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When Prince Harry’s memoir Spare came out, we were shocked by his portrayal of Camilla. He wrote of how he and Prince William pleaded with his father not to marry her: ‘Despite Willy and me urging him not to, Pa was going ahead. We pumped his hand, wished him well. No hard feelings.’
Well, some hard feelings, evidently. Otherwise, why would he have written that he remembers wondering if Camilla would be cruel to him ‘like all the wicked stepmothers in storybooks’. And that William ‘long harboured suspicions about the Other Woman’. And, among other accusations, that Camilla allegedly leaked one of her early conversations with William to the Press.
Now Channel 4 has a new documentary, Queen Camilla: The Wicked Stepmother? – a title that surely would not have existed without the Duke of Sussex’s paranoid accusations.
Predictably, it airs his grievances about the Queen and, in a synopsis, poses the questions: ‘How did Camilla Parker Bowles ascend from most hated woman in Britain to Queen Camilla, national treasure? And was her transformation at Prince Harry’s expense?’
Poor Camilla, is what I say. She doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment.
The programme presents itself as fair, and the ‘talking-head’ journalists in it were, on the whole, either on Camilla’s side or, at the very least, anxious to point out that there was not a scintilla of evidence to substantiate the view that she had been briefing the Press against Meghan.
Much was made of a pre-wedding squabble between the two sisters-in-law, Kate and Meghan, which supposedly ended with Meghan in tears.
In the Sussex’s version of events, there was no possibility of this story becoming public, had not either Kate or the Wicked Stepmother’s aides leaked it to the Press. But as all the journalists in the programme pointed out, there were plenty of people who would have either witnessed the row between the two women, or who could have listened at the doors.
Harry wrote in his memoir that he wondered if Camilla would be ‘like all the wicked stepmothers in storybooks’
The Royal Households are full of people, including large numbers of staff, and the institution of royal courts is leaky. No one has ever presented a shred of evidence that, after Kate and Meghan had a row, Camilla’s side immediately leaked the story. Frankly it’s impossible to imagine such a turn of events.
One royal expert – Jennie Bond – described, for example, how she had written to Camilla and received a nice letter back from her saying that she had never formed a special relationship with any journalist and did not want to start now.
Camilla was not snubbing Bond, a previous royal correspondent for the BBC. She simply did not want to play the game.
Yet taking up Harry’s cause, the programme commentary went on seamlessly to say that ‘the negative press against Meghan continued’. The unstated but unmistakable message suggested that Camilla had in fact briefed against Meghan.
They showed the clip, yet again, of Prince Harry saying that his family failed to protect him and his wife from Press intrusion.
A voice-over reminded us that there had been accusations against the Royal Family of racism, and this voice-over would not have been included in the programme if it did not want you to think that one of the ‘racists’ concerned had been Camilla. Again, there is simply no evidence for this.
The programme tried insidiously to suggest that there is still such bad blood between Harry and Camilla that the Royal Family’s reputation is irreparably marred. It gave almost no space to Camilla’s hard work, especially during the King’s illness and cancer treatment, during which she wore herself out doing public duties.
The truth is Camilla is the best thing that has happened to the Royal Family since the Queen Mother.
In Spare, Harry suggests the only way Meghan and Kate’s row could have been made public was if Camilla’s aides had leaked the story to the Press
The future George VI was a shy, stammering naval officer called the Duke of York when his starry elder brother David looked like becoming the even starrier Edward VIII. In fact, Edward VIII abdicated, and ‘Bertie’ became one of the best loved and best respected Kings in modern history. But he would not have done so without his wife Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.
As for King Charles, he was a wretchedly unhappy person, misunderstood by his parents, and hurried into a marriage with Diana Spencer bound to make them both miserable.
Diana was a wonderful person – but she was, as she said herself, a Queen of Hearts, a one-off superstar and not a natural royal consort. She had genuine empathy, and knew how to charm the public.
It is perfectly understandable that we all cherish her memory. She did immense good and she was rightly loved. Of course, Harry remains traumatised by the horrible way in which she died. So is Prince William, and that tragedy will scar the Royal Family for the next generation.
But Diana was not cut out to be the kind of wife that Charles desperately needed – one who loved him unreservedly; who had enough humour and maturity to laugh him out of his self-pity and touchiness; and one who was not trying to steal his thunder.
Diana was herself a vulnerable, paranoid person who came from a broken home. She lacked some of Camilla’s solid qualities of common sense and humour.
In this context, to view Camilla as the wicked step-mother who broke up an idyllic fairy-tale marriage is simply ridiculous. Charles had never settled in to any stable relationship with a woman until he met her. With none of his many girlfriends was he able to build a lasting relationship. It is a very, very difficult thing to expect of any human being that they should be Charles’s partner.
He is a difficult, tetchy person, as well as warm and loving. He needs constant reassurance. And he is frightened of being eclipsed – in the past, by his father, and in his first marriage, by his wife.
Charles, Harry and Camilla in a photo featured in Channel 4’s documentary
Camilla by contrast is a modest, good-humoured person. Everyone who meets her must be struck by her pleasant manners, cheery conversational style and decency. She is prepared to go through the motions of making royal visits, royal speeches and royal meetings with a huge variety of people, from diplomats to primary school children, from politicians to disaster-victims. She does not give herself airs, and is happy inside her own skin.
When Prince Charles’s marriage to Diana was breaking up, Camilla was described as the most hated woman in Britain. Twenty-five years have passed since then and even the most fervent Diana fans can now see she has helped rebuild not only Charles’s self-confidence but also the plausibility of the monarchy.
It is Harry, not her, who today is the despised outcast. Whatever Channel 4 may wish us to believe.
- A.N.Wilson is the author of the Substack anwilson.
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