The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (14 page)

The name Mark Bolland still sends shivers down a number of spines in both palaces. He was hired by the Prince of Wales in 1996, post-Dimbleby, post-divorce, when the Prince’s reputation was at an all-time low and many of his friends were demanding Richard Aylard’s head. Over dinner at St James’s Palace, Hilary Browne-Wilkinson, who had been Camilla’s divorce lawyer, and also happened to be a member of the Press Complaints Commission, asked the Prince if he had come across a man called Mark Bolland. Her husband, law lord Nico Browne-Wilkinson, was also at the dinner table that evening, and another couple, plus Camilla. As coffee was served Lord Browne-Wilkinson launched into a fearsome attack on the way the Prince’s staff had handled the media in recent times, concluding that it was the legal profession’s collective view that the situation could not be worse, nor more damaging for the monarchy. Sitting uncomfortably, playing with his coffee cup, was Richard Aylard, the man apparently responsible, a detail not lost, I am sure, on the assembled guests.

‘He works for the Press Complaints Commission,’ said Hilary, referring to Mark Bolland, in the ensuing silence. ‘You should hire him and see if he can do anything to help.’

Two days later Bolland, who was director of the PCC at the time, had accepted a very minor role in the Press Office at St James’s Palace. He’d been warned the job he would be offered would be ‘crap’ but had been told to take it; better things would follow. As indeed they did. Bolland, clever, charismatic and confident, very swiftly became the Prince’s new best friend, the wonder man who would fix his life; and Aylard, whose loyalty and devotion to the Prince had cost the courtier his marriage, was spat out of the system like so many before him, as cherished as yesterday’s bus ticket.

It was not the Prince’s finest hour. He knew that Aylard deserved better but once again he took the weak man’s course and allowed himself to be convinced by friends that Aylard was responsible for everything that had gone wrong – and after Dimbleby little seemed to go right. In truth, Aylard had probably been there too long and had certainly given too much of himself; he discovered at the end of the day the brutal reality, that working for a member of the Royal Family, however close the relationship, is only a job. There is often a gong at the end of it or a present of some sort and a card at Christmas – and in Aylard’s case he continued to do some consultancy work on green issues – but in other respects it’s no different from leaving a burger business or a merchant bank. Out of sight is out of mind, and some new face soon becomes equally indispensable.

Aylard had been Private Secretary for five years but he had been in the household for eleven, and had been with the Prince throughout his worst years. He was at Klosters in March 1988 when an avalanche killed the Prince’s friend Major Hugh Lindsay, and with him through Morton, Camillagate, separation and divorce. They shared the same interests and enthusiasms – as a zoologist Aylard was an expert on environmental matters and conservation and wrote some of the Prince’s best
speeches on the subject. It was a very intense relationship; they spent hours together, round the clock, most days of the year, and if Aylard was not actually in attendance he was at the other end of a telephone, even on his days off. Aylard would never presume to have called himself a friend – no courtier ever would – but they were close and there is no doubt he enjoyed his position. ‘Richard had all the armament required,’ says a former courtier at St James’s Palace. ‘The Prince of Wales loved him, the chemistry between them was very good, but he became completely intoxicated. Late at night they used to sit in front of the fire at Sandringham and he would have all the problems of the Royal Family poured out to him. The Prince of Wales didn’t understand how tremendously overexcited he was.’

And yet for all the talk down the years, and the unburdening of the Prince’s problems, the Prince was blissfully unaware of Aylard’s own problems on the home front. The Princess of Wales was always concerned about the people around her, attuned to the slightest vibration and aware of their personal circumstances. The Prince has no such antennae, and no awareness that the demands he puts on his staff might have an effect on their family life. Because he never stops working, it doesn’t occur to him that they might need a break. Because he never has lunch, it doesn’t occur to him that his staff might feel a little peckish in the middle of the day. In Aylard’s case he had a wife who had suffered severe post-natal depression and two young children living in the country he never got home to see. He lived in a grace and favour apartment in Kensington Palace and when he did have enough time off to make it to the country, the Prince would ring and want to speak to him on the telephone all day long and half the night.

