Twenty five years ago, Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor threw a party for 80 friends at Highgrove, his Gloucestershire kingdom within the kingdom. Tony Blair had declared weeks before that the Britain of the elite was over. Princess Diana, along with William and Harry, was a guest of Dodi Al-Fayed in St Tropez. Old structures tottered.
Charles’s guest of honour, on her birthday, was his long-suffering mistress. She was then the crossroads where all national snobberies meet: a tabloid had recently printed a picture of her next to a horse, then asked: “Which one would you rather go to bed with?” The party was widely interpreted as an insult, but it was more of an apology to Camilla Parker Bowles. No other Royal attended.
A quarter of a century on and Camilla’s 75th birthday presents are the guest editorship of Country Life magazine, and a television special on ITV. The documentary reveals that she has shared a fag with Jeremy Clarkson, and her approach to life is to “just get on with it”. Through the cameras, and on the pages, she appears unaffected. Is this Camilla an actual person? Or a spit-and-polish construct designed behind-the-scenes to fill a vacancy when the Queen dies?
Suspicions about her have lasted. Only 13% of the public believe that Camilla should be Queen. (It will happen, regardless.) In the run up to her birthday next week, newspapers wonder how Camilla has “won everyone round”, but she remains, in tabloidese, a “controversial figure”. The public are persistent Diana partisans. They do not get on with it. Like some of our politicians, for them it is eternally 1997, and Diana’s car will always be heading towards a smash. Against this sentimental legend, Camilla has nothing to offer but her Jack Russell terriers, being “nice” to photographers, and that time she laughed at some Inuit throat singers. She becomes a mirror of her mother-in-law — a quiet enigma.
Still, the essentials are not at all mysterious. War hero father becomes a wine merchant, and a mildly amusing writer. Mother: knitting, wealthy, and deb of the year 1939. School friends remember Camilla’s ability to stand in the cold for longer than normal. (This will prove useful later in her life.) There is nothing to suggest the formation of an unusual character.
She passes fewer O-levels than Jeremy Corbyn. (Similarly, Diana Spencer’s most notable academic achievement is to win a school prize for best-tended guinea pig.) She likes hunting, and blowing cones of smoke between tokes of her Marlboros. Camilla Shand is of her class but slightly before her times. She is tomboyish and funny, consequently perfect for the men in the Polo scene, with their frighteningly monosexual educations.
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SubscribeOh good grief. All this writing and pontificating and philosophising when really all you need to know is that Charles loves Camilla, Camilla loves Charles – they seem to have a solid marriage and he will become King, with her as Queen Consort.
The ongoing devotion and sentimentality about Diana is absurd for anyone who isn’t directly related to her in which case you have an excuse to go a bit weepy on certain days (but not every day and all the time – Harry, I’m looking at YOU).
In that sense, I think Camilla’s attitude of “just getting on with it” – far from being a leftover from another time – is bang up to date and we should take our lead from her.
Applause and a hearty hear, hear!
Totally agree.
She is an adulteress and unworthy because of that fact.
It doesn’t have to have anything to do with sentimentality over the Princess of Wales.
Charles was pretty certainly an adulterer, but you don’t seem to hold that against him! But that would hardly a first for the Royals after all. Your antiquated sexist attitudes were exactly the reason why Charles was married off to Diana and not Camilla in the first place – the former being a virgin – and the whole ensuing tragi-comedy. They now love each other, and I hope and expect both will be dedicated monarchs, not a position I’d wish for anyone.
Absolutely spot on Katharine!…
Top bird who loves a fag, a drink, a laugh and Hunting… and her ex is an excellent man. Of course 99 pc of those making comments will not only have, obviously, ever met Camilla, but never met anyone like her or her ex, or indeed anyone like them.
A very fine essay. I admire Will Lloyd’s work.
“Raised by a coterie of what Prince Philip delicately called “nannies, nurses, and poofs”,”
LOL. I miss Phil the Greek.
