The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (40 page)

‘The Queen appeals to those things which are beyond controversy; the basic values, she enunciates them, she points to that realm where we are still united despite all the political shenanigans and argy-bargy. You may feel, sitting in London,’ says Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, ‘that the appeal of these things ebbs, is ebbing, has ebbed.’

I am wondering whether the monarchy still has the capacity to overcome the differences of education and community disintegration. I think the death of the Queen Mother was an astonishing revelation of the world outside the chattering classes of the Westminster village, where there is huge cynicism about all of this. Mind you, there’s huge cynicism about everything. It isn’t that the monarchy is regarded as decrepit; it is that we have, astonishingly, an Establishment that seems to want to liberate us from any sense of constraint or universal value and fundamental meaning. That’s obviously an enormous challenge for an institution like the monarchy whose whole
raison d’être
is social cohesion pointing beyond the argy-bargy of politics to some of the deep laws, the abiding themes of all human life, love and loss, values that we all basically share.

‘The Queen didn’t choose to be Queen,’ he says.

She hasn’t competed for her place on the greasy pole. Anyone who knows anything about it realizes what a heavy sentence it is in some ways and the institution therefore speaks also about Call, Acceptance of Call, Doing your Duty, Service, and that is real. Also there’s no escape clause, it’s a contract. In all those ways it’s a very remarkable institution. However, England is changing so that we may not for ever be worthy of it. If there is no principled, philosophical
support for monarchy then the whole thing depends much more on what, in a celebrity culture, is made of the individuals, how they are used. The Queen is a canvas on whom people project, as well as someone who stands for things. There is such confusion and shame about the British story that it hasn’t been taught and communicated for the last twenty, twenty-five years. We feel very sorry for individuals who have lost their story – their memory – they’ve lost part of their identity, they live an impaired life – but if the community has no sense of its story, if you exalt diversity as the only virtue then you find that you have a giddy, rootless population which can easily be swayed by gusts of indignation and emotion.

As Lord Salisbury says,

By its nature the monarchy is a long-term institution and perhaps the greatest thing in its favour is that it endures while fashion doesn’t, politicians come and go and editors come and go. So the fact that it is always there, like the papacy, is a huge strength. It occupies a position no one else does and by occupying it they prevent anyone else from doing so. It’s very difficult, not impossible, to have a military coup when the officers are loyal not to the Prime Minister and government but to the monarch. It’s very difficult, although much easier now with the European Court of Human Rights legislation and supremacy of EU law, but still difficult so long as judges owe their oath of fealty to the monarch rather than the government, for the law to lose its independence entirely – a keystone of the way our free society operates. It’s also very important that people should recognize the monarchy in this context that the Queen is part of Parliament. There are not two parts of Parliament;
there are three: Monarch, Lords and Commons, and ultimately one of the great restraints of being in government is the feeling that you don’t want to drag the monarchy down into the pit of parliamentary and political dispute although that is becoming more difficult with the question of the monarchy’s existence being in play. So long as senior politicians of all parties owe a genuine allegiance to the Crown, always before you do anything, you have to ask yourself, does this breach the club rules? That is a great guarantee; but as soon as that consensus breaks down you’re in trouble.

Tristan Garel-Jones again concurs.

It’s true that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely; when you’re a minister, even if a junior minister of state, it’s quite easy to end up thinking you’re quite important, because you have lots of people laughing at your jokes and telling you how clever you are and writing clever speeches for you, and you could end up thinking you’re quite somebody; and the beauty in Britain for me is there are certain positions that no politician can hold, ever. No politician can ever be Head of State. The Armed Forces in Britain do not swear an oath of loyalty either to Parliament or the Conservative or Labour Party or anyone else. Every officer in Britain is commissioned by the Queen. You can argue it’s all mirrors, but it removes all positions, albeit symbolic, from the hands of politicians, which is not a bad thing at all. Even in my case, if ever when I was a whip it passed through my mind that I was quite important, I had to sit down at the end of every day and write an eight-hundred-word letter to the Queen. Another thing that went with this position, you were a kind of messenger, you carry the messages from the Queen to Parliament, bits of paper
she had to sign, and there were certain moments when I had to put on a morning coat, get into a motor car, go round to the Head of State’s office, stand to attention, present the Head of State with certain papers, and go back. It reminds politicians that there is something up there that is the Nation – the national interest – that is going to go on and on and on long after they’re dead and buried.

