Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (18 page)

Diana understood that transaction as she understood the implications of destroying the illusion. She was many things, but she was never, ever dumb, though she at least once described herself as “thick as a plank.”
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She could read people including her husband as he could not read her, and she could seduce almost anyone if she set her mind to it, male or female. Charles never entirely succumbed. The legacy of that rare failure and the ensuing battle for public sympathy endures in a global fan base that stoutly leaps to Diana’s defense and a global media that still sometimes fights her corner, even if an increasing proportion of her army barely remembers her.

During the last decade of the twentieth century, the Waleses’ conflict polarized Fleet Street and spilled across TV screens and bookshelves. That there was public appetite for royal gossip had been clear since the publication in 1950 of
The Little Princesses
, an account by a former governess to the Queen and her sister, Margaret, of their childhood. It became a bestseller, earning its author, Marion “Crawfie” Crawford, a fair whack of money and a painful estrangement from her erstwhile charges. Her revelations, by today’s standards, were a tame brew. The thirteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth seems much taken on a visit to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth by an eighteen-year-old cadet, Prince Philip of Greece, a “fair-haired boy, rather like a Viking, with a sharp face and piercing blue eyes … good-looking though rather offhand in his manner.” At the tennis courts, the boy “showed off a good deal, but the little girls were much impressed,” recounted Crawfie. “Lilibet said, ‘How good he is, Crawfie. How high he can jump.’”
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This sort of stuff was grist for satirists who continued chipping away at the edges of monarchical reverence and never succumbed to the self-censorship that gripped newsrooms for the first half of Elizabeth II’s reign. In 1963 the comedy series
That Was The Week That Was
ran a sketch sending up the commentaries of Richard Dimbleby, father of Jonathan. He was the BBC’s first war correspondent and went on to front coverage of the Queen’s coronation and other big moments in royal life. In the sketch, the royal barge sinks, pitching the Queen into the water. “The Queen, smiling radiantly, is swimming for dear life,” says a Dimbleby soundalike. “Her Majesty is wearing a silk ensemble in canary yellow.”

The latex Windsors created by the television show
Spitting Image
in 1984 depicted the royals as both stupid and venal, abusing commoners, each other, and every vowel. “Charles” is distinguished by hydraulically controlled ears and a compulsion to cavil about “monstrous carbuncles,” the term his real-life original used to torpedo a planned extension to the National Gallery.
Spitting Image
also conceived its own version of the Changing of the Guard ceremony, “that most glorious of royal traditions, steeped in history, the Changing of the Wives.” “Of course it looks so easy but to make it all possible, there’s actually been a lot of hard work and precision planning,” the announcer intones. “By Camilla.” Diana might well have chortled at that scene. According to the actor and writer Stephen Fry, who knew her and remains close to Charles, the Princess confided that she was a regular viewer of
Spitting Image.
Her in-laws hated it, she told Fry. “I absolutely adore it.”
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Before Morton, newspapers assumed, probably correctly, that their readers would not thank them for this sort of l
è
se-majest
é
. Columnists might sometimes question the cost of the monarchy and turn a skeptical eye on the Prince’s advocacy for the environment or against carbuncles, but many editors chose to downplay the gathering omens of the Waleses’ marital implosion. Executives at Rupert Murdoch’s News International group decided to mothball one of the biggest potential scoops they had ever received. A retired bank manager called Cyril Reenan, whose hobby involved using a scanner to listen in on radio communications, approached the
Sun
newspaper in 1990, with a tape of a telephone conversation he had tuned into the previous New Year’s Eve. The woman on the tape sounded just like Diana, and
Sun
reporters would identify the man who crooned “I love you, love you, love you” and called her “Squidgy” as an upper-crust businessman named James Gilbey. After discussions at News International, the tape—which would later become known as “Squidgygate”—was locked in a safe.