It’s always a pleasure to read Will’s columns, but I’m not sure about this: “Charles’s wife is now a mirror of her mother-in-law”
The big difference is that all the Queens any of us can remember could be presented to us as almost perfect. The perfection was part of the mystique of monarchy, why their waving to us from gold carriages, wearing tiaras, just added to the rareness of the myth.
Given the times, given the media, the mystique was evaporating, but Camilla as Queen will pretty much shatter the myth. The Queen will be much more of an ordinary person, much more incongruous in a gold carriage. It’s going to be quite a redefining of what promises to be a downsized royalty.
Until Catherine is queen and it will return to spotless (madonna-like?) purity.
Camilla will do the job well and she clearly makes him happy. He should have married her in the first place.
That’s it.
Wasn’t she already married?
Yes, that ws the issue, and why he was married off to Diana Spencer.
That’s the saddest and most frustrating part of the whole story. Both of them were single, he waited too long, she gave up and married someone else. Bad decisions all around, too much procrastinating. Like father, like son, William came very close to making the same mistake with Kate Middleton.
As an American I am not that invested in this topic, but what fantastic writing. Some of the sentences are so enjoyable I had to read them twice. Go Will!
As an outside observer btw my only bafflement is that others can’t seem to clearly see the method here. If you have offended the British public, you have to eat crow for an extended period of time without complaint, and eventually you will be received back, even if previously your disgrace seemed permanent. You just can’t appear resentful, unrepentant or sulky. Harry pay attention.
I think the crucial thing in (re-)gaining the affection of the British public (especially if you are a royal) is to “just get on” with your appointed job without drawing attention to yourself unnecessarily or whinging over a long enough period of time that at some point you are considered a part of the furniture and people can’t imagine life without you. Soldiering on is what it’s called and Camilla has shown herself to be epically good at it, which is why she has won people over.
I’d say that the process is similar to the Marines and what they go through in training before they can claim the glory. You have to go through a protracted period of hardship and psychological onslaught, with people yelling unpleasant things at you very loudly at intervals…but if you get through it, you get to be part and parcel of a great national institution.
So Harry should have been in the Marines?
The primary aim for Harry before we think about anything else is to stop whinging and being bitter.
Charles and Camilla have the same background — the same friends, and sorts of friends, when they were young (like William and Kate). Imagine the life of a monarch, or a future monarch — the travel, the endless parade of faces, the endless searching for the right thing to say at each event. It could be fun. If you get to do it with your best friend, if the two of you can talk and laugh about it at the end of each day. If you have to do it all alone, or with someone who simply doesn’t laugh at the things you laugh at, it could be torture. Imagine 2 people on a royal progress, under all that pressure, who, when they are alone, are tense with each other. So, just be glad, and relieved, that Charles and Camilla seem to have that ease with each other. The country will benefit. We know we’ll all like Charles better with Camilla.
Of course 99 pc of Britons, not least Daily Mail reading bourgeois intra M25 Pooter snobs, have never ever met anyone like Camilla, or indeed anyone from her background, but have the great privelige of the free speech to express their views and opinions: those of us who do can assure them over their shaking schooners of Bristol Creme and ‘ Hearl Grey tea that she is an unquestionably ” Top Bird” and that we are unbelieveable fortunate to have her in public life.
ps.. Just love to see those disapproving Pooters have one of Camilla’s fag butts dropped in the aforementioned sherry or tea!
Thankyou
“At this height, in this society, people and ponies are easily confused” – how damaged are the upper classes!
I think Camilla is fantastic and admirable of course he should have married her and not the too young callow Diana.
She really couldn’t handle the glare of Fame particularly in the tacky, glitzy 1980s.
I’m very happy for Charles that he married camilla the way they always should have been and I like her calm sense of humour
I think she’s really quite a role model for midlife women. I look forward to her being queen
i think more Americans like me prefer the late Princess Diana to Camilla…part of it is the cruelty which Charles and Camilla deliberately flaunted their tacky affair. I’ll never forget that Charles told Camilla he wished he was a tampon inside her. I don’t really give a shit about Camilla. CPB loves fox hunting. Ugh. That kind of sadism tells me a lot about people, none of it good.
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