However, the minute he was alerted to what was going on by someone in the office – ‘I had no idea,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t
anyone tell me?’ – Charles was immediately on the phone to him full of sympathy. ‘Thank you very much,’ said Aylard in mock indignation as he came storming into the office the next morning. ‘Thanks to you the Prince was on the phone from a quarter past ten until midnight last night sympathizing with me.’

Mark Bolland was never going to sacrifice his life for the sake of a job. Aylard had been a commander in the Royal Navy; he was traditional courtier material – courteous, understated, with a healthy understanding of the importance of tradition and hierarchy. By contrast, Bolland was a maverick. Educated at a comprehensive school in Middlesbrough and at York University, he had been nowhere near the Armed Forces and was in awe of no one. He was thirty, good-looking, gay, sophisticated and already on a highly successful career path. After three years at the Advertising Standards Authority and five at the Press Complaints Commission he knew his way around Fleet Street, knew all the personalities and loved wheeling and dealing.

At their first meeting the Prince of Wales asked him if he could bear to do the job. He could certainly bear to do it, he said, and he intended to have some fun the while. ‘If you don’t have fun in a job, there’s no point in doing it,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t all need to be so terrible. Things can get better.’

‘If you say so,’ said the Prince.

‘Well, I do, actually.’

And he was true to his word on both counts. Things did get better, quite dramatically, and as Bolland settled into the job it was clear he was having fun. His predecessors seldom lunched and perpetually looked harassed and overworked. Bolland did lunch, very comfortably. He had a table at Le Caprice, conveniently round the corner from St James’s Palace, and liked nothing more than a Kir Royale. In the evenings he
dined at the Ivy or 1 Aldwych or wherever was fashionable, the food good and the clientele classy. He and his partner Guy Black, at that time director of the Press Complaints Commission, equally charming and accomplished, were very much a part of the London social scene – also the Gay Mafia – and by association took the Prince’s name into a whole new constituency.

When Richard Aylard departed, Stephen Lamport stepped into his shoes as Private Secretary. A career diplomat, he had been in the Prince’s office for three years handling foreign tours and the architectural brief. He was orthodox, cautious and clever but uninspiring. Mark Bolland was his deputy, but he was the one with the influence over both the Prince and the press. His brief was to rehabilitate Camilla Parker Bowles; to restore the Prince’s reputation after Diana’s various assaults on it; and to demonstrate to the world that he was not a bad father and, contrary to what his ex-wife had said, perfectly fit to be king.

Bolland was camp, flamboyant and dangerous – and those who didn’t hate him loved him. He took chances, he spun stories, he had favourites, traded secrets, called in favours, and very quickly the Prince’s name was in the headlines – and, for the first time in years, not because he was a bad husband or a lousy father but because he was hard-working, committed and entrepreneurial. But there was a sting in the tail. The
quid pro quo
was that selected newspapers were given occasional stories about his love life. A dangerous barter but, in the hands of a pro like Bolland, it worked.

To suggest Mark Bolland’s life was one long lunch would be entirely misleading. He was at the Prince’s constant beck, his mobile phone never further away than his breast pocket, and in all the years I knew him in that job I don’t remember a meeting that wasn’t either cancelled because he had been
called away or wasn’t uninterrupted by a call from the boss. As one former courtier, who, like many before him, had given up an extremely successful career to take up the job of working for the Prince, said:

It is very odd to find oneself being treated like an office boy at my stage in life. I’ve never had to work so hard.

When I told him once that he really ought to employ more boring people as courtiers, he said how awful courtiers were and how boring. But it’s quite right, you need boring people to be courtiers, you don’t want people who are going to be overexcited. Mark Bolland, he hit that comment off into mid-wicket. As a professional PR man you couldn’t get better, putting engine oil all over Mrs PB so she could be readily reintegrated into the royal structure …

A large part of Bolland’s job was looking after Mrs PB, as Camilla was universally called, and the engine oil he put all over her was very effective. When he arrived in the job, Camilla was a prisoner in her own home with two Jack Russells and sackloads of abusive letters for company. When he left seven years later, she and the Prince of Wales had been seen together in public so frequently that the newspapers didn’t always bother to carry photographs – and more than 50 per cent of the British public thought he should marry her.

