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 was a tipping point for the monarchy. While the public’s perception of Diana could not be ignored, the four officials focused on protecting the queen. Any misstep would have embarrassed 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
