Camilla, the wicked stepmother. Really?
Aged 38, Harry is stuck in trauma, as if it’s 1997 again and he is 12. But is Camilla also doomed to return with Harry to that same date?
Disliking stepmothers is easy; blaming them for the fate of your own mother is almost inevitable; reaching a mature adult detente can be a lifetime’s work. Until the turn of the 20th century there was a pandemic of stepmothering, due to so many mothers dying young. Now it’s the pandemic of divorce that has created a new generation of stepmothers.
Camilla’s role in the lives of Prince Harry and Prince William came as an awful conjoining of the two. This is Brothers Grimm rewritten as a 21st-century national soap opera in which her stepsons, not the stepmother, hold the power to exact revenge.
Camilla’s acceptance as Queen by the public and her acceptance as stepmother by her new stepsons were twinned, the first dependent on the second.
But just as Camilla seemed to have - 26 years after the divorce of Diana, and 25 years since her death - ascended into a place of quiet fondness, a sort of “part of the (gilded) furniture” state of contentment, Harry launched his attack. His revenge is served icy cold. Just a few short months after William and Camilla stood behind the new King during his proclamation at St James’s Palace in September, with William caught on camera putting out a supportive hand to steady his stepmother as she tackled a step up to the dais, Harry does exactly the opposite. If this were panto, and it almost is, the audience would have been frantically shouting in warning, “Look behind you!” But to whom, Camilla or Harry?
Yesterday (Monday) on Good Morning America, Harry doubled down on the attacks on Camilla made in his autobiography, Spare, where he writes that he feared Camilla would become his “wicked stepmother”. On CBS he used the same formulation, “I don’t see her as an evil stepmother,” then followed it with an invisible “but” as he went into embittered claims of her using him and his brother as tools to burnish her own crown.
While his father, Charles, is criticised for being emotionally distant, Harry paints his stepmother as a direct threat, a selfish schemer who is “dangerous” to the boys, willing to sacrifice them as babes cast out in a dangerous tabloid forest. Harry’s own mother, Diana, was hyper-aware of her place in the fairytale, referring to herself in her tapes for the journalist Andrew Morton as the princess doomed to be “a sacrificial lamb”. Harry appears to have been reading the same book at bedtime.
The language Harry uses to write about Camilla is unusually violent. There is a direct line in the way Harry talks about Camilla leaving him as a “body in the street” and Diana dead in a car on a road in Paris. This blonde interloper is nothing like his own mother, reads his story.
She “sacrificed me on her personal PR altar”, he writes in Spare. Harry says that he and William “begged” his father not to marry her, but reluctantly agreed that “maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy”. How was Camilla “dangerous”, inquired Anderson Cooper in an interview on CBS in America. “Because of the need for her to rehabilitate her image,” Harry said.
“That made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press,” he said. “And there was open willingness on both sides to trade off information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being Queen Consort, there were going to be people or bodies left in the street.”
There is much else lobbed at Camilla, and Harry seems to set aside the irony of his protectiveness towards his own wife and his hostility towards his father’s: Camilla is “someone who married into this institution and has done everything she can to improve her own reputation, her own image, for her own sake”. While Camilla focused her charm offensive on William, Harry says in Spare that she appeared “bored” with Harry, as he was not the heir. