38656356325923

more impatient with him than they were with the Yorks’ little girl, Beatrice. It was the
heir to the throne syndrome repeating itself. Prince William would eventually be King;
therefore his upbringing and behaviour mattered more than the other children’s. When
Prince William out riding one day gave his groom the slip and came home early, his
grandmother, who was only too aware of what the implications might be, tore a strip
off him. However, as far as the grandchildren were concerned, the regime at Balmoral
was much less spartan and more relaxed than it used to be. Instead of bathing in the
freezing burns, they were allowed to go to the local swimming-pool and to the cinema if
there was a film specially suited to them.
There were frictions with Charles too. Although on the whole Elizabeth could laugh
and joke with her son as before, on more important levels she doubted his judgement,
while he, for his part, felt excluded from major decisions by her household. Elizabeth felt
distanced from him by his obvious reliance for advice upon his inner circle of friends,
even over such questions as the treatment of the arm which he broke playing polo in
June 1988. Philip always had little patience with his son; now both he and Elizabeth felt
both anguished and irritated over the obvious failure of the marriage. Charles seemed
oblivious to Palace advice. Sir Robert Fellowes and his predecessor as Private Secretary,
Sir William Heseltine, had attempted in vain to get the Prince either to give up or cut
down on his polo commitments. They felt, correctly, that polo was bad for his image
and that this reflected generally on the monarchy. In recession-hit Britain, the Prince of
Wales’s association with the sport of rich playboys was hardly helpful to his family’s
public face. Yet he insisted on continuing for therapeutic reasons. ‘Without polo’, he
said, ‘I’d go stark, staring mad.’ Where George V and George VI had always made a
point of attending the Cup Final, the annual high point of the national game,
association football, Elizabeth nowadays never went. The job was left to the Kents,
hardly first-circle royalty, and the implication was that the real royals couldn’t care less
about popular sport. When Charles did finally attend the 1995 Cup Final, as part of the
campaign to refurbish his image, he attempted to present the Cup to the losers, a faux
pas which suggested that his attention had hardly been riveted to the game.
Elizabeth’s affection for Fergie was waning in the face of the Duchess’s self-indulgent
behaviour. In March 1990 the Yorks’ second daughter, Eugenie, had been born, but this
was not enough to compensate for the fissures in their marriage. Sarah was evidently
bored with her husband, whose frequent prolonged absences on naval duty left her at a
loose end. Sarah told a friend that in 1988 Andrew had spent only forty-two nights at
home out of a year. Once Sunninghill was finished she was not prepared to live as an
ordinary naval wife in married quarters or even in a rented house near Andrew’s base,
and when he was home she found his preferred way of relaxation dull. Andrew liked to
watch videos and play golf and, when the couple entertained, Sarah found his behaviour
embarrassingly boorish. At dinner-parties Andrew was served first and gobbled down his
food regardless of the other guests, and he had a fondness for telling loud and unfunny
naval jokes. To Elizabeth’s household it seemed that he had no control over his wife’s
behaviour, while to Sarah equally it appeared that Andrew was not prepared to stand