Prince William (11 page)

The foreign tour to Korea three months later was always going to have been tricky. At first Diana tried to duck out of it, but the Queen intervened and persuaded her she must go, so go she did, but it proved to be the final straw. The press were only interested in the marriage, and since neither the Prince nor Princess could exchange a civil look let alone a civil word, the media were hovering like vultures just waiting for the final death throe.

It came soon enough, when Diana yet again used the boys to outmanoeuvre her husband. There had been a long-standing arrangement to host a private shooting party at Sandringham together on the weekend of 20 and 21 November, which was the Ludgrove exeat. The weekend had become something of a tradition and Charles had invited the usual sixteen friends with their children for what should have been a relaxing and jolly time for everyone. Harry was now at Ludgrove too, and both he and William were looking forward to a trip to Sandringham, which was a boys' paradise, and to seeing their friends. Both of them loved shooting.

Less than a week beforehand, the Prince discovered that Diana had decided not to come to Sandringham and was planning to take the children to stay with the Queen at Windsor instead. According to Jephson, she had looked forward to the weekend with a mixture of anger and dread. ‘They're all
his
friends,' she complained. ‘I'm going to be completely outnumbered.'

Her instincts were probably right; most of his friends took his side in the marital war, and now that they had Morton and Squidgygate in their armoury, it could have been a very uncomfortable weekend. Charles spoke to his mother who spoke to Diana who swiftly said that if she couldn't go to Windsor then she would take the boys to Highgrove instead. She refused a plea from the Prince who asked, if she was determined to stay away, that she should let the boys go to Sandringham by themselves. On the advice of her lawyer, she wrote a careful letter of explanation
in which she said that she felt the atmosphere at Sandringham would not be conducive to a happy weekend for the children. Nor could she be sure that he would not expose them to guests whose presence would be unwelcome to her (by whom she meant Camilla). Charles finally lost it. The farce had to end.

Thus on the afternoon of 9 December 1992, John Major, then Prime Minister, stood at the dispatch box in the House of Commons before a packed but silent House and read aloud the following statement: ‘It is announced from Buckingham Palace that, with regret, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate. Their Royal Highnesses have no plans to divorce and their constitutional positions are unaffected. This decision has been reached amicably and they will both continue to participate fully in the upbringing of their children.'

Julia Cleverdon, chief executive of Business in the Community, who had worked closely with the Prince of Wales for ten years and was with him in Holyhead that day, first knew of it when reporters shouted, ‘Give us a statement, Charlie.' Later, he told her about the separation, and she says that in all the years she'd known him, she had never seen him look so miserable.

Coincidentally, 20 November was the date of a devastating fire at Windsor Castle, while the Queen, who spent much of her childhood there, was in residence. The fire started accidentally when a curtain that had been touching a spotlight burst into flames in the Private Chapel. Fortunately no one was hurt but it raged for fifteen hours and caused millions of pounds' worth of damage to what is the oldest of royal residences and the only one that has been in constant use since William the Conqueror selected the site for a fortress after his conquest of England in 1066. These events and more were what led the Queen to declare 1992 an ‘
annus horribilis
'.

William and Harry had been told about the separation in advance. Charles and Diana had gone to Ludgrove – where Harry had joined William in 1992 – and first explained the situation to the Barbers, so that they were prepared to support and reassure the boys in the days and weeks that followed. Then, in the homely
surroundings of the headmaster's sitting room, they broke the news to William and Harry. William's rather grown-up response was to hope that they would both be happier now. He let more of his feelings be known, perhaps, in a letter to his trusted nanny Olga Powell. She wrote him a very personal letter back consoling him about the impending separation.

The Households were swiftly divided. Diana took sole possession of Kensington Palace and kept the two senior butlers, Paul Burrell (who was later prosecuted for stealing her belongings after her death) and Harold Brown. Charles took butler number three, Bernie Flannery. The Prince and Princess were careful to keep photographs of each other in their homes for the sake of the boys. The office at St James's Palace, which they continued to share, remained much the same. There was talk of warring factions, but the two teams were surprisingly united and continued to work together to co-ordinate diaries, particularly over arrangements for the children.

