improve my media image,’ said the prince. ‘To get me out of this hole.’ Reversing the Dimbleby blowback was the priority.

Bolland’s attraction for Charles was unsurprising. The prince was animated by new personalities, especially a self-confident, streetwise soothsayer. For his part, Bolland offered loyalty and true friendship, especially to Camilla. She quickly passed on one observation she had learned early about her partner’s limitations. ‘Never push Charles too hard,’ she advised. ‘Always remember his terrible childhood, and how he was bullied at school and by his parents.’

Bolland understood his terms of employment, but first he had to assess the people close to the prince. He was struck by the extent to which Charles disliked critical advice and surrounded himself with sycophants. Chief among them was Michael Fawcett, the son of an accountant from Orpington. Officially, Fawcett was Charles’s principal valet, but in reality he was his closest aide and most trusted comforter. Known as ‘the Fixer’ and ‘the Enabler’, he seemed omnipresent, loading Charles’s guns at Sandringham, wrapping his Christmas presents and caring for Camilla. An indispensable perfectionist, he smoothed his master’s existence. Unseen by outsiders, he also dominated a mendacious war zone competing against Paul Burrell, his opposite number in Diana’s court. Employed initially at Buckingham Palace in 1976, the nominal butler Burrell had next worked for Charles and Diana at Highgrove, and after the separation moved with Diana to Kensington Palace. Ever since, he had become a confidential accomplice in Diana’s life, witnessing her extreme moods and secret affairs.

Of the two, Michael Fawcett’s position was the more uncertain, because Richard Aylard was plotting his removal. Bolland took a different view. ‘Fawcett is a good and decent man,’ he concluded after a short time, opting to conceal his antagonism towards Aylard, who he recognised was under threat.

‘I know why you’re here,’ said Sandy Henney, the deputy press officer at St James’s Palace, on the day Bolland was formally appointed, 12 May 1996. ‘It’s to make Camilla Parker Bowles acceptable.’ Bolland smiled. He had agreed with Charles that this often unkempt, horsey countrywoman should be transformed into the prince’s future wife, dressed by the best couturiers.

The impetus for Charles’s instructions to Bolland often followed an agitated telephone conversation with Camilla. ‘You know, Mark,’ Charles would say, in what became a familiar routine, ‘I think people should be told about …’ The public should be aware, he complained, of his family’s demand that he abandon Camilla. The pressure on him, he continued, was unrelenting. On one occasion he read out a letter from his father urging him not to marry Camilla; Bolland was told to leak its contents, and Richard Kay of the Daily Mail, so often the royals’ first port of call, was duly briefed. Bolland also briefed the Daily Telegraph that after his divorce Charles would remain celibate, and would never see Camilla again.

Disseminating that canard served several purposes. In their eagerness to stay close to Charles, few of his old circle welcomed Camilla’s proximity to the throne. Soon after Bolland’s appointment, Nicholas Soames, Berkshire landowner Gerald Ward, the Palmer-Tomkinsons and Charles’s other close friends visited him at St James’s Palace to ask about Charles’s relations both with other members of the royal family and with Camilla. The ‘three in the marriage’ scenario painted by Diana, they said, was not the whole story. There had always been other women in Charles’s life, including Eva O’Neill, a statuesque German blonde, and of course the Australian Dale ‘Kanga’ Tryon, whom he would visit as he drove between London and Gloucestershire (on which occasions Kanga’s husband conveniently made himself scarce). Charles, they said, was unlikely to marry Camilla.

Bolland was not yet in a position to judge his employer’s intentions. He quickly saw that Camilla, like so many hunting women, was fun and fearless. Her romantic adventures as a teenager were no secret, nor was her unusual relationship with her husband Andrew. The husky captain in the Royal Horse Guards, ‘the Blues’, was famous for his affairs, and so had been unconcerned about Camilla’s first meeting Charles in the early 1970s, before their marriage. In Andrew and Camilla’s banter – she was prone to exaggeration – she had laughed about the prince being an emotionally immature boy suitable for a fun fling until, seven years into her relationship with Parker Bowles, she persuaded the captain to propose to her.

Their engagement was presented by Charles, through Jonathan Dimbleby, as the missed opportunity of his life. At the time he was serving as a Royal Navy officer in the Caribbean. Ignoring the reality that Camilla neither loved him nor was interested in marriage other than to Parker Bowles, he lamented not having proposed before his rival. ‘The surge of raw feelings,’ wrote Dimbleby, ‘reduced him to tears of impotence and regret, the more severe because he was lonely and so far from home.’ (Twenty-three years later, Camilla’s biographer would claim that Charles had written to her one week before her wedding, urging her not to marry – but no letter has been produced.)

