would regularly keep them waiting. Yet few refused. The outstanding garden, more than thirty-five years in the making, had been designed by a succession of experts. Molly Salisbury, Rosemary Verey, Miriam Rothschild, Julian and Isabel Bannerman, one after another, were enlisted to fill the landscape with trees, hedges, wildflowers, fountains, rare breeds of farm animals and architectural features, all blended into a romantic safe haven. In return, the heir to the throne offered conditional gratitude. Professional gardeners were divided about the extent of Charles’s own contribution.
Roy Strong was summoned to advise on the cultivation of hedges. He spent days with his own gardener perfecting his ideas. At the end, he submitted his employee’s bill for £1,000 – and was never asked to return, or even thanked. Strong had personally inscribed a copy of his book on gardening to Charles, but it was left in a waiting room rather than included in the prince’s library. ‘He’s shocked by the sight of an invoice,’ Strong noted. ‘So he likes people who don’t charge for their services.’ Inevitably, none of those advisers was individually thanked after Charles received the Victoria Medal of Honour from the Royal Horticultural Society, presented by the queen for his services to gardening, in 2009.
‘Grace and favour’ took on a new meaning. To make up a floragim (a book of paintings of Highgrove’s flowers), Charles recruited over twenty artists to paint two or three flowers each, for free. Similarly, he approached Jonathan Heale, a woodcut artist, for some of his work, which he expected to be donated as a gift. One of the few artists known to have rebuffed similar demands was Lucian Freud. Would Freud swap one of his oils – which sold for millions of pounds – for one of Charles’s watercolours? ‘I don’t want one of your rotten paintings,’ Freud replied.
Strong, despite the rebuffs, narrated a BBC TV documentary about Highgrove. He intended to report that Charles had followed fashion by asking Molly Salisbury to build a ‘potager’ – a vegetable garden, but his draft commentary was returned from Charles’s office with the rebuke, ‘His Royal Highness never follows fashion.’ Strong removed the comment. Charles, clearly, stood ‘above fashion and is always right’. Thereafter, Strong stepped back: ‘I stayed on the edge with Charles. It was less dangerous.’
In the same spirit, in 1998 Charles called Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s media adviser, to ask whether he could borrow Elizabeth Buchanan, employed by Bell to develop relationships with Conservative politicians and bankers, for three days a week. ‘You can’t turn down a royal summons,’ said Bell, knowing that Charles would not pay Buchanan’s salary. Buchanan went to work at the royal home.
Charles had chosen an utterly devoted woman. ‘Elizabeth curtsied lower than anyone thought possible,’ one household member noticed, ‘and then for longer than necessary. She worked all the hours God gave and then some God hadn’t thought about.’ Dubbed ‘the virgin queen’ by her fellow staff, she understood the ritual, the pattern and the access Charles expected. He would sit for hours, and sometimes for a whole day, dressed in eccentric clothes in an armour stone garden surrounded by trees and wildflowers, while Buchanan, ‘blinded by devotion’, pandered to his requirements. On occasions when Charles, in the midst of a meal, took exception to the conversation – especially criticism of his opinions – and stormed out, she was summoned by Michael Fawcett to smooth things over with the guests and to placate the prince. When Charles, near the end of a seemingly pleasant dinner, abruptly headed to his study to spend hours handwriting letters late into the night, it was Buchanan who made excuses to his guests. Tim Bell was unsurprised when she became a full-time employee. Her salary did not reflect her new position as an assistant private secretary, but the media man quietly bridged the gap.
5
In mid-1998, Mark Bolland and Fiona Shackleton were lunching at the Ivy restaurant off St Martin’s Lane when both their mobile phones rang. The Highgrove switchboard connected the prince. ‘I’ve got a terrible problem,’ said Charles. ‘I’ve had a delegation of the staff led by Bernie and Tony and they say that everyone will resign unless Michael Fawcett goes.’
The mutiny among Charles’s staff at Highgrove had been brewing for weeks. Fawcett had been imposing unreasonable demands, especially on five of the staff serving under him: a valet, two sub-valets, an equerry’s assistant and a chauffeur. The result was a revolt by a group of people noted for exaggerating the smallest inconveniences out of all proportion. However, on this occasion Fawcett’s behaviour would seem to have been insufferable. Fearful of losing all his employees, Charles had instantly surrendered to the delegation and agreed that Fawcett should resign, despite his seventeen years’ service. Then, immediately regretting his decision, he had telephoned Bolland and Shackleton. Both were joyful at the news. Later that afternoon, on Stephen Lamport’s orders, Bolland drove to Highgrove. ‘Make sure he’s fired,’ were Lamport’s parting words. In unison, the prince’s closest advisers ‘went into overdrive to make sure Fawcett left before Charles changed his mind’. The thirty-five-year-old, they agreed, was a hated bully. Regardless of Fawcett’s usefulness, no one could understand why Charles had chosen to live alongside such a seemingly unpleasant man.
Bolland entered the prince’s study to be ‘greeted by the sight of Charles and Fawcett crying together’. Amid their tears, Charles told Fawcett that he would have to go, but that provision would be made for him to continue working for him privately. An announcement was made that Fawcett’s departure was ‘entirely amicable’. Commentators, misled by spokesmen, mistakenly reported that Fawcett was the casualty of a ‘war’ within St James’s Palace between the old guard and the modernisers.
The backlash began soon after. Led by Patty Palmer-Tomkinson, Charles’s friends urged him to recall Fawcett.
‘Poor Michael,’ said Palmer-Tomkinson.
‘It’s not my fault,’ replied Charles. ‘They made me do it.’
The following Friday, Charles and Camilla were invited to Chatsworth by Debo, the Duchess of Devonshire. Debo, at seventy-eight the youngest of the Mitford sisters, was a favourite of Charles. Amusing and resourceful, she was independent-minded and the most practical of duchesses, having rescued the family estate at Chatsworth with her marketing zeal. During his marriage to Diana, Charles and Camilla had often been welcomed by Debo to stay while they discreetly hunted with the Meynell in Derbyshire. Less discreetly, she revealed to a confidential source that Charles and Camilla slept in the same bed on these visits, and that Charles was submissive to Camilla. ‘That’s why the relationship works,’ she had said, smiling, hinting at a deeper meaning to Charles’s expressions of adoration in the Camillagate tape.
The next day, while Charles and Camilla were out hunting, Debo summoned Bolland and Lamport to drive up immediately from London. Within minutes of their arrival, she reprimanded them: ‘You’re making Charles unhappy about Fawcett. This must stop.’ Charles, it became obvious, had been easily persuaded by his hostess that Fawcett was too important to lose, especially as Camilla remained so indebted to him.
During the months after her separation from her husband, Camilla had lived in comparative impoverishment. Receiving £20,000 a year in alimony, she could barely afford to run her Wiltshire home. Without Fawcett’s help, Debo reminded Bolland and Lamport, Camilla’s life would have been ‘seriously unpleasant’. Thanks to him, food had been sent from Highgrove, her laundry was returned pristine, and Andy Crichton, a former police protection officer, had been made available to act as her driver. Moreover, Fawcett was a great survivor. Ten years earlier, John Riddell had arranged his dismissal, only to discover that Charles had reneged on their agreement. The same would happen now. Fawcett, Debo made clear, was non-negotiable. As one of Charles’s senior staff was to observe, ‘The man who puts the death mask on the king will be Fawcett.’