Mark included her in the office, invited her to diaryplanning meetings; they were allies in handling the Prince of Wales, who is not always easy. She could often say things to him over the breakfast marmalade that anyone else would have had their heads bitten off for even mentioning. He would speak to her for hours on the phone each day, exchanging news and gossip or listening to one of her many minor crises. They would meet for lunch – he would always be given the
best table in all the best restaurants – he gave her advice, took care of any problems, eased her anxiety, boosted her confidence and was kind to her – something she was not always accustomed to in the Prince’s office. While Diana was alive there were many who had no sympathy for Mrs Parker Bowles at all. And surprisingly, after all this time and all she has been through, she doesn’t have the hide of a rhinoceros. Mark looked after her, made her feel brave enough to take on the world.

Bolland gave the Prince of Wales courage, too. Charles was by now fast approaching fifty, still failing to please his parents, and, worse, still agonizing about it. It was a daily task to prop up the Prince’s psyche. Bolland encouraged him to stop worrying; if his parents didn’t approve of his lifestyle and his choice of companion that was their problem. This wasn’t courtier-speak and did nothing to improve inter-family relationships, but Bolland was not traditional courtier material and the Prince loved that. For years he had felt himself surrounded by people who spent their time telling him why he couldn’t do things. Here was someone telling him not only that they
could
be done but
how
they could be done; and the Prince loved him, listened to him and relied upon him – just as he had Richard Aylard and others before him. The Prince of Wales has always been looking for someone to solve his problems; sometimes he thinks he has found that person, but ultimately he is always disappointed. Perhaps this is because ultimately there are only so many problems that a Private Secretary can solve.

Bolland loved the power of his position. He never suffered from red-carpet fever, one great advantage he had over his predecessor. He was never in awe of anyone, never felt socially inferior to anyone, never lost sight of the Prince’s shortcomings, never lost his sense of perspective, and never forgot
that what he was doing was a job and that real life, his personal life, came first; but he did enjoy watching doors open and the effect that the Prince’s name had on people. And he enjoyed the fame – and the notoriety – that he acquired over the years as a Machiavellian
éminence grise.
Other members of the Royal Family may have had good reason to curse him but he was never disloyal to the Prince of Wales and in the seven years he worked for him he achieved everything that the Prince asked of him. He was there for him night and day; there for his children and there for his lover, and, until shortly before the end, by which time he felt overused and under-appreciated, he revelled in it.

By that time, however, a schism the size of the Mall had developed between Buckingham Palace and St James’s and that had become the story. The Firm was split down the middle with one side sniping at the other and the senior courtiers from both camps hardly on speaking terms. The mistrust of Bolland became so chronic that he would now be excluded from meetings for fear that he would leak anything that was said during a meeting to the press. He professed a sincere belief in the monarchy, which I am sure was genuine, but felt that the entire institution needed a wake-up call, that they were ‘totally out of touch with the real world’. Writing in 2003 after he had left the Palace – seen as an act of treachery – he said, ‘Sadly, the Prince of Wales apart, they are blissfully unaware of real people’s problems and ignore the hard choices that confront everyone else in public life. The declining audience they attract is almost as narrow as the ageing rump of support that sustains the ailing Conservative Party.’

The problem was a conflict of style and a conflict of interests. Mark Bolland was from a world that Robert Fellowes didn’t begin to understand. There were no points of reference: he didn’t hunt, shoot or fish, didn’t inhabit gentlemen’s clubs, hadn’t been to Eton, hadn’t been in the Army, hadn’t even
been in the City, didn’t have a wife and children, and was twenty-five years younger. He was not steeped in the tradition of royal protocol; he was a meritocrat – he gave respect where it was earned and not where it was expected because of rank or status. And he was there to do a job which the Queen and Robert Fellowes frankly didn’t want done. In their ideal world Camilla would have emigrated to another planet; they recognized, however, that Charles was not going to let that happen and their next best option was to keep her out of sight. Bolland was specifically instructed by the Prince to make Camilla visible, to bring her out into the open so that the day would dawn when the public would view her as a legitimate part of his life, which is precisely what he achieved. A clash was inevitable.

