CHARLES: I want to feel my way along you, all over you and up and down you and in and out … Particularly in and out.
CAMILLA: Oh, that’s just what I need at the moment … I can’t bear a Sunday night without you.
CHARLES: Oh, God.
CAMILLA: It’s like that programme Start the Week. I can’t start the week without you.
CHARLES: I fill up your tank … The trouble is I need you several times a week.
CAMILLA: Mmm, so do I. I need you all the week. All the time.
CHARLES: Oh, God. I will just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier!
CAMILLA: What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers? [Both laugh] Oh, you’re going to come back as a pair of knickers.
CHARLES: Or, God forbid, a Tampax. Just my luck! [Laughs] … My luck to be chucked down a lavatory and go on and on forever swirling round on the top, never going down.
‘Knickers’ … ‘Tampax’ … ‘Lavatory’ … It is thought that the Mirror Group arranged to debut this shockingly intimate and non-royal material in Australia as a protective tactic against getting sued when it later ran the conversation in its Sunday tabloids in Britain. It was only republishing for British readers, it could argue, what others were already reading around the world. And as Buckingham Palace pondered legal retaliation in January 1993, it realised that would only make matters worse.
The People looked back to the monarchy’s embarrassments of 1936 to compare Charles and Camilla to the last Prince of Wales and his divorced mistress, Wallis Simpson. ‘The British people should have had the right to know what was going on then,’ the paper editorialised about the Abdication Crisis. ‘You have the right to know what is going on now.’
Abdication did not seem an overwrought comparison to make in the weeks that followed.
‘Have you no shame?’ shouted one man in a crowd that actually booed the prince when he next appeared in public. Opinion polls showed that disapproval of Charles had doubled in the past two months, with 37 per cent of respondents to a Daily Express ICM poll saying that he ‘should not succeed if the Queen dies tomorrow’. Seven out of ten of those polled agreed that the Camillagate tapes had caused ‘great damage to the monarchy’, and 64 per cent felt ‘let down’ by the prince.
Serious calls were made for Charles to step down from the succession in favour of his elder son, with Princess Anne being proposed as a possible ‘Regent’ or ‘proxy monarch’ should the Queen die before William turned eighteen. It was suggested William be invested as Prince of Wales in his father’s place.
Diana leapt joyfully to propagate such ideas. ‘William is going to be in his position much earlier than people think now,’ she had told Andrew Morton. ‘If I was able to write my own script I’d say that I would hope that my husband would go off, go away with his lady and sort that out and leave me and the children to carry the Wales’s name through to the time William ascends the throne.’
Martin Bashir would push the same question in his famous Panorama interview a few years later.
‘Would it be your wish,’ he asked Diana, ‘that when Prince William comes of age that he were to succeed the Queen, rather than the current Prince of Wales?’
‘My wish,’ responded the princess with one of her coy and meaningful smiles, ‘is that my husband finds peace of mind, and from that follows other things – yes.’
We do not know precisely how Diana broached this explosive and subversive subject with her elder son, but the idea was a simple one to grasp. The boy should not only seek to be a good king. Now William must aim to be a better king than his father.
12
Uncle James
‘Never being able to say the word “Mummy” again in your life sounds like a small thing …’
(Prince William, Mother’s Day, March 2009)
‘Tampax-gate’ supplied a nasty twist to the tail of 1992, Queen Elizabeth II’s ‘annus horribilis’ – her ‘horrible year’, as she described it half-ruefully, half-smiling in her Christmas TV broadcast that December. Andrew and Fergie’s separation, the divorce of Princess Anne from Mark Phillips, Andrew Morton and ‘Squidgygate’, Fergie’s toe-sucking and the catastrophic fire in Windsor Castle – after this remorseless succession of embarrassments, the legal separation of Charles and Diana on 9 December had come as almost a footnote. Prime Minister John Major even maintained that the couple’s separation would not automatically lead to divorce – it was still quite possible, he insisted to the House of Commons, that Charles and Diana might be crowned in the future as a ‘separated’ king and queen.
The ludicrous prospect of the next king and queen of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth turning up to be crowned at Westminster Abbey from separate addresses was presumably intended to assuage the Queen’s horror of the ‘d-word’. Who would have custody of the children that day? In reality, the lawyers for Charles and Diana went to work quietly on the divorce settlement that would finally come into effect three years later.
1992: ‘I preferred it when she just used to shake hands!’
The year 1993 proved not-quite-so-horribilis for the Queen and her family – and for William and Harry in particular. The brothers thrived together on the playing fields of Ludgrove, with their parents’ legal separation bringing some sort of stability – and even predictability – to their lives. No longer did
