In a time of austerity, Charles felt that the profusion of royal relatives who spilled onto the palace balcony in all their uniforms and jewellery on ceremonial occasions gave out quite the wrong message. Who knew or cared about these Kents and Gloucesters from a bygone age? And what about the modern Yorks and the Wessexes, for that matter? Charles felt that his brothers Andrew and Edward should step back as part of the slimming process.
The Prince of Wales pursued his theme hard, with Andrew resisting fiercely on behalf of Edward and himself – and particularly his own daughters Beatrice and Eugenie, eight and six in 1996. Andrew saw royal service as the perfect career path for both his girls, and he also pointed out that if Charles really did intend to limit the family workforce in this drastic fashion, it would make a heavy load for William and Harry, which they would surely appreciate sharing with their female cousins. The arguments grew bitter, bringing out into the open all the tensions and jealousies that had long festered between the ‘heir’ and the ‘spare’.
Andrew was the Queen’s favourite son by far – that was the bottom line. Everyone in the family knew it. Elizabeth II had always been uncomfortable with the cerebral and sensitive Charles, forever debating the whys and the wherefores. The gulf between mother and son went back to his very earliest years, when the Queen had been travelling so much in fulfilment of her new monarchical duties – and then found herself, when she got home, just as preoccupied with her racehorses and ‘red boxes’ of state papers.
As one disenchanted private secretary put it rather brutally in retirement: ‘If the Queen had taken half as much trouble about the rearing of her children as she has about the breeding of her horses, the royal family wouldn’t be in such an emotional mess … If she’d spent less time reading those idiotic red boxes – to what effect, one asks? – and had taken being a wife and mother more seriously, it would have been far better. Yes, she can handle prime ministers very well, but could she handle her eldest son? And which was the more important?’
It was not his mother but his nannies, Charles told Jonathan Dimbleby with perceptible bitterness, ‘who taught him to play, who witnessed his first steps, who punished and rewarded him, who helped him put his first thoughts into words’.
Andrew, by contrast, was the first of the Queen’s more favoured second brood – the children she had produced because she really wanted them, for personal, not dynastic reasons. But as a consequence of his maternal spoiling, the younger ‘spare’ had grown up to be an incredibly indulged and self-regarding creature. Like his brothers, he went to Gordonstoun in the wilds of Scotland, but while both Charles and Edward made it to ‘Guardian’ or Head Boy, Andrew did not. The second son was too much ‘the prince’, explained the headmaster in a phrase that cruelly summed up just about everything that went wrong with Andrew’s subsequent non-military career – from his business and personal dealings with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein to his embarrassing defence of that relationship on the BBC’s Newsnight in November 2019. When the Newsnight interview ended, the prince actually thought that he had come across ‘well’.
Apart from his mother’s special favour, Andrew also benefited from the support of his other parent – from whom he had clearly inherited so many of his more forceful character traits. Prince Philip was a supporter of his second son – shielding him, for example, during the 1996 Way Ahead meeting whose details somehow found their way into the Guardian. After sharp arguments between the two elder brothers, Philip had drawn the gathering to an early close.
But the Duke of Edinburgh would be ill in the summer of 2012 when Prince Charles renewed his campaign to cut down the number of family figures on the palace balcony. On this occasion it was a question of who would step outside to mark Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, celebrating her sixty years on the throne.
November 2019: Prince Andrew interviewed on BBC Newsnight
Charles had been foiled in 2002 when a score of relatives had been invited onto the balcony to lap up the applause for the Golden Jubilee. But ten years later, in the absence of his father, the Prince of Wales got his way. In 2012 just six people walked out onto the balcony – the Queen, Charles and Camilla, William, Kate and Harry – a victory for Charles’s vision of a slimmed-down monarchy with its future built around the talents and energies of his two charming and popular sons.
But what if the two brothers happened somehow to fall out? And what if one of them decided to take a hike – to up sticks and go to live in another country? Such a departure would leave only one prince to shoulder all the royal duties and to meet all the demands of an ever more demanding public – not just in Britain but in the wider world. Perhaps the current heir had done just a bit too much slimming.
15
Forget-me-not
‘If we don’t feel comfortable pouring our eyes out in front of thousands of people, then that’s our problem. You know, we’ve got each other to talk to.’
(Prince Harry, 18 June 2007)
For nearly five hundred years the Spencers of Althorp – some twenty generations of them – have been buried in their local parish church of St Mary the Virgin. But in 1997 Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, was not laid to rest among her ancestors. Her brother had a more private and romantic site in mind – inside a little Grecian-style temple on a