“It just didn’t seem right or proper to carry it,” recalled Andrew Knight, at the time Chairman of the company. “The feeling of myself, and I’d always been a royalist and remain one, and also of Rupert Murdoch, was simply that these stories were too explosive to carry. The irony is that by the time these events started coming out, Mr. Murdoch had come to the belief that the royal family, although it was the pinnacle of a system of snobbery that he didn’t relish, nevertheless on balance was a good thing and he was reluctant to see it undermined.… He knew that Middle Britain, the sort of stalwart core of Britain, is pro-royalist and it wasn’t his job to undermine it.”
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It took another two years until Murdoch changed his mind and green-lit the Morton serialization. In the meanwhile, Reenan’s wasn’t the only tape in circulation. Two or three more copies of the same conversation did the rounds while the
Daily Mirror
laid hands on a counterpart recording, inevitably dubbed “Camillagate.” This was the late-night conversation in which Charles and Camilla planned their next assignation and chatted with an intimacy that was not only sexual but emotional.

The War of the Waleses blurred the definition of public interest journalism. Nobody would doubt the prurient fascination of hearing the Princess comparing herself to a soap opera character who gets pregnant by a man who is not her husband
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or the Prince, combining his trademarks of humor and self-pity into one unfortunate, unforgettable image, that sees him transformed into a tampon in his attempt to maintain sexual contact with his mistress. “My luck to be chucked down the lavatory and go on and on, forever swirling round on the top, never going down,” he said.
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This was certainly stuff that interested the public, but didn’t necessarily qualify as public-interest journalism. Public figures are entitled to private lives, however messy. After Morton’s book destroyed the compact between the British press and the palace, editors would argue that publication of Squidgygate and Camillagate served the public interest in a more profound way, as defined by their recently established regulatory body, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC): “Preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an individual or organization.” The establishment had tried to cover up the sham at its heart. The 1993 Calcutt report, a review into the effectiveness of the PCC, unwittingly upheld a lie—“that rumors linking the Princess and her friends with involvement in leaking information to the press were baseless.”
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The palace hadn’t told journalists the truth about the Waleses, and not just because the truth represented a danger to the monarchy. Officials didn’t always know what the Waleses were up to and when they did, they sought to draw the line at commenting on matters that crossed the line into the private domain. They were used to being helped in this endeavor by their charges, who had historically approached most interactions with the media with all the enthusiasm of vampires invited to dip carrot batons in aioli.

The Princess was a different proposition, an instinctive media player who could “sense a camera at a thousand yards,” as Gilbey said admiringly.
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About a year after the publication of Morton’s book, Charles’s biographer Anthony Holden received a mysterious phone call. It came, he says, “from a mutual friend who told me to be at the restaurant San Lorenzo at Knightsbridge circa 12:40 p.m.” Holden had written a cover story on Diana for
Vanity Fair
and she had decided to show her appreciation. She “swept in” with her sons, pretended surprise, and then invited Holden to join them. Holden remembers, “I thought A) this is wonderful and B) Prince Charles has never thanked me for anything.” Several more lunches followed and then a one-on-one interview “once the divorce and the [settlement of] £17 million was safely in the bank.”
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She played innocent when the Morton biography first appeared. Dickie Arbiter, Royal Press Secretary at the time, at first accepted Diana’s assurances that she had no involvement with the tell-all. “I said to Diana, ‘I want you to look me straight in the eye. What do you know about Andrew Morton’s book?’ And she did look me straight in the eye and she said ‘I don’t know anything,’” he remembered.
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Patrick Jephson, the Princess’s Private Secretary, resigned after she bypassed him to secretly film her
Panorama
interview, later remarking, “I always thought that Diana did her best talking when she kept her mouth shut.”
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Many in the royal households, including the Queen herself, harbor similar sentiments about the Prince and despaired as he let himself be drawn into fighting the Princess on her terms.

