the monarchy as the head of our morality.’ Charles failed that test.
His fate had been dictated by a series of humiliations, not least by Diana’s disclosures in Andrew Morton’s 1992 book Diana: Her True Story. Morton’s revelations had broken through the carapace of lies about the royal marriage. Diana had portrayed her estranged husband as an unloving and unfaithful father without a care for anyone except himself. ‘It is so very awful,’ Charles wrote to Nancy Reagan, the former president’s wife; ‘very few people would believe it.’ Through Dimbleby, Charles wanted to right the balance but also to retaliate, to have his revenge against a wrecker.
First he agreed to the queen’s insistence that he and Diana formally separate. The announcement was to be made by John Major, recently re-elected as prime minister.
A strong prime minister would not have tolerated the warfare between Charles and Diana, and would have halted the books and briefings. Instead, Major believed that his duty was to reconcile the two and restore the public’s trust. Sympathetic to Diana’s side of the case, he did not underestimate his task, particularly after a private flight when Diana had emerged from the plane’s lavatory covered in blood. There was no explanation other than that she was psychologically unwell.
Major’s intentions were obstructed by Buckingham Palace. Robert Fellowes, the queen’s private secretary, gave no clear guidance about the royal family’s attitude. Until the circumstances were compelling, Fellowes judged, the queen would remain reluctant to interfere. Her inactivity magnified the ineptitude of her advisers. ‘The trouble is that Charles is a Hanoverian,’ a senior civil servant observed, ‘and now that he’s delivered “an heir and a spare” and has done his duty to the nation, he thinks he’s entitled to live the way he wants.’ In the coded language of the official classes, he added, while Diana Spencer could trace her family’s British ancestors back to 1478, the Windsors had been invented only in 1917. Their history became irrelevant when the queen’s hand was finally forced by Diana’s secret cooperation with Morton and her untruthful denials of that pact to Fellowes.
At Charles’s request, Aylard had insisted to Major that when announcing the formal separation he should tell the House of Commons that ‘no third party’ was involved; and so on 9 December 1992 the lie was formally announced in a speech drafted by a quartet of officials: cabinet secretary Robin Butler, Robert Fellowes, Buckingham Palace’s senior spokesman Charles Anson, and Aylard.
To control the narrative, Charles expected Aylard to dictate the ‘truth’ about the separation, a divorce and the possibility of remarriage by employing the usual convenient formulas: ‘There are no plans …’ or ‘It is not the intention that …’ Silence and denial were his tactics to become king – a contested succession, as some senior bishops doubted whether an adulterer could lead the Church of England.
Aylard knew that loyalty meant suspending the conventional role of a private secretary. Unlike the queen’s supportive working relationship with Fellowes, Charles would not tolerate Aylard discussing whether muddying the facts about his relationship with Camilla was tolerable. To continue as Charles’s adviser required acceptance that the heir was infallible, divinely ordained, and that his ‘truth’ remained unchallenged. That fiction had been instilled in Charles since childhood. Reminded of the fate of Europe’s other royal families, he had learned that the House of Windsor’s survival depended upon minimising the public’s indifference, assuaging its hostility and dispelling any suggestion of insecurity.
To fulfil that ambition, Robin Butler had included in Major’s statement a second fiction. Despite their legal separation, Major would tell MPs, there were no constitutional implications; with a formal separation rather than a divorce, on Charles’s accession Diana would still be queen. Butler would later concede that his advice was wrong.
Early on the morning of his announcement, the prime minister shuttled between Diana in Kensington Palace and Charles in St James’s Palace to seal their final approval. Any satisfaction he may have felt was shredded a few hours later when his statement in the House evoked widespread derision. His suggestion of a monarchy of two separate individuals offended the British reverence for their royal family. Instead of calming the public, the speech raised speculation that Charles might abdicate.
The queen had already responded to the danger: persuaded that she had to reprimand her son, she had forbidden him to move from Kensington Palace into Clarence House, the queen mother’s home, after formally separating from Diana. The prospect of Charles entertaining Camilla in a palace shared with his grandmother, then aged ninety-two, was offensive. He had been assigned instead to St James’s Palace, a cold, comfortless dwelling.
At which point, his troubles increased. Five weeks later the Daily Mirror published the transcript of an eight-minute telephone conversation between Charles and his mistress. Millions around the globe listened as he told Camilla how he yearned to ‘live inside your trousers’ and be reincarnated as ‘God forbid, a Tampax, just my luck … to be chucked down the lavatory and go on and on forever swirling round the top, never going down’. Charles fled to Sandringham, hoping never to see a newspaper again. He was, however, unable to escape a Daily Telegraph report that his approval rating had fallen to 4 per cent. Further crises seemed imminent. He lacked even the authority to demand an investigation into who had targeted him. The obvious suspect was a rogue employee at the government’s intercept agency GCHQ who had recycled his work to amateur radio hams.
‘You have to be careful which shadows you decide to chase,’ Diana told Patrick Jephson, her private secretary, to explain why no proper inquiry had been demanded. Like Charles, she suspected that her police protection officers leaked her and Charles’s secrets, especially their adulteries. The police had accumulated considerable influence over the royals, not least after Diana and Princess Anne had affairs with their protection officers. Unethically, other officers had used that information to cultivate lucrative relationships with the media.
Charles stopped talking to journalists in 1993, even during foreign trips. Damaged by the recent revelations, he now repeatedly complained about the lack of safeguards. A senior Downing Street official was summoned to St James’s Palace and asked to ban photographers from around Balmoral, the queen’s fifty-thousand-acre estate in north-east Scotland. ‘There’s not much we can do if you go near the public highway,’ Charles was told. ‘You’ll just have to find somewhere on the estate which they can’t see, even if it’s less attractive.’
That exchange jarred after the news emerged about Charles’s negotiations over an authorised film and biography. Jonathan Dimbleby was the younger son of Richard Dimbleby, the hugely respected BBC journalist and the nation’s trusted commentator on all state occasions until his death in 1965. That pedigree was ignored beyond St James’s Palace. Speaking on behalf of the senior officials in Buckingham Palace, Robert Fellowes had strongly advised Aylard to resist Dimbleby’s offer. After Charles made his enthusiasm plain, the queen was advised to intercede. As usual, she replied that Prince Philip should be asked for his opinion; together they decided not to interfere.
Their reluctance stemmed from the breakdown in relations with their son. Charles had publicly blamed his parents, particularly Philip, for an unloving childhood and being forced into an unhappy marriage. In graphic terms, he saw his father as an emotional gangster. He wanted to appeal through Dimbleby for the public’s sympathy. To present Charles’s point of view, Dimbleby was given unprecedented access to his private papers, his friends and employees, and extensive interviews with Charles himself.
Controversy, the prince knew, was inevitable. While reading the proofs of Dimbleby’s book during a trip on the royal yacht Britannia, he regularly shouted his protests to Aylard, who in turn negotiated changes with Dimbleby – who, as he sympathised with Charles’s predicament, was usually receptive. But no one ever sought to stop publication. The result was a remarkably intimate but ultimately destructive profile.
