hunting, Charles and Camilla were frosty towards the two private secretaries, whom they inexplicably blamed for Fawcett’s plight. One solution, they nevertheless speculated, would be for him to be employed by Robert Kime, the prince’s favourite interior decorator. Kime was invited to Highgrove for dinner the following Saturday.
Around the table a week later sat Charles, Kime, Lamport and Bolland. Kime advised that Fawcett be employed as a private contractor, as Charles had suggested originally, but after listening to Bolland and Lamport discuss the valet’s fate, Charles expressed his fears. For the past week he had lived through the horror of life without Fawcett. No doubt the valet had crossed the line by bullying the staff, but he was more important than any friend. He also posed an enduring threat, as at any time he could succumb to the temptation to sell his story to the media.
Kime was concluding that Fawcett was not going anywhere when there was a commotion. Arriving late, Camilla had entered Highgrove through the kitchen, where several employees were milling about. Dressed as the woman in charge rather than in her usual country clothes, she told them, ‘I hear you’re being beastly to Michael and I’m angry with all of you.’ Her direct language, Roy Strong later said, brought ‘the common touch to the household which Charles lacked’. After extracting grovelling apologies, she headed for the dining room, where Kime was pleading Fawcett’s case. Finally, at 2 a.m., it was agreed that he would stay, and that some of the members of staff who had complained about his bullying would be fired.
During the previous week, Camilla’s assistant Amanda McManus had shifted her attitude. On Monday she had told Robert Higdon, ‘I hate Michael. He’s not honest and he’s a liar. He should go,’ but by Thursday she was willing ‘to go through hell to help Camilla on Fawcett’s behalf’. Survival, she evidently realised, depended upon unquestioning sycophancy.
The crisis had been a failure of management. Unlike conventional executives, Lamport could not tell Charles to his face that his loyalty to Fawcett was unwise. Such outspokenness would guarantee his dismissal. Quietly, he implemented the royal wishes. Fawcett’s authority was restored, and indeed magnified. Outsiders seeking an appointment with Charles increasingly approached Fawcett in the hope that he would deign to be helpful.
The contrast between Charles’s management of his personal kingdom and his mother’s concern for the realm was captured soon afterwards at a meeting of the Way Ahead Group in Buckingham Palace’s cinema.
As he stood chatting with Simon Lewis, Lord Camoys and Michael Peat, Robin Janvrin felt particularly proud of his creation of the group back in 1993. The four officials who had taken over the queen’s private office presented themselves as the new generation. In the past, Richard Aylard had simply kept the show on the road, while Robert Fellowes had been the firefighter. Now Janvrin, jokingly dubbed ‘the angry young man’ by David Airlie, stood before the royals under a metaphorical banner that read ‘We must have change.’ In his opinion, his opponents offered the ‘doctrine of unripe time’. Gathering the key members of the royal family together, he suggested, could resolve their differences, and would help them plan the monarchy’s response to the tabloids’ intention to scratch open the raw scars once again as the first anniversary of Diana’s death approached.
The queen, Philip and their four children arrived, kissing each other warmly without betraying any tensions. Despite their rivalries, the family ostensibly remained friends. Janvrin’s tripwire was Charles. The heir’s natural stubbornness, he hoped, would melt away in the face of his unemotional presentation of the advantages of reform.
In anticipation of the meeting, Lewis had sent the queen a report based on a Mori opinion poll. Commissioned by Janvrin, it had been opposed by Michael Peat as a waste of money. Its conclusions were the basis of Lewis’s one-hour presentation, complete with slideshow.
The six royals understood the sharp difference between the public’s attitude towards the monarchy and towards other British institutions. Each of the four nations and each age group had differing attitudes towards the family. To rebuild its popularity, Lewis advised, over the coming months they should take up a dual focus: on Scotland, and on forging a relationship with Britain’s youth.
The queen agreed. Janvrin proposed to lighten the tone of her official tours. Meetings with the uniformed county lord lieutenants would be reduced, and instead she would visit schools, a pub, take a ride in a London taxi, sign a Manchester United football, walk past a McDonald’s and meet some of the homeless and unemployed. The queen agreed again. To placate Anne’s anger that Charles was occupying too much of the spotlight, Janvrin proposed that the princess should be given special status in Scotland. The queen’s continuing approval encouraged the Blairite modernisers.
The next item was the Jubilee, four years in the future. ‘What will we do?’ asked Philip, starting a family discussion. The unity crumbled. Charles wanted to reduce the numbers of the family appearing on the Buckingham Palace balcony and the number of teenage royals entitled to police protection. His particular targets were Andrew’s two daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie. Then he mentioned in a critical tone the commercial activities of his two brothers. ‘Enough has been done,’ interrupted Philip. He urged the queen to protect tradition. Amid that discord, the meeting ended.
Nervous that the Mori poll’s findings would provide negative headlines, Janvrin forbade Lamport to show the results to Bolland. Regardless, Charles ensured that some critical figures were leaked to the Sunday Times, partly because he disliked the idea of the Way Ahead Group and the meetings, and partly because he wanted to assert his primacy over his siblings. ‘I’m the Prince of Wales and they’re not,’ he said. To reassert his status still further, he opposed Janvrin’s plan to improve cooperation between himself and his mother by merging the two palaces’ press offices and appointing Lewis at their head. He ridiculed the idea of a New Labour spin master overseeing ‘The New Monarchy’ and prying into his plans, not least because he was becoming disenchanted with the government.
That disenchantment would soon become public knowledge. In June 1998, Charles declared war on Labour’s support for genetically modified crops. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, he warned that scientists were straying into ‘realms that belong to God, and God alone’, and questioned whether man had the right to ‘experiment with and commercialise the building blocks of life’. Genetic food engineering to produce long-life tomatoes, pest-resistant crops and soya beans with added protein would, he asserted, create a man-made disaster and deprive the public of organic foods. Consumers should consider the profits made by the manufacturers of the pesticide DDT and asbestos – both once hailed as scientific wonders but eventually proven to have potentially fatal side-effects – as an omen for GM crops.
Forewarned about the prince’s attack, Blair told Alastair Campbell, ‘We’re going to have running troubles with Charles because on many issues he’s more traditional than the queen.’ In the hope of securing an armistice, the two drove to Highgrove in the September sunshine. By then, Blair’s acerbic spokesman had become hostile towards Charles. The begrudging agreement by Highgrove’s staff that Campbell could use the swimming pool – which he found ‘a bit manky and with too many leaves floating around’ – did little to improve his temper. The visit, he declared, was ‘a journey back so far back in time it felt extra-planetary’.
After his swim, Campbell was offered lunch in the staff canteen. Inside the house, Blair was sharing a meal with his host, who for over fifteen years had championed a number of unfashionable causes, a category which until recently had included environmental protection. Ignoring Tory ministers’ mockery, he had warned about the failure to combat acid rain, protested against farmers burning straw, demanded a ban on CFC gases to protect the ozone layer, forecast ‘the problems and dangers of possibly catastrophic climate changes through air pollution’, warned about plastic bags and bottles polluting the seas, and lamented the mass extinction of species as a result of the loss of tropical forests. All his campaigns, Charles believed, had been dismissed by