From the outset, the Parker Bowles’s marriage was unusual. Army officers expected their wives to play their part in regimental life, tolerate regular relocations of home, and maintain appropriate standards in dress and housekeeping. Among her husband’s fellow officers, Camilla was known to avoid all that, not least because, as he admitted to his friends, ‘she’s bone idle’. Andrew Parker Bowles circumnavigated their untidy country home by living in London during the week.

‘Camilla was unhappy,’ observed a friend, ‘because Andrew was always putting her down.’ Sensing her disdain for army life, Parker Bowles avoided any permanent relocations abroad, not least because he was conducting successive affairs in London. By 1979, after he had been posted to Rhodesia as the last military liaison officer before independence, Camilla started seeing Charles. Few were shocked. Her family was known for adultery, desertion and divorce, and Parker Bowles made no protest. On the contrary, he preferred a bachelor’s life in Rhodesia while his wife enjoyed Wiltshire – and Wales. For Charles, Camilla was a relief after Amanda Knatchbull, Earl Mountbatten’s granddaughter, had rejected his proposal of marriage.

At the time, Mrs Parker Bowles was the perfect match for Charles. Sexually experienced, she was content to accommodate herself to his demands and his schedule – polo, shooting, fishing and his royal duties. Most of all, she showed genuine interest in everything he said. Her husband only became aware how far the relationship had progressed when in 1980 he invited his wife to Salisbury, Rhodesia’s capital. One week later, she welcomed Charles as the queen’s representative at the country’s independence ceremonies. While Parker Bowles spent most days in a helicopter in the company of an attractive American woman photographer (and was also beginning an affair with Charlotte Hambro, the married sister of Nicholas Soames), gossip columnists hinted that Camilla was the perfect escort for Charles. Typical of the risqué nature of their social set, Charlotte’s husband Richard was the brother of Rupert Hambro, Camilla’s first serious boyfriend. Tactful understanding precluded anyone frowning over Andrew’s behaviour. ‘Always one of the lads, but not a lad himself,’ said a fellow officer with a smile. Parker Bowles, promoted to major, may have resented the suggestion that Charles and Camilla had flown out to Rhodesia together and had isolated themselves in Charles’s private quarters on the plane, amid sniggers that they were joining the mile-high club, but generally her affair was acceptable so long as it remained discreet.

Charles broke that rule after all three had returned from Africa and met again at the annual Cirencester Ball. Parker Bowles watched the prince kiss Camilla passionately while dancing with her. ‘HRH is very fond of my wife,’ he told friends flatly, ‘and she appears very fond of him.’ Parker Bowles’s circle assumed that he was thrilled that Charles was in love with his wife. Their marriage could continue so long as the façade did not jeopardise his good relations with the queen, and especially the queen mother. Invitations from Buckingham Palace for shooting and fishing holidays, and hospitality at Ascot and Cheltenham, were invaluable. Nor was he perturbed when in 1980 Charles bought Highgrove, near Parker Bowles’s family home in Gloucestershire. For their part, Charles and Camilla felt no guilt about their affair until February 1981, when he announced his engagement to Diana.

Both Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles individually invited Diana for lunches. Camilla’s much-publicised meeting with Charles’s fiancée took place at a well-known London restaurant. By contrast, Andrew’s lunch, at the Turf Club, was discreet. Both were diplomatic successes. Thereafter, Charles and Diana stayed for weekends with the Parker Bowleses. On one occasion, in front of others, Andrew told Charles, ‘Diana is the girl for you.’ Charles had nodded in appreciation, and as a signal of their friendship replied, ‘You must tell me if I’m ever pompous.’

Andrew believed that, with the advent of Diana, his wife had decided to break off her relationship with Charles. When invited by mutual friends for dinner, she would ask, ‘Are the Waleses coming?’ If the answer was yes, she would refuse the invitation. ‘It’s easier if we don’t meet,’ she told her husband. Some were suspicious about such protests, especially after Diana’s denunciation of Camilla in 1992 and her allegation that Camilla had slept with Charles on the night before their wedding. Somewhat bewildered, Parker Bowles asked his friends whether they recalled that night. All would honestly reply that Camilla returned to the barracks with him from the party at Buckingham Palace. The story had in fact been invented by Stephen Barry, another of Charles’s disgruntled junior valets.

By the mid-1980s, the truth had become murky. Charles’s relationship with Diana collapsed after the birth of Harry in 1984. Clearly unsuited to his young wife, the prince sought comfort and advice, especially from Camilla. In 1986 Andrew Parker Bowles began a passionate affair with Rosemary Pitman, the wife of a friend and fellow officer. He had finally found true happiness, but, to protect his young children and his army career, he resisted divorce. In parallel, Camilla’s relationship with the heir to the throne intensified. ‘Charles,’ Diana told Richard Kay, ‘is obsessed by Camilla’s tits, and I haven’t got tits as big as Camilla’s.’

