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the wake of the Waleses’ separation had written his son some tough and unpalatable
letters, for once leapt to Charles’s defence: ‘Andrew, why do you always have to be so
tiresome?’ Easter that year had been a low point for Elizabeth. For a person who so
rarely revealed her feelings, she made it clear at small private dinner-parties how
depressed she was by the family situation and its repercussions. By the following Easter,
1994, when things seemed to be quietening down or at least the missiles were not
coming over the battlements at such regular intervals, her courtiers noticed a distinct
lightening of her spirits. She was not to be given much respite.
Elizabeth was concerned about the effect which the failure of his marriage and the
tabloid persecution of him as a result of it was having upon Charles. It seemed to
people, both friends and acquaintances, who met him over the following months that he
was self-obsessed, thrashing about to find an explanation for what had gone so horribly
wrong. Elizabeth and Philip were themselves searching for an answer, wondering
whether they were to blame for the failure of not just one, but all of their children’s
marriages. ‘What did we do wrong?’ they asked friends, and again, ‘What have we done
to become such bogeymen to our daughters-in-law?’ The answer that Charles eventually
came up with, or rather his authorized biographer Jonathan Dimbleby did with his
approval, was the one which was to hurt Elizabeth most as a parent.
The Prince was desperate to explain himself, to win back the approval of the public
which he had so spectacularly lost; the method he deployed first was to use television to
appeal to the people over the heads of the tabloids. The image-maker he chose was
Jonathan Dimbleby, son of the great presenter of the royal occasion, Richard Dimbleby.
As an experienced television interviewer with impeccable ‘green’ credentials and a man
who had once worked on the Windsor estate, Dimbleby seemed the perfect choice. He
got on well with Richard Aylard and ‘empathized’ at once with the Prince himself. Over
the next eighteeen months he prepared a television documentary aimed to celebrate the
Prince’s twenty-fifth anniversary of his investiture as Prince of Wales.
The result, Charles: The Private Man, the Public Role, appeared on British television on
29 June 1994. Elizabeth had not been consulted over the project; her gut reaction and
that of her friends and courtiers was that it was a mistake and that no good could be
done by taking a high profile. Their opinion was that the sensible thing was to take the
long view, to maintain a dignified silence and let time heal the wounds that had been
caused. The Prince of Wales could do himself no good, they thought, by exposing himself
on television. While he argued that he was taking a ‘pro-active’ stance, they thought he
was letting the media dictate his agenda. Several of his advisers thought the same,
including Camilla Parker Bowles, who begged him not to do it; one of them resigned.
‘He’s on a hiding to nothing’ was the general opinion. The Prince is not a good
television performer; his self-deprecating air and ‘Windsorspeak’ do not come across
well in the age of the sound-bite. None the less, Dimbleby had done a sympathetic and
expert job and his portrait of the Prince rang true. The programme was aimed at the
young, the future King’s constituency. The Prince was shown at his best as an
environmental crusader, speaking articulately, passionately and without notes. With