Two years before the Morton bombshell, the Prince invited Jonathan Dimbleby to Highgrove. Dimbleby had established a reputation for hard-hitting foreign affairs journalism. He found the Prince “just outside in the garden on the patio. He was wearing a white suit and looking fresh and crisp and he was alone and we shook hands in the slightly limp way that royals shake hands and he said ‘I hope you don’t mind being out here’ and I was looking at this beautiful environment and I said ‘Well I think I can bear it.’ He laughed and that broke the ice and of course I’d taken an interest in what he’d done already and I was attuned and sympathetic to quite a lot of it so we sat down,” says Dimbleby. “He said ‘What’s this idea to make a film?’ He affected that it was something that was going to come from me as opposed to coming obviously … [from the Prince’s aides]. In reality they had said to themselves ‘We need to do something’ I presume.”
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The ostensible peg for the film would be the twenty-fifth anniversary in 1994 of Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales; the real spur was the Prince’s PR problem. He could certainly draw attention to issues, but not, as his wife did, primarily by letting images speak. Charles’s loud forays into issues such as architecture and the environment galvanized debate but also drew scathing commentary and fed ready-made material to stand-ups. The Prince hoped Dimbleby would set out his stall as a serious public figure, counter some of the negative publicity he reaped, and perhaps wrest some of the limelight back from his wife. As the conversation with Dimbleby continued, the Prince said, “I suppose you’ll want to write a book as well, will you?”
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The Prince granted access to his private correspondence and diaries, facilitated meetings with his friends and family, and eventually read and annotated Dimbleby’s manuscript. He provided lengthy interviews and allowed Dimbleby to observe him at close quarters.

The twin-track studies provided the clearest picture yet of Dimbleby’s conflicted protagonist. Yet appearing after Morton’s
Diana: Her True Story
had painted the Prince as a cold fish whose cheating drove the Princess to an eating disorder and suicide attempts, Dimbleby’s project inevitably became the vehicle for the Prince’s riposte. “I was very anxious for it not to be a sort of arms race, because the other book was actually such a real frustration to me.… I knew there were issues about ‘was he faithful, wasn’t he unfaithful?’ and I had to deal with that,” says Dimbleby. He felt he must probe the marriage or see “the whole rest of the film overwhelmed by the fact that I hadn’t,” but he started gently.
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“Were you, did you try to be faithful and honorable to your wife when you took on the vow of marriage?”

“Yes, absolutely,” said the Prince. “And were you?” Dimbleby persisted. “Yes,” the Prince repeated, “until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.”
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The exchange confirmed there had indeed been three people in the Waleses’ marriage and raised questions that still rumble about the Prince’s fitness to be a figurehead for the Church of England.

Dimbleby had begun to wonder if Diana might suffer from an underlying psychological condition because of problems she had acknowledged and the testimony of people who knew her (but not, he insists, of Charles himself), but in the end the biographer chose not to speculate. “I was curious enough to test the proposition that she might have been suffering from one or another form of personality disorder,” he explains. “However, I came to the conclusion that it would be wrong to publish such a sensational conclusion: too speculative and certain to cause distress to all closely involved, not least to my subject.”
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Another author, Penny Junor, was one of the first journalists to go into print with the speculative diagnosis that Diana suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder. Junor also published the first detailed response to the Morton revelations, in
Today
newspaper, entitled “CHARLES: HIS TRUE STORY.”

The newspaper attributed the rebuttal to friends of the Prince. “All sorts of people, self-appointed members of his party, attempted to hit back,” recalls Richard Chartres. “But I don’t think he inspired all that.”
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Other members of Charles’s inner circle say that he explicitly asked that they not get embroiled in a briefing war. Hostilities ensued on both sides anyway. Nicholas Soames, by this stage Minister for the Armed Forces, gave an interview on the BBC after the broadcaster had screened Diana’s
Panorama
confessional, suggesting that the Princess was in the “advanced stages of paranoia.” She had certainly been right about the Prince’s undimmed love for Camilla. “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” she told Martin Bashir.
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