Although Kay was close to Diana, he was simultaneously forging a good relationship with Mark Bolland, an advantage to Charles when, in August 1996, on the eve of his decree nisi, the News of the World published a blurred shot showing Charles and Camilla in a garden in south Wales. The caption complimented Camilla on her appearance, because she was smiling rather than scowling: the implication was obvious. Shortly after, Charles took Camilla to a performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon. Journalists were waiting. The tip-off, Charles assumed, had come from Bolland. By this time, just a few weeks into Bolland’s new job, Camilla was speaking about the next steps to him, Hilary Browne-Wilkinson and Fiona Shackleton up to six times a day. Besides gaining favourable mentions in the media, Camilla said, her priority was Richard Aylard’s removal.

That, Bolland realised, was not Charles’s immediate concern. His employer’s dominant need was to unburden himself about his feelings towards his family and about the harm Diana had done to him. His young ex-wife, he complained, was badly educated, without any O- or A-Levels, and lacked self-discipline. Nor, he added, did she have any interest in theatre, poetry, music or opera. He seemed to have forgotten that in fact Diana loved opera and ballet, and played the piano daily. Her evenings at the pop concerts he so scorned were to raise money for charity.

Such inconsistencies were irrelevant to Charles. All he demanded was that none of his derogatory comments about Diana’s sanity should be quoted to the public. In the narrative he wanted Bolland to create, Camilla was perfect, while he was suffering the burden of dutifully going through life without the woman he loved. Bolland was unsure. Was Charles’s relationship with Camilla really the big love story, as Diana made out? Or had two middle-aged people, at the tail end of their marriages, found each other a convenient staging post? Either way, he was certain that his employer was not ideal husband material, and suspected that he could never live permanently with any woman. Even Michael Fawcett warned him against forcing Camilla onto Charles.

Bolland decided that Fawcett’s doubts could be discounted. Jealous of others, the valet wanted to be the only person in Charles’s life. The reality about Charles and Camilla’s relationship could be heard on the Camillagate tape. Charles’s reference to being Camilla’s tampon was not just unusual, but was calculated to gain her sympathy. Being treated as a child suited him. ‘My role in life is to support you and love you,’ she cooed. When Charles told her, ‘I need you several times a week,’ she replied, ‘I need you all the week, all the time.’ If the young Diana was the mouse, Camilla was catnip. Charles would always return to Camilla because she gave him what he needed emotionally, and was a skilled mistress. The twist was the layers of deceit on which their relationship had been built: the lies uttered by his staff, those assigned to protect them, and the friends who provided houses for their trysts.

In September 1996, during the prime minister’s annual visit to the queen at Balmoral, John Major described the public’s deep unease about Charles’s campaign to promote Camilla. The heir to the throne, the beleaguered prime minister said, should cool his romance with his old flame.

Unspoken was Major’s irritation at Charles’s lack of self-discipline when at the same time he was publicly criticising the government’s mismanagement of mad cow disease, which was causing havoc for farmers and the rural tourist industry. Charles, Major hinted, always blamed others but never himself. After a decade of scandal, many in Westminster suggested that the monarchy would benefit from a period of silence. But by this time Major was a diminished figure, certain to lose the imminent general election, and he proved too weak to influence his royal hosts.

Shortly after Major left Balmoral, Charles and other members of the family congregated for a meeting of the Way Ahead Group, an informal meeting held once a year between palace officials and the queen and her children. Under Prince Philip’s leadership, the royals were encouraged to discuss fundamental changes by treating the monarchy as a business. Invited to observe the royals’ discussion were Fellowes, Aylard and Robin Janvrin, as well as David Ogilvy, the Earl of Airlie, a close friend of the queen whom she always trusted to deliver unpalatable truths. Also participating was Michael Peat, a senior accountant appointed in 1990 to reform Buckingham Palace’s finances.

As the meeting got under way, the queen and Prince Philip listened to their officials’ proposals to reduce the number of royals living on the civil list’s annual budget of £55 million (drawn from the Crown Estate’s £94.6 million profits in 1995); to put some distance between Charles and embarrassing members of the extended family; and to consider whether a female child could become the first in the line of succession. During the discussion, Charles spoke about modernising the monarchy, but remained silent about the contrast between the queen’s frugal lifestyle and his own.

Also unmentioned was the uncertainty in Charles’s household. His divorce may have been finalised, but the prospect of his appearing in public with Camilla, let alone marrying her, was inconceivable to those at the meeting. Palace officials spoke only about rehabilitating the prince as fit to marry and as acceptable to be king-in-waiting by the time of the queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002.

That timetable was unacceptable to Charles. The first obstacle was Aylard. ‘My job in the beginning,’ Bolland recalled, ‘was to remove the antediluvian creatures who fuelled the War of the Waleses. Sour palace courtiers like Aylard and Fellowes, the grey suits who ordered royals to disappear.’