The first major problem arose over Camilla’s birthday party. Robert Fellowes was furious when he heard that the Prince planned to give a party for her at Highgrove and said that if the party went ahead he would have to advise the Queen to tell the Prince that he must give up Camilla for good. There was a view that Fellowes didn’t much like the Prince – a view shared by the Queen’s great friend and racing manager, the late Lord Carnarvon – which, given Fellowes’ relationship to the Princess of Wales, would not have been surprising. However, his colleagues Robin Janvrin and Mary Francis were both dismayed by his attitude over the party and told him that if he advised the Queen as he intended then they would have no alternative but to offer her very different advice. He backed down and the party went ahead.

The following year, in the spring of 1998, the Prince was giving a weekend party for a group of friends at Sandringham and wanted to invite Camilla. He asked Mark Bolland for his advice. ‘Invite her,’ he said. ‘It will be a two-day wonder in the press and then it will go away. It won’t be a problem.’ That was the phrase he used frequently in his dealings with
the Prince and that was what so endeared him to his boss. Diana had been dead for nearly nine months and the weekend was important in terms of defining Camilla’s future role in the Prince’s life. Besides, it was important for the relationship. She was beginning to tire of being left behind, kept in the shadows; they needed to spend some time together.

Bolland rang Robin Janvrin to tell him that it was happening and said there would be a story about it in the newspapers (leaked, inevitably, by an unnamed senior source within the royal household) which would, equally inevitably, beg the question of whether the Queen had known that Camilla had been invited to Sandringham and whether she had given her permission. He had deliberately chosen to ring Janvrin rather than Fellowes, knowing that he would meet less hostility. Janvrin was a younger and more conciliatory character than Fellowes: he said he would deal with it, and on his advice the Queen’s reaction was that this was a private party, it was up to Charles to invite whoever he wanted and she would not have been expected to be consulted. Had Robert Fellowes made the call to the Queen her reaction would have been entirely different, and rows would have ensued.

Janvrin was sympathetic to the Prince in relation to Camilla and he endeavoured to keep the lines of communication open between the two palaces, but he wasn’t prepared to go out on a limb for him. A few months after the Sandringham weekend, Prince William had a secret meeting with Camilla at York House, the Prince’s home in London adjoining St James’s Palace. A few months before Diana died, Charles had tried to introduce the subject of Camilla to his sons but neither of them had wanted to know. Now, a year after his mother’s death, William had changed his mind and on a visit to London from school said he would like to meet her. They spent half an hour together on their own in William’s flat at the top of
the house, and, although terrifying for Camilla, it was the beginning of a very cordial relationship. But later that afternoon the Prince of Wales suggested that Robin Janvrin, who was by then the Queen’s Private Secretary designate, might also like to meet Camilla. In all his years at the Palace he had never met Camilla. Charles was ‘tired of all this nonsense’.

Janvrin had been at St James’s Palace for a meeting and was in the waiting room when Stephen Lamport went to find him. ‘Robin,’ he said, ‘the Prince of Wales would like you to come back upstairs because he’d like to introduce you to Mrs Parker Bowles.’ Janvrin declined. ‘I can’t possibly do that,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t do it without asking the Queen’s permission and making sure it was the right thing to do.’ He was not to be budged and when Lamport relayed this message to the Prince of Wales his language was unrepeatable. ‘In my house …’ he said. ‘How dare he be so rude in my house?’

Janvrin was being neither rude nor judgemental. He had been placed in an impossible position and knew full well that if he had agreed to meet Mrs Parker Bowles without having first cleared it with the Queen, it would have been all over the newspapers and would have been a grave embarrassment to the Queen, and to him. His instincts were right. Camilla’s meeting with Prince William found its way on to the front page of the following day’s
Sun
, and there is every chance that his meeting with Camilla would have done so too. For once this was none of Bolland’s doing; Amanda MacManus, Camilla’s PA, who was married to a
Times
newspaper executive, had told her husband about the meeting over supper that night and he had subsequently mentioned it inadvertently to a journalist. But such was Bolland’s reputation that the other newspapers immediately thought that he had given the story to the
Sun
and were enraged by such apparent favouritism.