The beauty of all this is because I held these positions [Vice Chamberlain, Comptroller of the Household and Treasurer – all of which go with the whip’s job] for quite a long time, all three, one after the other, I had quite a lot of contact with Buckingham Palace and with the Head of State. And audiences – you go in with your bits of paper, and whilst I can honestly say the audiences were perfectly courteous and even amusing sometimes, never once by hint or gesture did the Head of State imply to me that I was some kind of friend, that she was rather pleased I was a Conservative and not a Labour member, ever. I regard this as wonderful. I used to go in there regularly, write her letters regularly, and at the end of the day I have no doubt whatsoever, if instead of me standing in front of her it had been my opposite number, the Labour member for Jarrow, it wouldn’t have made a scrap of difference and I think that’s something the country needs to know. Certainly a lot of Conservatives think she secretly likes us. That’s bollocks. I am a person representing a function which is part of her duty and she does it with courtesy and humour and wit but never, ever, ever on any single occasion did I feel that I was in some way special or my party was in some way special.

The Queen’s will be a very tough act to follow but the Prince of Wales has great strengths and rightly has many fans – but he was damaged by the breakdown of his marriage to Diana
and by his determination at all costs to cling on to Camilla Parker Bowles. It damaged him and it damaged the monarchy. A stronger man would have put the greater good of the institution before his own personal happiness – as his mother, in the same situation, almost certainly would have done.

But he did even greater damage by failing for so long to put a ring on Camilla’s finger when the majority of the public had so obviously come to accept the situation. It left the way open for so much debate, so much criticism. Shortly before the engagement was announced in February 2005, a powerful group of MPs, led by Alan Williams, a known republican, grilled the Prince’s accountants about how he spent his income from the Duchy of Cornwall and how much Charles was paying to support his mistress. He was beginning to take on the air of a victim, and victims attract bullies.

And the situation left so much uncertainty about the future. The Queen’s eightieth birthday in April in 2006 was approaching and although she enjoys the best of health – and if she lives as long as her mother, might have another twenty useful years or more to go – the prospect of Charles being crowned with Mrs Parker Bowles sitting four rows back in Westminster Abbey – or even, on his insistence, at the front – would have caused constitutional mayhem.

Their marriage at Windsor Castle on 9 April 2005 settled all that. It began to heal many wounds that had been festering for years and tied up a host of uncomfortable loose ends. Charles had insisted that he wanted Camilla to be seen as a legitimate part of his life. At last she was and the arguments of whether it was right or wrong for the country, good or bad for the boys, what kind of service it should have been, whether she should have been called HRH The Duchess of Cornwall or something more low-key, and what the Princess of Wales would have thought, all disappeared. The public didn’t want
her to be Queen and we were told she wouldn’t be. When the time comes she will be The Princess Consort and have much the same role as the Duke of Edinburgh has in relation to the Queen. There may be opinion polls on whether she should, in fact, be Queen rather than Consort when Prince Charles ascends the throne – by then, it is my guess that the public will be perfectly content for her to be called Queen – and more opinion polls on whether, now he is married to a divorcee, he should still be King, but there is nothing new in that debate.

The wedding was a triumph. It took place a day later than originally planned because the date clashed with the funeral of Pope John Paul II in Rome. The Pope’s death and the Vatican’s choice of date for the funeral gave the doom-mongers still more reason to suggest the wedding was jinxed but the plans were moved seamlessly to the following day, a Saturday, and despite a freezing cold day and fears that there would be protests at worst and apathy at best, it was a great day. Camilla looked endearingly nervous but beautiful in an oyster-coloured Robinson Valentine creation and hat by Philip Treacy and, despite the temperature, lingered chatting to well-wishers. Charles looked happier than he has looked for years, the Queen embraced her new daughter-in-law with a witty speech, the boys looked delighted and the critics were forced to eat their words. The wedding was a resounding success and proved a significant turning point.

There had been endless debate about the arrangements and the legality of the marriage and suggestions that the Church had bent the rules. Clarence House was accused of bungling incompetence and, to everyone’s frustration, the Queen refused to attend the civil ceremony, thus fuelling the notion that she was still against the match. She didn’t give her reasons – she never does – leaving room for speculation, but the fact is she has never attended a registry office wedding, and as
Supreme Governor of the Church of England, possibly never will. She was at the blessing afterwards and hosted a reception for Charles and Camilla in the State Apartments at Windsor Castle – neither of which she would have done if she had being wanting to express her disapproval.

