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courtiers like Lady Susan Hussey and Martin Charteris, who were extremely fond of him.
The fact that there was a certain amount of truth in Charles’s self-pitying account did
not excuse it. Elizabeth is good with small children but not with adults. She is not a
hugger or a communicator on a personal level. Out of consideration for her adored
husband in his difficult position as consort, she over-compensated by allowing him
absolutely free rein in the upbringing of his son. But the inescapable fact that she is the
Queen sets her apart from everyone, even her own children. Charles was a victim of his
royal birthright; he seems unwilling to accept, as his mother has, that there is a price to
pay for privilege and the greater the privilege the higher the price. Charles’s siblings,
Anne, Andrew and Edward, were outraged by this public portrayal of their parents and
told him so. Outwardly, Elizabeth put a brave face upon it. No one seeing her in
Moscow could have thought her less than delighted to be there. In London on her return
one foreign ambassador on taking his formal leave of her found her laughing, joking
and seemingly without a care in the world. 6 Only those who knew her well could
diagnose how wounded she felt.
Predictably, almost exactly a year later, the Princess of Wales determined to have her
say on television and to put her case to the nation over the heads not only of her own
advisers but also of Buckingham Palace. Elizabeth learned of the planned broadcast only
shortly before the BBC announced it for the following week. (The date of the
announcement, 14 November, was an unwelcome forty-seventh birthday surprise for
Charles, on an official visit to Tokyo. Photographs showed him cutting a celebratory
cake, his face expressing total dismay.) The broadcast went out on the BBC’s flagship
current affairs programme, Panorama, on Monday, 20 November 1995, yet another
unhappy wedding anniversary for Elizabeth. The interview by the BBC’s Martin Bashir
(the BBC had naturally been chosen as the vehicle since Charles’s programme had
featured on the opposition ITV) revealed the Princess, unlike her husband, to be a
consummate television performer, but, like him, she was in confessional mode. She
confirmed all the facts in Morton’s book – the bulimia, the depression, her anguish over
Camilla Parker Bowles. She had been the victim of attempts by her ‘enemies’ to isolate
her, to represent her as ‘a basket case’. Like Charles, she confessed publicly to adultery –
with James Hewitt (although she denied other affairs). Defiantly she announced
(referring to herself in the third person) that she ‘would not go quietly’, that she did not
want a divorce and that she intended to reign not officially but, to use a phrase
borrowed from the works of her step-grandmother, Barbara Cartland, as ‘Queen of
Hearts’. The interview was a public relations triumph for Diana, but yet another family
embarrassment for Elizabeth. Diana had publicly cast doubts on whether Charles was fit
to be King in an obvious bid to promote Prince William as next in line to the throne, a
proposal which, if taken seriously, would strike at the heart of the hereditary monarchy.
Elizabeth, with the welfare of the future of the monarchy and her Wales grandchildren
at heart, decided on a policy of containment and conciliation as far as Diana was
concerned; in line with that, Buckingham Palace announced its willingness to offer
support to the Princess and have talks with her on her proposed role as roving