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a deeper level between Elizabeth and her eldest son, a point emphasized by the Prince’s
biographer, perhaps even over-emphasized in an attempt to excuse the Prince’s return to
his mistress.
… he was unable to turn to his parents to discuss the misery of his private life or of his public persona
[Dimbleby wrote]. Their response to his charitable endeavours was incurious, while he was rarely left in
doubt that they did not entirely welcome his contributions to controversial debate. The emotional gulf
between the Prince and his parents was hard to bridge, while communication between them was normally
limited to the exchange of social pleasantries and the formal business of family enterprise. In the family, only
his grandmother seemed able to give him the understanding and support for which he had always turned to
her. 6
Other factors were the unwillingness of people to tell her. One courtier said:
The Queen is an extremely well-informed person. My mother always drummed into me that they [the royals]
knew far more about you than you thought they did… There were an awful lot of people who would tell the
Queen things about people who were further removed from her than her own children, which she might be
interested in hearing. But I’m not certain that when it comes to somebody who’s very near they actually
would.
And there was always the family habit of ‘ostriching’.
Elizabeth could not fail to notice, however, that Diana was ‘difficult’. Diana’s
calculated power games, using her beauty and attraction for the media – demonstrated
by such occasions as when Diana chose the televised state occasion of the opening of
Parliament by the Queen in November 1984 to air her new, short hairstyle and thus
became the focus of all the camera shots – did not endear her to her mother-in-law. A
year earlier, on the occasion of the British Legion concert in memory of the dead of two
world wars at the Albert Hall, the Princess had first sent a message she would not be
going and had then appeared twenty minutes after the Queen, a public discourtesy on a
solemn occasion. Privately, Elizabeth now regarded Diana as ‘that tiresome girl’ and her
behaviour as childish. For someone as totally dedicated to public service and royal duty
as she was, such antics were inexplicable.
To the Princess of Wales, however, what she saw as the royal family’s apparent
approbation of her husband’s mistress and her husband seemed equally strange. The
Parker Bowleses were frequent guests of the Queen Mother at Birkhall when Charles was
on holiday nearby at Balmoral. Derek Parker Bowles, Andrew’s late father, had been an
old friend of the Queen Mother’s. Andrew, his eldest son, remained on easy terms with
the royal family; there was at that time never any outward sign that he resented his
wife’s relationship with the Prince of Wales except when taunted with it in public, as
happened to him once at Ascot when a fellow member of the Turf Club repeatedly
shouted ‘Ernest Simpson’ at him. The Parker Bowleses’ was an open marriage in which
each apparently accepted the other’s affairs. All the same, many people unfamiliar with
the ways of the court thought it strange when in 1987 Parker Bowles was appointed