by the Foreign Office to meet Nelson Mandela.
‘Speak to the media and be friendly,’ Mark Bolland advised Charles.
He also told Robert Higdon, ‘He wants to raise money while he’s there.’
‘You’re mad,’ replied Higdon, ‘but I’ll try.’
Higdon approached Mary Oppenheimer, scion of the diamond-mining family, to host a dinner for thirty people, including a number of South Africa’s billionaires, prepared to contribute to Charles’s Global Foundation. ‘It was always about money,’ recalled Higdon, who was delighted by the event’s success and by Charles’s praise. Some years later, he revised his opinion: ‘The atmosphere to extract donations from the guests was very awkward.’
Media coverage of Diana’s son happily meeting South Africa’s hero, who had also invited the Spice Girls, liberated Charles. On the return flight to Britain, he offered journalists his new manifesto: ‘Tradition is a living thing but to be so it has to be made contemporary in each generation. That is always the great challenge.’ A few days later, a South African friend of Charles’s wrote reporting Mandela’s admiration of him. ‘How wonderful,’ he replied. ‘Why do foreigners praise me but my countrymen never share that feeling?’
He believed that Peter Mandelson could provide the solution. Their relationship had strengthened in the weeks after Diana’s death. Reflecting on Mandelson’s recent defeat in elections to the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, Charles commiserated: ‘It only goes to show, I suppose, what a ghastly, cut-throat business politics is. The throwing of knives into other people’s backs seems to be a pretty prevalent blood sport and it is not a pretty sight. But then, you would perhaps expect the representative of an “outmoded” hereditary organisation to make such an observation.’ He added that he wrote as ‘a person who, despite the inevitable outer carapace which has to be worn to confront the world, nevertheless has a rather vulnerable and sensitive inner core’.
Mandelson was an obvious guest for one of Charles’s ‘culture weekends’ at Sandringham that autumn. Others invited (the guest lists for many of these weekends were orchestrated by the philanthropist Drue Heinz) included Tate director Nicholas Serota, novelist Angela Huth, barrister Ann Mallalieu, Leo Rothschild and Stephen Fry. Clever, funny and endlessly flattering, Fry had an erudite wit that delighted Charles. ‘No one complains on his deathbed,’ Fry told the guests, ‘“Oh God, I wish I had spent more time in the office.”’
‘You’ll need black tie and white tie, clothes for walking,’ one guest was advised. Asked about attending church on Sunday, the official replied, ‘There’s no obligation to go, but if you don’t you’ll be ignored during the following lunch.’
All of this was in the spirit of the royal family. Sandringham formality had been inherited by the queen from her father and grandparents – even on Christmas Day she expected perfect behaviour from her grandchildren. Charles’s literary weekends were no different. Although he had not engaged with intellectuals during his time as a student at Cambridge, he enjoyed their company. ‘Of course, I know very little about this,’ he would say in a self-deprecating manner after mentioning paintings he had bought by little-known artists. His guests would depart on the Monday morning with a sense of privilege and memories of a remarkable performance by their host.
Charles had remained silent about Camilla’s absence. She was, he knew, suffering under the strain. ‘She’s a wreck,’ he told a friend, and half-joked to Bolland that in the past he would have been sent into exile and Camilla committed to a dungeon. All he wanted, he told those whom he regularly telephoned, now including Mandelson, was the chance to go out in public with the woman he loved.
By Christmas, the worst was over. The trip to South Africa had placated some critics. In one poll, 61 per cent of those who responded said they were satisfied with Charles, compared to 46 per cent before Diana’s death and that 4 per cent immediately after. The dissatisfaction rate had fallen from 42 to 29 per cent. These figures restored some sense of Charles being master of his destiny. His advisers spoke about rebuilding his reputation after a doomed decade. In the new era, he anticipated that an open relationship with Camilla would be possible, despite other polls that showed about 90 per cent of Britons still opposed their marriage.
One obstacle was Robert Fellowes. In a court corroded by inertia, he and the queen were struggling to estimate the damage caused by the ten-year crisis. Neither Charles nor Camilla saw any possibility of a normal life together unless the queen approved, and that was impossible until Fellowes was no longer there to advise her.
Charles’s machine went into action. The poison was planted in the Mail on Sunday. On 2 November 1997 the newspaper published an attack under the headline ‘Another Royal Farce … Carry On Sir Robert’. The article, by Peter Dobbie, a regular columnist, accused Fellowes of being prejudiced against Charles for wanting to live with Camilla. Worse, he was accused of being ‘a joke’ who ‘evokes loathing’ for having been ‘one of the prime instruments in the destruction of the monarchy’s public esteem’. Fellowes was singled out for blame for the ‘public perception of uncaring, dysfunctional senior Royals’ after Diana’s death. Dobbie ended with the knife-twist: ‘By staying on he can only perpetuate his views of outdated incompetence born of arrogant indifference.’
‘Robert’s been stuffed by Bolland’ was the word around Downing Street. Naturally, Fellowes was furious. His friends in Buckingham Palace blamed Charles for wanting to destroy any courtier who opposed his demands. To save himself, the prince had infected the royal palaces with jealousy, vulgar extravagance and deceit.
Fellowes saw no obvious solution. One immediate remedy would be to surrender to the media attack. His departure could be seen as justifiable. The queen needed a new, candid friend to whom she could unburden herself and be advised how to satisfy her headstrong son. In the inevitable negotiations between the palaces, Fellowes was not ideally placed to suggest sacrifices. He and the queen agreed that after seven years’ service he should move on; the transition should start for Robin Janvrin, his deputy and a former Foreign Office diplomat, to succeed him.
For his part, Janvrin was immersed in plans for the queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002, which he hoped would restore the monarchy’s reputation after a decade of disaster. Securing the queen’s approval for the celebration was an uphill battle – the public, she said, were unenthusiastic about the monarchy. But persistent pressure gradually wore down her reluctance. However, retaining her trust depended on months of serenity. There could be no more scandals.
Charles’s fate partly depended on the celebrations restoring the romance of the monarchy. Although he himself was not obviously imaginative, Janvrin shrewdly understood how to draw on other people’s ideas to make an impact. Among the spinoffs of the Jubilee, he believed, would be a challenge to those courtiers who ignored the public’s loss of trust in the ‘unworthy’ royals. Too many members of the royal family were living off the civil list, receiving police protection and revelling in the free use of private planes, royal trains, boats and castles. Family ties and relationships were bedevilling attempts to persuade these ‘unworthy’ royals to draw the line voluntarily. Too many of them had too much to lose, especially some of the young royals who demanded privilege and pomp while simultaneously making sham pleas to be treated like everyone else.
A by-product of the Jubilee would be to curb the legacy of the imperial era. More profoundly, here was the opportunity to signal the transition from a belief in the queen’s divine right to rule, as affirmed at her coronation in 1953, to Charles’s wish for a multi-denominational, inter-faith coronation. Although that was constitutionally impossible, negotiations for a compromise would open discussions about whether Charles’s heirs could marry Catholics, and whether a first-born female child could succeed as queen.
Overcoming