But as is the way with wars, when one side loses ground another side surges forward. After Diana's embarrassment it was the Prince's turn. For a man jealous of his privacy, the publication in the
Daily Mirror
in January 1993 of his own intimate late-night telephone ramblings with Camilla was the ultimate humiliation. Even Diana, while enjoying a little
Schadenfreude
, was embarrassed on his behalf. The tape was eleven minutes that could be distilled into one: the heir to the throne's wish that he could always be with the woman he adored and musing on the possibility of turning into a tampon to achieve it.

The puritanical outburst that followed, what was immediately dubbed ‘Camillagate', verged on hysteria and was out of all proportion. An alien would have concluded Britain was a nation in crisis. There were lurid headlines and cartoons, wide condemnation of the Prince, questions about his fitness to be King and, in the mounting fever, demands from Cabinet ministers that the Prince give up Mrs Parker Bowles.

How this ridiculous rambling demonstrated that Charles was not fit to be King was a mystery. It was the sort of idiotic conversation
with crude jokes that many lovers might have when entirely alone at the dead of night. All it demonstrated was that the Prince had found in Camilla what he had so much hoped for with Diana. They clearly had a loving, friendly, familiar relationship with no suspicion or tension or jealousy. She was fun, she was sexy and giggly and pulled his leg when he was angry or sounding pompous, but she didn't criticise him or put him down. She was interested in him: she boosted his ego, bolstered his confidence and made no demands on him. She wanted to hear about his work, read his speeches and listen to his plans and ideas. She was happy when they could be together but understanding when that wasn't possible. It was clear she was a friend as well as a lover and shared many of his enthusiasms.

No one has ever determined who made the recordings but Charles and Camilla worked out that it was a compilation of several conversations held over several months around Christmas 1989 – shortly before Diana was being listened into – but, curiously, like Diana's, they weren't published until much later.

Before investigations into either record began, the Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, told the House of Commons ‘There is nothing to investigate … I am absolutely certain that the allegation that this is anything to do with the security services or GCHQ … is being put out by newspapers, who I think feel rather guilty that they are using plainly tapped telephone calls.' An interesting theory in the light of Prince William's discovery that his was one of several mobile phones being hacked into, which led to an avalanche of claims against the Murdoch empire.

The Prince of Wales was furious that his phone had been illegally bugged and deeply annoyed that the press should have published the tape. He was also miserable that he had managed to drag the monarchy through the mire yet again, and devastated for Camilla, who was bombarded with hateful letters and accused of breaking up the royal marriage. He was humiliated beyond words and it required huge courage to step out of the car on a visit to Liverpool the following day, not knowing what kind of reception
to expect from the crowds. As it was, there was not one single snigger or catcall and no evidence that people had stayed away.

But his greatest fear was for William and Harry, and also for Camilla's children, Tom and Laura Parker Bowles, who were a few years older. They were all at school and children, he knew, could be horribly cruel. He was terrified about how they would cope.

Yet again, the Barbers worked overtime to keep the most lurid headlines out of sight and to support William and now Harry. The school had had the children of high-profile parents through their doors before and scandals in the press were nothing new, but nothing before or since could have compared with the upsets that these young boys had so far had to handle.

A TOUGH CHOICE

With every episode, the bold, confident, cheeky boy was becoming more muted, while his brother, the quiet, subdued one, still too young to fully understand what was going on, appeared to blossom. It was becoming clear that William was taking onto his young shoulders the burden of responsibility for his parents' wellbeing and happiness.

He saw the newspapers and the television news, witnessed the sarcasm and shouting, felt the corrosive atmosphere, but because he loved both his parents, his loyalty and emotions were torn down the middle. Fortunately, they were not the only providers of care in his young life and it was perhaps the stability that came from the other people around him that prevented him from careering off the rails when everyone else seemed to be hell bent on self-destruction.

