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the Prince for her co-operation. Elizabeth was aware of the interviews, but when she
discovered, as the book was nearing completion in September 1994, that the Prince had
given Dimbleby access not only to all his correspondence and diaries but also to state
papers without checking what they were, there was an explosion. She insisted that he
take the papers back and ensure that Dimbleby did not have access to official material
which he had no right to see. At Balmoral on his annual visit the Prince stayed with his
grandmother at Birkhall. ‘He’ll only be coming here for one day,’ Elizabeth remarked
drily; the day which Charles chose was the Ghillies’ Ball, when there would be no
occasion for a conversation with his mother.
The Prince of Wales: A Biography, finally published in November to a major fanfare in
the press and three weeks’ serialization in the Sunday Times, was an important book
based on original material which under normal Palace conventions would not have been
released until after Charles’s death. But both its tenor and its timing could hardly have
been worse from Elizabeth’s point of view, hurting her in both her private and her
public role. The serialization, coming as it did on the eve of her visit to Russia, the first
ever by a reigning British sovereign, diverted media attention from this historic royal
event to sensational revelations with all the most controversial material lumped
together. It was, of course, the Case for Charles and was intended as a heavyweight
riposte to Andrew Morton’s Case for Diana.
According to Dimbleby, blame for the unhappy state of the monarchy as a result of
the failure of the Waleses’ marriage could not be laid at Charles’s door. In common with
almost everyone since Philip Larkin wrote his memorable line, ‘They fuck you up, your
mum and dad’, the Prince and Dimbleby blamed what Charles saw as inadequate
parenting. His mother had been remote, his father a bully. Both of them had been
‘unable or unwilling to proffer… the affection and appreciation’ which Charles craved.
His wife had been neurotic; one passage described an occasion when she had sat all day
in Colborne’s office ‘her head bowed in silent despair’. Only Camilla Parker Bowles
emerged with credit as, in the words of one reviewer, a kind of virginal Mills & Boon
heroine: ‘Her warmth, her lack of ambition or guile, her good humour and her
gentleness endeared her to the household.’ (But not, it should be said, to the British
public at the time; housewives reportedly spat at her when she shopped in her local
supermarket.) Within months of the book’s publication the Parker Bowles’s twenty-yearold
marriage ended. The Prince’s initiative in making his TV confession had made it
untenable.
It is terrible for any parent to be accused publicly of being a bad mother or father.
Elizabeth had done her best in a difficult situation – to be a mother and a head of state,
head of the Commonwealth and head of a household is a unique experience. She has had
to put her job first and the reason why she has been so successful at it is because she not
only enjoys it but also because she is a dedicated, self-contained personality. Charles
may have felt excluded from areas of his mother’s life and subject to the rigorous
standards expected of the heir to the throne, but, except at boarding-school, he had been
surrounded by love, from his nannies and his grandmother, let alone his mother’s