But, on the day, the criticism and sniping quietly evaporated. They became man and wife in a twenty-minute private ceremony in the local registry office, the Ascot Room at the Guildhall in Windsor, just like any ordinary couple. The ceremony, conducted by the Royal Borough’s Superintendent Registrar, Clair Williams, began at 12.30 p.m. with only family and close friends invited – twenty-eight in all – and their elder children Prince William and Tom Parker Bowles acting as witnesses. The Service of Prayer and Dedication in St George’s Chapel, which followed at 2.30 p.m., conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams and the Dean of Westminster, David Conner, was a much more public affair: television cameras and eight-hundred of their closest friends. Outside, the world’s media were kept at arm’s length and stationed at vantage points all over the town, in makeshift studios, on hotel balconies, on the streets and in shop windows that overlooked some part of the route where they could glimpse some of the action or even just the guests arriving. It was a roll call worth glimpsing: the cream of Church and State, foreign royals, the great and the good, and celebrities from every field.

At 5.30 a.m. that day, when I arrived in Windsor to talk on
BBC Breakfast
, there was one brave family who had camped overnight opposite the Guildhall and one couldn’t help thinking of the hundreds who had camped out along the route between Buckingham Palace and St Paul’s Cathedral for the wedding twenty-four years before. Security was tight, but by 10.00 a.m. there was a still only a smattering of people and it looked as though the public’s overriding emotion that day was
going to be apathy. Not so. Half an hour later the street, closed to traffic for the day, had suddenly filled to bursting, people of every age chatted excitedly with strangers, hemmed in behind police security barriers, all, with the exception of a couple of protesters, in party mood, delighted that Charles had finally taken the plunge and wed the woman he has loved for over thirty years.

On New Year’s Day, 2006,
The Sunday Times
ran a light-hearted feature titled ‘Camilla: The It Girl of 2006’. Their reporter had consulted futurologists about the year ahead and discovered that the ‘Rottweiler’ had made an astonishing turnaround. Marian Salzman, J Walter Thompson’s advertising superstar in America, was confidently predicting that ‘Camilla is going to be the next great lifestyle icon. Just look at that fabulous creature,’ she said, and to emphasise her point, ‘Look at the young princesses today – Beatrice, Zara and whoever. No one cares. All the lights are turned on this fifty-eight-year-old woman. Camilla tells us almost everything we need to know about where society is headed. I honestly believe that we’ll soon start seeing communities of older newlyweds being built because love over fifty doesn’t feel stigmatised any more. Camilla makes it look wonderful.’

Apparently she was not alone. Tom Bentley, director of the political think tank Demos, said ‘We’re witnessing the dawn of a new golden age for baby boomers. Camilla’, he laughed, ‘could definitely be a pin-up.’

The article may have been slightly tongue in cheek but the interest in Camilla and the admiration for her since she wed her prince has been infinitely greater than anyone might have
predicted. In the Prince’s office it is known as ‘the Camilla factor’. From the morning she had to be dragged out of bed – such were her nerves – on the day of her wedding, she has won admirers everywhere she has been and, working alongside the Prince, chatting, smiling and co-operating with photographers, she has given a much-needed boost to the Prince of Wales’s profile.

She was right to have been nervous that cold April afternoon, however. The eyes of the world were on her, waiting to find fault. There was no guarantee that the crowds would warm to her, no guarantee that there would be any crowds, or viewers for the television coverage; but there were, many of them uncertain how they felt, and she pulled them round. She got it absolutely right. And she has been getting it right ever since. She has slipped into the role of Duchess as one born to it. People have been turning out in their droves to see her and they like her – they like her warmth and the fact that she is so down to earth. Over two thousand people waited outside the church at Sandringham on Christmas Day 2005 for her first church service with the Royal Family and the general consensus was that she was ‘the star of the show’.

It has been quite a year for her, trying to juggle the transition from lover-with-a-life-and-family-of-her-own to fully fledged working member of the Royal Family, with all the commitment and responsibility that that involves, and there have been occasions when her loyalty has been divided – times when her children have felt second best. Friends say she has become regal and that she is not averse to people dropping a curtsey when they meet, but as Paul Arengo-Jones (who ran the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award International Association) said of Sophie, Countess of Wessex, ‘If you want her to be an HRH you have to put her in a glass case,’ and, ‘Yes, she has become grand; grand enough for us to be able to sell her. It would be
an embarrassment … if she didn’t turn up suitably dressed or say the right things to people.’ Courtiers at Clarence House say Camilla has hardly changed at all, she’s a smart cookie, no fool, and can be formidable even, but still very approachable and friendly and more relaxed and informal than members of the family that were born to it.