One of these people was a ditzy young aristocrat called Alexandra Legge-Bourke, known as Tiggy, whose mother, Shaun, and aunt, Victoria, were both ladies-in-waiting to Princess Anne. Tiggy was taken on as an aide to Richard Aylard, but swiftly moved sideways as a female presence in the boys' life and to act
in loco parentis
when, under the terms of the separation, they were with Charles but he had commitments elsewhere. It was a magical appointment. Tiggy was twenty-eight and a bundle of fun, something between a loving, liberal mother and a slightly wild big sister. She was a nursery school teacher who had a delightful rapport with children of all ages and temperaments, whom she called her Tiggywigs. She said of her royal charges, ‘I give them what they need at this stage;
fresh air, a rifle and a horse. She [their mother] gives them a tennis racket and a bucket of popcorn at the movies.'William and Harry took to her like ducks to water but their mother once again grew frightened that she was being usurped.

Meanwhile, another crisis was brewing. The veteran writer and broadcaster, Jonathan Dimbleby, had spent two years working on a double project: a television documentary about Charles and a biography, which he had managed to persuade the Prince to authorise. He was given unrestricted access to the archives at St James's Palace and at Windsor Castle, where an entire floor is filled with documents and memoranda accumulated over the last four decades. ‘I have also been free to read his journals, diaries and many thousands of the letters which he has written assiduously since childhood,' Dimbleby wrote. ‘Not only have I drawn heavily from this wealth of original material but I have been free to quote extensively from it. Nor has the Prince discouraged past and present members of the royal Household from speaking to me; likewise, at his behest, his friends and some of his relatives have talked about him openly at length, almost all of them for the first time.'

Both were timed to coincide loosely with the twenty-fifth anniversary of his Investiture as Prince of Wales, in July 1994. What began as an innocent and well-intentioned exercise had unimaginable consequences and was ultimately responsible for Camilla's divorce from Andrew Parker Bowles, terrible ructions within the Royal Family, Diana's devastating
Panorama
interview, Richard Aylard's departure and the fiercest controversy yet about the Prince's fitness to be King. William was twelve and deeply affected by it.

The documentary was called ‘Charles: the Private Man, the Public Role'. It ran for two and a half hours and attracted fourteen million viewers, many of whom understood for the first time what the Prince actually did when he wasn't playing polo. But what most people remembered about the film ran to no more than three minutes.

Dimbleby asked Charles about his infidelity: ‘Did you try to be faithful and honourable to your wife when you took on the vows of marriage?'

‘Yes,' said the Prince, and after a brief and rather anguished pause added, ‘until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.'

When asked about Camilla he said she was ‘a great friend of mine … she has been a friend for a very long time.'

At a press conference the next day, Richard Aylard, who had overseen the project, confirmed that the adultery to which the Prince had confessed was indeed with Mrs Parker Bowles.

His reasoning was sound enough, even if the results were not. The question had to be asked because after the Morton book, the taped phone calls and everything else that had gone before, it was the only thing the public was interested in. How he should answer it was a tough choice. The Prince could have refused to answer, but that wouldn't have stopped the paparazzi who followed him and Camilla and made their lives so difficult. He could have lied but that was morally unacceptable, and if and when the paparazzi did catch the two of them together, he would be shown to be a liar. Or he could tell the truth, which he did, naively believing that the public would understand that he committed adultery only after the marriage had irretrievably broken down.

‘NOT FIT TO REIGN' ran the
Daily Mirror
headline, and other front pages took a similar tone.

Diana went down to Ludgrove to talk to the children. As she said in her
Panorama
interview, ‘I … put it to William particularly, that if you find someone you love in life you must hang on to it and look after it, and if you were lucky enough to find someone who loved you then one must protect it.