This book tells the untold truth of the last 20 years of Prince Charles’s life. Up till now, everyone assumed the heir to the throne was a much-respected and well-loved man. But thanks to my research – trawling through the cuttings and speaking to 120 people who don’t like him very much but refused to go on the record – I can now exclusively reveal that he is a bit of a pampered, out-of-touch loser who likes homeopathy and despises modern architecture. As someone who knows Prince Charles well told me: “He has never recovered from being bullied by his father – and with any luck he won’t recover from being bullied by you.”
In July 1996, Prince Charles was a worried man. His valet was two minutes late bringing him his lightly poached free-range Duchy egg for breakfast and the newspapers were reporting that he was the least popular person in the entire world. In a fury, he summoned his entire staff, including the 12 Indian gardeners who had been up all night picking snails out of his Highgrove flowerbeds, to a summit meeting. “Something must be done,” he yelled. “I want to marry Camilla and for her to become queen.”
When the news broke that Diana had been killed in a car accident, Prince Charles was sitting on the lavatory. Immediately, he summoned the Keeper of the Prince’s Stools to wipe his bottom and telephoned his mother who was on holiday in Balmoral. “What shall one do?” he asked the queen. “Forked if I know,” the monarch replied. “You sort it out. I want to watch the racing on the television.” It was only a few hours later when one of his servants suggested it might be a good idea for him to show his face in Paris.
The death of Princess Diana only hardened public hostility towards the prince. Many still blamed him for the break-up of the marriage and were unwilling to forgive his adultery with Camilla. To try to improve his image, Charles set up another 100 charities, many of which would duplicate work his existing charities were doing. The prince, though, was adamant that his tireless championing of good causes should receive the maximum attention and instructed his press secretary to write letters to dozens of the wealthiest people around the world instructing them to send donations of no less than £50,000. In return, they would be invited to a private dinner where Charles would make a point of ignoring them.
During one of his regular squabbles with Prince Andrew and Prince Edward over who would sit in the front row at Westminster Abbey during the Queen’s funeral, Charles was interrupted by an urgent phone call from his press secretary to say that it might be a good idea to reduce his number of staff by several hundred if he wanted to become more popular. Charles was incandescent. “There’s no one I can spare,” he insisted, as several dozen footmen packed up his entire living quarters (including the avocado, neo-classical bathroom suite) and moved them to the stately home of an acquaintance he was planning on visiting later that afternoon.
The early years of the new century marked a high point of turbulence in Charles’s life. Camilla was complaining to him that she was completely broke and down to her last few mill, while refusing to get out of bed even to smoke a cigarette, and Diana’s butler was in the news for hoarding embarrassing souvenirs of the royal marriage.
In 2005, there was a brief respite to Charles’s misery when he was allowed to marry Camilla. However his day was spoiled when he discovered that his mother had stayed at home to watch the Grand National and had sent one of her lookalikes to the civil ceremony in a Catford register office instead. The prince also had a tantrum when he discovered that the sandwiches had been cut into squares rather than triangles.
The rest of the prince’s life has been almost pointless. As one person said to me: “His life really has been almost pointless. He is a total waste of space.” Most days, Charles is to be found checking his popularity ratings on YouGov polls, arranging £80,000 round trips on private jets to the garden centre, moaning that everyone likes his two sons more than him, worrying his hair is falling out, handing out cash to Camilla and phoning Buckingham Palace to check if his mother is still alive. Luckily for the country, she is.
Digested read, digested: The untold story retold.
