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Aylard’s background was quite unlike that of the Queen’s courtiers; he had no ‘social’
connections. He is good-looking rather in the Peter Townsend mode, lean, of medium
height, with dark slightly curly hair and finely cut features. Aylard, as Dimbleby
admitted, ‘was indeed more ambitious than his modest demeanour would suggest’.
In 1990 Sir John Riddell departed the Prince’s office six months before his contract ran
out and returned to the more familiar and agreeable pastures of the City. His successor,
Major-General Sir Christopher Airy, who had recently completed a stint as General
Officer Commanding London District and Major-General Commanding the Household
Division, might have been hand-picked by the Palace, where he was well known and
regarded as a ‘safe pair of hands’. The Prince consulted Aylard and, curiously, James
‘Jimmy’ Savile, an eccentric TV personality and charity fund-raiser who acted as
unofficial adviser to some of the younger royals, asking them to ‘sound out’ Airy.
Undeterred by this unusual pair, the Major-General accepted the job, but within a few
months he had been sidelined by Aylard who was destined to succeed him. Before the
Prince’s departure from London for the official visit to Brazil culminating in the Britannia
environmental seminar, Aylard suggested that it would be better for the Private
Secretary, Airy, to remain in London holding the fort as there would be little for him to
do on the tour. Airy, however, not unnaturally, since Private Secretaries always
accompanied their employers on official visits, resented this advice and did not take it.
According to the official biographer:
During the seminar, it was painfully obvious that he [Airy] had nonetheless been reduced to the role of a
bystander, able only to engage in a kind of courteous small talk that did not quite measure up to the needs of
the moment. It was this episode which finally convinced the Prince that, whatever his other qualities, Airy
should be replaced by Aylard.
The Prince, apparently, shrank from sacking him, but his hand was forced in the
spring of 1991 when Aylard warned that the Sunday Times was about to run a story
‘Prince sacks Airy’ and told him that ‘either we will have to deny it or make it fact very
quickly’. The deed was done, however, not by the Prince, who hated sacking people, but
by Allen Sheppard, chief executive of Grand Metropolitan and a member of the Prince of
Wales Co-ordinating Committee, which oversees the Prince’s ‘overlapping and often
rivalrous charities’. ‘The Prince went for a walk in the garden while Sheppard took Airy
to one side to inform him that the time had come to write a letter of resignation…’
His successor was, of course, Aylard, in whom ‘the Prince detected, if not a kindred
spirit, at least someone who appreciated his purpose and, as an environmental
specialist, understood his vision. To an unusual degree, Aylard combined reticence and
intensity, his deference concealing a resolute and calculating intellect.’ His qualities,
however, do not seem to have been equally appreciated by his colleagues, who,
according to Dimbleby, motivated by jealousy of Aylard’s ‘closeness’ to the Prince,
alleged that he had engineered his own preferment at their expense and consequently
‘for many weeks the atmosphere at St James’s was to be soured by this jealousy’. By the
time Aylard had been in charge for three years, the social mix among the Prince’s senior