ten years,’ Higgins told Sally Bedell Smith in 1999. ‘I talked to her about Diana and Charles. She guided me on things that were not true, or things that were off the beam. Everything was behind closed doors and I didn’t write about her, although I spoke to her all the time during that period. I didn’t sense that she and Charles were out of touch.’

So starting in 1982, the year following Charles and Diana’s wedding, the future Queen Camilla dispensed royal nudges and whispers to one of Britain’s top tabloid reporters in return for his keeping her name out of the papers.

The indefatigable James Whitaker and his binoculars bore witness to the state of the royal marriage in the summer of 1986, shortly after brother Andrew had married Sarah Ferguson – ‘Fergie’ – drawing popular and romantic attention away from the Waleses for some moments of relief. After the Andrew–Ferguson wedding Charles and Diana took the boys, then four and nearly two, on a bucket-and-spade holiday on the island of Majorca, staying with Spain’s King Juan Carlos on board the Fortuna, his royal yacht.

‘When we pulled into one of the tiny, idyllic bays,’ wrote Whitaker, ‘the royal party had no idea we were nearby. I stayed below deck out of sight and watched what was occurring on the Fortuna for the next five hours. It was illuminating … Not once during the lengthy period did Charles or Diana sit anywhere near one another – let alone speak. When he came up from his air-conditioned quarters to go windsurfing, she walked off in the opposite direction. When she went diving off the back of the boat, he deliberately looked the other way. They read, they sunbathed, they chatted to others, but never once did they address a single word to each other.

‘I watched through my field-glasses, completely mesmerised. I had heard the stories, listened to the excuses, hoped that what I had been told was exaggerated or wrong. But clearly it wasn’t. The five-year-old marriage, I was forced to conclude, was dead.’

So from the ages of four and two, William and Harry grew up in the care of two parents who were not sharing the same bed, who were more inclined to talk to the press than to each other, and who were also engaging in patterns of systematic deceit. Maybe Diana had not been unfaithful by this date, but she was definitely developing plans in that direction, and she had come to accept the fact that her husband was already doing the same – that the essence of their marriage was a lie.

Barbara Barnes’s successor as the two young princes’ nanny, Ruth Wallace, lasted only three years in the job. Both boys adored her: Harry called her Nanny ‘Roof’. But her closeness to the brothers was not enough – Nanny ‘Roof’ simply could not stand the ever more bitter warfare between their parents, which, according to different sources, she described as ‘difficult to deal with’, ‘too unpleasant’ – or, in one word, ‘toxic’. Booking herself a long voyage of recovery up the Amazon in 1989, the nanny would hand in her notice and shake off the poison of the palace. William and Harry could not.

In 1985 Diana’s beloved Dr Spock brought out a new edition of his Baby and Child Care handbook for parents intended to reflect the new domestic challenges of the times – and prominent among them were marital disagreements that could lead to separation and divorce.

‘Most separations and divorces,’ wrote Spock, ‘involve two people who have become very angry at each other.’

That was unquestionably the case with Diana and Charles, according to Wendy Berry, their housekeeper at Highgrove, where, by the late 1980s, the prince was insisting on spending more and more time.

‘I hate you, Charles, I fucking hate you,’ Diana screamed at her husband during one confrontation, according to Berry.

‘I hate you, Papa. I hate you so much,’ William added to the chorus on another occasion, shouting at his father, ‘Why do you make Mummy cry all the time?’

Still not ten years old, William was already establishing the pattern of open disdain and aggression towards his father that has lasted to the present day – but more of that later.

The young prince had picked up his nicknames of ‘Basher Wills’ or ‘Billy the Basher’ when he joined Mrs Jane Mynors’ Nursery School in Notting Hill, not far from Kensington Palace, in September 1985. Noisy, cheeky and defiant of discipline, Wills soon angered his classmates by pushing his way to the front of the dinner queue and getting involved in playground fights. He felt entitled …

‘My daddy can beat up your daddy,’ he would say. ‘My daddy’s the Prince of Wales.’

‘Basher’ went public in the summer of 1986 in Westminster Abbey as a pageboy at the marriage of Uncle Andrew to Sarah Ferguson. After dragging his cousin Laura Fellowes, six, a bridesmaid, down the aisle, ‘he fidgeted throughout the ceremony’, according to Penny Junor, ‘rolled his order of service into a trumpet, scratched his head, covered his face with his fingers, poked his tongue out at Laura, and left the Abbey with his sailor hat wildly askew’.

‘William’s very enthusiastic about things,’ explained Diana who was reluctant, like her husband, to be judgemental of their boisterous elder son and heir. ‘He pushes himself right into it.’

With neither parent keen to play the disciplinarian, it was left to Nanny Ruth to try to administer some correction. In the autumn of 1987 she yanked the five-year-old home from a birthday party following a tantrum when he had not been allowed to blow out the candles on the cake and had expressed his displeasure by throwing sandwiches and ice-cream around the room. Nanny made him clean up the mess before he left.

By that same autumn of 1987 reports of William’s bad behaviour had spread so widely that Spitting Image, the satirical TV show, included the five-year-old among its grotesque puppets of the royal family. A juvenile William puppet, dressed

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