She has kept her house in Wiltshire and, although her children do occasionally go to Highgrove, they more frequently get together at the old family home, Raymill. Her family are still of prime importance. On Christmas day she had lunch with the Royal Family at Sandringham and then, leaving Charles with his family, drove to her sister Annabel’s house in Gillingham, Dorset to have Christmas dinner with her father, her own children and her sister’s family. She had never spent a Christmas apart from her family and was determined that this would be no exception. A few days later she travelled north to meet Prince Charles at Birkhall for New Year.

Highgrove bears very little trace of her. A photograph sits in the drawing room in a silver frame – oddly enough it was a wedding present to Charles and Diana. Otherwise there is no sign that a woman now lives in the house and certainly none of the clutter that used to fill her own house years ago. The staff there like her; they find her friendly and easy. Charles doesn’t fraternise with them – Camilla quite often goes into the kitchen for a chat. She has taken on eleven charities since her marriage, which gives her a total of fourteen but, unusually for an HRH, she decided she didn’t need or want ladies-in-waiting. She simply has a small staff of three – Amanda MacManus and Joy Camm, who have been with her for several years, are now official members of the Household as part-time Assistant Private Secretaries, and she has one full-time Assistant Private Secretary, Katy Golding. She also has someone to help with her wardrobe, who had her work cut-out for Charles
and Camilla’s trip to America in November 2005. The press reported that she had taken ninety outfits for the seven day tour. It was actually nearer fifty, and inevitably her choice of clothes was a subject of much debate.

The American tour was Camilla’s greatest triumph. It was their first official overseas trip together as man and wife – with him introducing her repeatedly as ‘My darling wife’ – and what she demonstrated above all was her determination to be just that. She made no attempt to steal the limelight; she was there as his consort to support him and keep him company and cheerful. As Tina Brown, the British born New York magazine editor wrote, ‘One of Camilla’s feats is that she understands Prince Charles’s language and simultaneously translates its meaning, which is often the opposite of what he says.’ And she teases him – still the only person to get away with it. When they signed the visitors’ book at a school in Washington, she lunged for his pen to sign her own name and then playfully dangled it in front of him while he tried to snatch it back. So often throughout the trip the cameras were on her but she made sure that she stood close by the Prince so that he would be in the photographs too.

It was a gruelling trip for a beginner – twenty-one engagements in seven days, encompassing New York, Washington, New Orleans and San Francisco – and she was under the spotlight remorselessly, knowing that in this, the biggest media market in the world and the country that took Diana to their hearts, she would be harshly judged. And judged she was … After day one, the
Post
dubbed her ‘Frump Tower’, saying her navy velvet cocktail dress was better suited to a choirboy in Westminster Abbey than to a guest of honour at the Museum of Modern Art.
The New York Times
, meanwhile, said that black stilettos were the sign of a woman ‘really, really trying’ and by implication failing. But as one of the Prince’s aides
says, ‘They look down their nose at everyone. If God turned up for a tour of America they would find a way to be rude about him.’ And as Caroline Davies in the
Telegraph
remarked, ‘In this surgically enhanced ultra-brite milieu, where young, skeletal trophy wives overdressed in inappropriate ball gowns posed with their wizened, wealthy husbands, she probably did look different. Thank goodness.’

What she proved to everyone on both sides of the Atlantic was that she doesn’t feel the need to dress like a woman half her age, or have her teeth bleached and every wrinkle and laughter line surgically removed. She is happy in her own skin, and confident enough to laugh at herself. When complimented on a fuschia-pink outfit she replied, ‘It’s probably the same colour as my face.’ And when the actress and comedienne Elaine Stritch marched up to her and said, ‘No bullshit, you look great,’ she replied, ‘You need eye-glasses.’

No one had quite known what to expect in America but the general public appeared to agree with Elaine Stritch. And the fact that the style writers had so completely failed to understand or appreciate what Camilla is all about, made the newspapers in Britain leap to her defence and the American public all the more enthusiastic in their welcome. In Washington, where, watched by the Prince of Wales, she delivered a moving speech about osteoporosis and her personal experience of the disease with her mother and grandmother, the crowds cheered and clapped ecstatically. And in San Francisco, where she flouted the accepted protocol that members of the Royal Family don’t eat in public, and munched her way around a local organic farmers’ market sampling the produce, the public simply loved her.