A former Lord Chamberlain had a strict rule, which he maintains to this day, of never doing or saying anything in this area without first telling the Queen. Others who have worked for her say the same. Provided she is forewarned, the Queen is 100 per cent supportive if things go wrong. What she doesn’t like are surprises. Some months later, Robin Janvrin did finally meet Camilla Parker Bowles at St James’s Palace, but he told the Queen of his plan beforehand, and they have had a perfectly amicable relationship ever since.

Whenever stories appeared the finger of suspicion immediately pointed to Bolland. And as often as not he was responsible, but it was always calculated. He didn’t issue formal statements as his predecessors had done. He gave non-attributable briefings to editors and journalists. He used the newspapers to get good, positive stories about Charles and Camilla into the public domain and stories that demonstrated that Charles was a good and loving father. But he also used these briefings as bargaining tools, and a great many explosive stories, particularly about the boys when they were first going to parties, never saw the light of day because of the relationship Bolland had developed with certain editors. There were some papers he disliked and gave nothing to, such as the
Daily Telegraph
, because he felt that its editor, Charles Moore, was hostile to the Prince. The
Daily Mail
had always had a special relationship with the Princess of Wales, via its good-looking royal correspondent Richard Kay, to whom Diana regularly fed stories. Being pro-Diana, it was inevitably, therefore, anti-Charles; but it was an important and influential market and after Diana’s death there was a considerable amount of cross-wooing between Bolland and David English, editor-in-chief of the
Mail
and
Mail on Sunday
, and after his death with his successor, Paul Dacre. The two titles became his main outlet – also the
Sun
and the
News of the World
, whose editor,
Rebekah Wade, was a personal friend with whom he and Guy Black spent holidays.

The first ever photograph of Charles and Camilla together since their affair had been made public was a prime example of the way in which Bolland cleverly orchestrated the news for his own purposes. A photograph of the pair had become as sought after as the Holy Grail, worth a fortune to the paparazzo lucky enough to catch them in an unguarded moment. The Prince was determined this should not happen but equally resolved that he and Camilla should be able to do things together. And so Mark devised a plan. Camilla’s sister Annabel Elliot was celebrating her fiftieth birthday with a party at the Ritz on the evening of 28 January 1999, to which both Charles and Camilla had been invited. It was the perfect occasion, informal and non-royal. Mark made a few discreet phone calls suggesting that they might be seen leaving the party together and by mid-afternoon the pavement outside the Arlington Street entrance to the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly was thick with photographers. According to one, there were no fewer than ninety-seven sets of photographer’s ladders on the street. It was a long, cold wait but they were richly rewarded. Shortly before midnight the couple emerged. They didn’t pose for the camera and there was no touching, apart from the Prince’s guiding arm around Camilla’s waist as he steered her towards the waiting car, but it served a very useful purpose and proved a major landmark in the history of their relationship. No one had an exclusive shot, all the papers and television broadcasts carried the story, and it was the perfect way of gauging public opinion – which they found to their relief was surprisingly favourable. From that day on their relationship was effectively out in the open and life for the two of them became very much easier.

But what was good for St James’s Palace was not necessarily
viewed in such a favourable light from across the Mall. Stories in the press that the Queen was still hostile to Camilla did nothing to amuse. For the Prince’s own fiftieth birthday the Queen gave a party at Buckingham Palace to which Camilla was not invited. Since the guests were people from his public life that was not surprising. What did seem surprising was that the Queen refused an invitation to a private birthday party that Camilla gave for Charles at Highgrove. In retrospect the Prince realized he should have spoken to his mother about the party first and not just allowed her to find out when an invitation arrived out of the blue. More likely was that she found herself between the devil and the deep blue sea. There would be a media story whatever she did: if she went she would be seen to be condoning the relationship, which she was not prepared to do at that stage; if she didn’t, she was snubbing Camilla. Damned if she did; damned if she didn’t.