and highly-polished shoes – all carefully folded between tissue paper for the journey. Every night Fawcett prepared Charles’s bedroom with masterly attention to detail. With familiarity spawned by living close to his employer since 1981, he could anticipate his employer’s requests without any order being issued. He would discreetly replenish the royal lavatory paper, clean up vomit, wash the royal boxer shorts by hand (salacious gossips on the Sun credited Fawcett with revealing that Charles’s underwear had to be specially adapted because he was so well endowed), guarded his liaisons, bowed to his tantrums, tested the royal boiled eggs and always spoke in deferential tones. At each of Charles’s homes he supervised every detail, ensuring that the gravel on the drive was raked, the paintings hanging precisely, the cushions properly positioned, the kitchens supplied with organic food from the prince’s favourite suppliers, the elaborate flower arrangements refreshed daily, and the dining table covered with the appropriate linen tablecloth, silver cutlery and candlesticks.
Some of those who witnessed Fawcett’s outbursts of fury when he spotted an error considered him a thug, but Charles embraced this one servant who, in his eyes, could do no wrong. Most royals have a weakness for a special retainer. The queen’s was Angela Kelly, her personal assistant; Queen Victoria’s her beloved attendant John Brown. Charles would confess, ‘I can manage without just about anyone except Michael.’ Operating like a general, Fawcett was given the keys to the front and back doors of Charles’s homes – and control over his life.
Shortly before leaving for Hong Kong, Fawcett was told about an important dinner party that would be hosted by his master during the trip. Charles was focusing on his charities, for which he hoped to raise money from American billionaires. ‘Show your good side,’ said Mark Bolland. Searching for a new fundraiser, the prince asked Geoffrey Kent for a recommendation. Kent had heard about Robert Higdon from Alecko Papamarkou, a Greek banker. At the time Higdon was accompanying Margaret Thatcher on her speaking engagements, having been recruited by Thatcher’s son Mark, who knew of the American’s successful work for Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
In July 1995, Colin Amory, an architect and sometime adviser to Charles, invited Higdon to meet him and Geoffrey Kent at Claridge’s. Higdon arrived with the billionaire American publisher Kip Forbes, who was said to have first met him in a Red Lobster restaurant in Florida. Over a drink, Amory and Kent told Higdon that the Prince of Wales’s Foundation in America, which had been created two years earlier, needed a professional fundraiser.
‘I have met Charles,’ said Higdon, ‘when he and Diana came to the White House to meet the Reagans.’
Soon after, Kent asked Higdon as a trial to arrange a dinner with potential donors.
‘What’s your platform?’ asked Higdon.
‘The Prince of Wales’s interest in architecture,’ replied Kent.
‘No one’s interested in that over here,’ said the American bluntly. ‘I raised money for the Frick, but for the prince there’s nothing to discuss.’
Kent managed to overcome Higdon’s objections, and a dinner party was arranged in New York for people who had previously ‘written a cheque for Charles’. To Higdon’s surprise, 150 people accepted the invitation, including members of the Rockefeller family, and the event was reported in the city newspapers’ society columns. ‘I raised about £75,000,’ said Higdon. ‘I was the money whore.’
Delighted by the evening’s success, Charles asked Kent to sign up the American for further fundraising. ‘I’d need to meet Charles again,’ replied Higdon. Before long he was in the prince’s office at St James’s Palace. ‘We chatted as long-lost friends,’ said Higdon. With Lamport sitting in, ‘I bluntly told Charles what would and wouldn’t work.’
Lamport interrupted: ‘You cannot speak to His Royal Highness like that.’
‘Lamport didn’t like me or want me to help,’ Higdon concluded, ‘but Charles trusted me.’
In January 1997 Charles formally asked Higdon to run his foundation under Kent’s chairmanship. Within weeks the new recruit encountered obstruction: ‘The gatekeepers wouldn’t let me speak to Charles. Fawcett and others were fighting against me. I saw no good.’ Eventually he met Charles for a third time, at Birkhall, the queen mother’s house on the Balmoral estate. ‘You won’t get a dime for your architecture,’ he told Charles, ‘because you’ve 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