They loved them both. The reception from students when Prince Charles arrived at Georgetown University for a seminar on Faith and Social Responsibility wouldn’t have been out of
keeping at a Rolling Stones concert. More than a thousand students were screaming and shouting and reaching out to try and shake his hand, and when he emerged at the end of the seminar one-and-a-half hours later, the crowds were still there. According to the Principal, Bill Clinton was the only other visitor who had ever been given such an enthusiastic reception. And when he delivered a speech in San Francisco at the launch of his Business and the Environment Programme on the West Coast, someone got to his feet and said, ‘Why can’t you be our President?’

A few weeks earlier he had been at Oxford doing something similar, and while the Great and the Good turned up in force to see him, there was scarcely a student to be seen. Small wonder, perhaps, that in an interview on American television, he mournfully said of the British, ‘I only hope that when I am dead and gone, they might appreciate me a little bit more.’ What is it they say about prophets in their own land?

Like all official foreign visits, this was undertaken at the behest of the Government and in diplomatic terms, the highlight of trip was a dinner at the White House as guests of President George W Bush. Bush is no great fan of late nights – this was only the sixth time he had hosted a formal dinner of this kind during his tenure and the first time ever that official visitors have been entertained privately to a family lunch as well. It spoke volumes. And if the Duchess of Cornwall was finding it hard to believe that she, who had once had to hide beneath blankets in the back of cars to avoid being seen with the Prince of Wales, was standing on the White House lawn posing for photographs, not only with the Prince but alongside the President and First Lady of the United States of America, so too were the world’s media. More than two hundred journalists were there that day, more, the President remarked, than he had ever seen on the White House lawn during his entire presidency.

There will be more official foreign tours for Charles and Camilla in 2006 but the notion, occasionally floated in the press, that there is a plan afoot for the Prince of Wales to take over duties from the Queen so that she can quietly bow out of the more arduous one are premature. She is still in the greatest of health, her diary is full, she enjoys her work and shows no signs of wanting to slow down. Indeed her birthday year is full of celebratory engagements including an eightieth Birthday Reception and Lunch at Buckingham Palace a couple of days earlier for people from all over the UK who share the Queen’s date of birth, 21 April. And in August, at the end of her summer programme the Queen is chartering a ship called
The Hebridean Princess
(paid for out of her private money) for a week’s cruise around the Western Isles, with members of the family coming and going. It will bring back nostalgic memories, no doubt, of
HMS Britannia
, the Royal Yacht, sadly decommissioned in 1997 after forty-four years, which she and the rest of the family so treasured.

One day, of course, the Queen will slow down, and preparations are already being made at Clarence House to ensure that, when the time comes, the Prince’s core charities will be able to stand on their own two feet and not depend, as they have in the past, upon such hands-on involvement from the Prince. There is no suggestion that he will duck out of them entirely but his role will inevitably change. In May 2006, the oldest of those charities, The Prince’s Trust, which grew from a few scribbled ideas on the back of an envelope, is thirty years old, and will be marked by a concert at the Tower of London and an interview with Charles, William and Harry conducted by the
I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here
TV presenters Ant and Dec.

Anyone who hoped the Prince of Wales might become easier to deal with once Camilla was finally, officially and legitimately
by his side and the divisions and the controversy over, will be largely disappointed. He is happier without question and life is more fun with someone to share it, but the Prince is still capable of being a demanding and difficult man – and as the American interview intimated, still given to feeling sorry for himself. When Kevin Knott, who was appointed to the new post of Master of the Prince of Wales’s Household in September 2005, and had been in the Prince’s employ for nearly twenty years, handed in his notice several months later to become bursar of an Oxford college, the Prince, to use one observer’s phrase, ‘threw ALL his toys out of the pram and behaved like the petulant child he is.’ Sir Malcolm Ross, Comptroller of the Queen’s Household, was recruited in his place and took up the post in January 2006 – thus strengthening the ties between the two palaces still further.

But what worries many of the Prince’s friends and employees is the continued and undiminished presence of Michael Fawcett in Charles and Camilla’s life. Visitors to Sandringham say he is ‘a shadow … and rather a nasty one, on the listen, as well as in their pockets – and they in his.’ For reasons no one can quite put their finger on, he is not only unpopular but positively feared by many of those who work with him and his arrogance takes the breath away. Tom Parker Bowles, who married Sara Buys, the fashion editor of
Harpers & Queen
in September 2005, refused to let Fawcett have anything to do with his wedding arrangements. Fawcett is said to have been miffed but since the bride’s father was footing the bill, the arrangements were easily done. Laura, who will marry Harry Lopes, the former Calvin Klein model, in 2006, shares her brother’s sentiments but may find she has no choice in the matter. If Camilla is paying, the chances are Michael Fawcett will be in charge.