still regularly say. Wedded to George VI’s influence and with the queen mother urging the most reactionary decisions during her daily telephone calls to her daughter, the queen was shaped by Edwardian precedents. Rigidly conservative, she refused to allow even moving any furniture in Balmoral from the place assigned by Queen Victoria. Charles, she feared, would change everything, not least out of pique. ‘My son,’ she once complained to a nobleman, ‘resents me because I taught him the alphabet.’
On many matters she would defer to her husband, who was well aware of the problems they all faced. ‘Throughout history,’ Philip told an adviser, ‘there’s been a difficult relationship between monarch and heir. It’s not a job but a predicament.’ He wanted his children to follow his way of doing things, but knew that Charles would not forgive his father’s apparent ‘sins’ – including his ordering Charles, as a child, to wear corduroy trousers to a birthday party, the only one present to do so. Even as a middle-aged man, Charles still felt the legacy of that trivial humiliation. He also lacked his mother’s genius for concealing what she truly felt and separating her personal values from those of the nation. He would never be able to emulate her landmark speech at a lunch in Whitehall to celebrate her golden wedding anniversary in November 1997, when she had volunteered that the monarchy’s existence rested on popular approval – adding, to applause, that she herself was willing to change after listening to the public.
Charles disliked those sentiments. He preferred to confront anyone he disliked, regardless of the fallout. Unlike his mother, he failed to provide a sense of solidarity or stability. He did not stand as a symbol of the country and its heritage, or personify an idea. Not astute enough to create illusions when needed, or to float above the rancour, he was content to pose a threat.
Negotiating peace with the unpredictable heir was complicated by the appointment to head the queen’s household of Lord Camoys, a banker from an old Roman Catholic family, as the lord chamberlain. To Charles, Camoys represented the old guard, with its antediluvian understanding of the monarchy. His dislike was exacerbated by Camilla’s complaint that Camoys had once accused the Parker Bowles children of cheating in a school race.
Since the 1980s, Charles had sabotaged every attempt by the queen’s advisers to coordinate their two courts. To him, Buckingham Palace was not a homogeneous organisation. In his opinion, little had changed since he was born. Within the immutable layers of rank, right down to the servants who laboured in the basement of the palace, there was unyielding respect for the queen and fear of her displeasure, but also an understanding that individual power depended on every courtier’s relationship with his or her immediate superior, the high value of intimate information, and ultimately access to the queen. Charles’s disdain for that culture was magnified by his dislike of Fellowes, Janvrin and now Camoys.
Janvrin’s hope that he could fashion a new relationship with St James’s Palace rested on Stephen Lamport’s skill in persuading Charles to resist his instincts and stabilise his relationship with Buckingham Palace. But that depended on Charles’s whims. Giving honest advice to a man who would explode when contradicted was no easy task, especially as the prince once confessed, ‘My problem is that I believe the last person I spoke to.’
Unlike the queen, Charles frowned on people with different ideas from his own. While her lack of dogmatism encouraged free discussion, he was closed to alien thoughts. Every day his public and private life threw up difficulties, and every day Lamport tried to tone down Charles’s opinions, especially about the environment, education and fox-hunting – although after their lunch at Highgrove, Peter Mandelson had told journalists that any private member’s attempt to introduce legislation banning hunting would not be supported by the government.
In their daily meetings, Lamport tried to measure Charles’s intentions in comparison with the precedents established by his predecessors over the previous two hundred years. He then gave advice, but he could not always gauge Charles’s reaction. To reach the ideal decision on almost any matter required him to follow a convoluted and uncomfortable route. If his advice were rejected, Lamport suffered in isolated silence: ‘I blame the vipers’ nest in Charles’s private office,’ observed an official in Buckingham Palace about the tortuous process. There were layers of hierarchy, with everyone attempting to climb the greasy pole. Whatever was said, one never knew how far it might go, ‘who could be trusted and how it would be twisted’. Buckingham Palace and St James’s Palace suffered from identical manipulative tussles.
Uncertain about the best course, in the summer of 1998 Janvrin and Fellowes invited Alastair Campbell for lunch. Charles’s stubborn grudge, they confided, was a tough, long-term problem made worse by their distrust of Bolland. True to his conviction that ‘spin’ was the answer to most difficulties, Campbell urged the two to ‘get a grip’ and embrace a new generation by appointing Simon Lewis, a Blairite public relations expert. On Campbell’s recommendation, Janvrin immediately hired Lewis as Buckingham Palace’s new spokesman. Unlike his predecessors, Lewis was told to bridge the gap between the monarch and the people – or, at least, to break the mould.
Adopting the Blairite tactic of targeted messages, Janvrin believed, would modernise the brand and help define the monarch’s renewed contract to serve the country. Inevitably, some courtiers were puzzled that he was putting so much faith in a New Labour marketing man with no experience of the royal family. Janvrin replied that Lewis and Camoys would repair the monarchy’s vulnerability. As the first anniversary of Diana’s death approached, he feared renewed damage from the tabloids.
Lewis, as a newcomer, struggled to understand the tension between the palaces. Hearing critical comments in Buckingham Palace about Charles’s weaknesses, the contamination caused by Camilla, and how Bolland was promoting the prince at the expense of other members of the family, bore little resemblance to Westminster’s wars. Lewis’s proposals to start lobby briefings, issue statements, send an annual report on the queen’s behalf to twenty million homes, and harness Buckingham Palace to Cool Britannia (New Labour’s gospel to revolutionise Britain) bewildered Janvrin’s critics. He replied that changing the culture was essential to prepare for a modern monarchy.
Charles disagreed. Conjuring an air of change was merely colourful spin, in his opinion, and ignored the House of Windsor’s instinct for self-preservation. Ever since the Saxe-Coburgs had reinvented themselves as the Windsors in 1917 to avoid the fate of the Tsar of Russia, the Kaisers of Germany and Austria and the downfall of other minor European monarchs, the queen had separated herself from Britain’s aristocracy. Unimpressed by titles, the royal family was aware of the country’s hereditary families only if they were genuine friends or were criticised by the media. The natural order, with the monarch at the head of a pyramid supported by the landed nobility, had vanished.
The gentry’s loss of power was of no interest to St James’s Palace. After a decade of gossip and misbehaviour, Charles’s household yearned for a period free of notoriety. His officials’ expectations were frustrated by the prince’s feudal exercise of power, a different kind of misbehaviour.
Some long-term employees who had been granted a home were obliged to receive a visit from Charles as a reminder of their place in the scheme of things; others were invited for dinner, or to a garden party at Highgrove. Lesser mortals received gifts. The prince dispensed presents, graded by his opinion of their importance, to paid and unpaid employees: whisky glasses engraved with his motif, or designer salt and pepper grinders. A typed letter signed by Charles was welcome, but the greatest trophy was a handwritten message in black ink. The universal fear was his expression of displeasure, signalled by the absence of a ‘please’ or ‘thank you’. Finely calibrated blanking – like a Mafia don’s kiss of death – was an overt threat to the courtier’s job, income, school fees and self-respect. After dismissal, there was nothing. Being cut off without even a much-prized Christmas card to acknowledge the relationship was ‘so hurtful’, repeated all the casualties. Charles had made himself clear that they were no longer useful. Loyalty was always a one-way street.
Preferring
