This twist of timing turned a narrative that might have suggested parental out-of-touchness into a fable of fatherly redemption, with the News of the World actually praising Charles’s ‘decisive intervention’ in an editorial headed ‘Courage of a Wise and Loving Dad’.
‘Unfortunately, this is something that many parents have to go through at one time or another,’ one ‘senior aide’ to Prince Charles remarked, and general opinion responded supportively. ‘No one in our society is immune from the problem of drugs,’ opined the Mail on Sunday forgivingly.
‘Households right across the country waking up to this story,’ declared Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy, ‘will probably have had very similar experiences with their own teenagers.’
This masterpiece of damage limitation had been the work of Charles’s assistant private secretary Mark Bolland, who would disclose a few years later that ‘the sequence of events’ producing this largely favourable reaction ‘was distorted’. He himself, he admitted, had been the sympathetic ‘senior aide’ quoted in the article.
Hired by Charles in 1997 to repair and rebuild the prince’s post-Diana reputation, Bolland’s long-term mission was the ‘selling’ of Charles’s eventual remarriage to Camilla, and it had been Camilla herself who first discovered the rangy and attractive PR fixer. Bolland had been working as director of the PCC, where he had actually been the architect of the unprecedented privacy arrangements protecting William and Harry.
In the short term it made great sense for Bolland to improve Prince Charles’s image as the caring and concerned parent of Diana’s children, and in this exercise he had been helped by Guy Black, his successor as director of the PCC. Black himself had been responsible for tightening the PCC’s Code of Practice in the wake of Diana’s death. He was also the partner of Mark Bolland, and would become his civil partner in 2006, prior to their marriage in 2015. In July 2010 Guy Black was ennobled as Baron Black of Brentwood.
In happier times, William and Harry would joke about the incredible connections and manoeuvrings of Mark Bolland on their father’s behalf as he masterminded the ruthless campaign that would achieve its purpose with surprising speed in 2005 – the marriage of Charles and Camilla to general public acceptance, if no special enthusiasm. The boys humorously dubbed Bolland ‘Lord Blackadder’ after the scheming and manipulative anti-hero of the long-running Blackadder TV series starring Rowan Atkinson – all sneeringly curled lips and sinisterly arched eyebrows.
But Harry was not laughing in January 2002. For whose reputation had Blackadder actually saved? ‘World Exclusive – Harry’s Drugs Shame’? Thank you very much, dear Mark and Guy and Rebekah. Dad might have emerged from the story smelling of roses, but it was Harry who was typecast as the ‘Bad Boy of Buckingham Palace’ or ‘Boozy Harry’.
This was the beginning of the relentless popular media stereotyping that would eventually drive Prince Harry out of Britain – while the other face of that stereotype was, of course, the impeccable image of his perfect elder brother, golden boy Prince William. There were even newspaper stories suggesting that it was William who should get the credit for intervening at his father’s request to ‘save’ Harry.
It was a complex story, since Harry had certainly lost his way in 2000 and 2001 when the brothers’ two-year Eton partnership ended and William disappeared from his life to pursue his gap year around the world. In the absence of William’s companionship, the younger brother had turned to false companions.
But it was William who had opened the first bottles behind the well-stocked bar in the cellar of Highgrove and had led the group forays to the Rattlebone Inn after hours. William was the blue-eyed glamour boy at the centre of the Glossy Posse, pouring out the drinks and inspiring all the revels that would coax his younger brother – a full two years and three months younger, still a child – into errant and self-destructive ways. ‘So that’s why they call it “Highgrove”!’ was a joke from the left-wing Observer that applied to both brothers – but it actually applied rather more to William, since he had been the Lord of Misrule and driving spirit behind the entire seductive fantasy of Club H.
Both Charles and William, father and elder son, could now move on from ‘Harry’s Drugs Shame’ towards the grand and glittering roles that the dynasty and public opinion required of them. For all their alleged thirst to reveal ‘the truth’ about the scandals of Highgrove, Britain’s tabloid newspapers never put anything seriously discreditable on the record about the future King William V – the ‘King of the Castle’. It was Harry who was cast as the ‘dirty rascal’.
In this culturally distorted scenario it was evidently the predetermined function – the very destiny – of the son and younger brother to carry the can for his ‘exemplary’ elder sibling. But while Harry might be forced into such a role at the age of seventeen, he was not going to accept it for ever.
16
Wobble
‘I just want to go in there and get my asparagus, or whatever.’
(Prince William on shopping in St Andrews, BBC, 19 November 2004)
It was certainly unsentimental – when Diana’s friends found out about it, they said that her elder son was betraying her memory – but William really was very keen to meet Camilla. He saw it as his next priority. The hard-headed and purposeful fifteen-year-old had realised that this woman whom his late mother, still only a few months in the grave, had hated with such a passion, now occupied a place at the heart of his father’s life.
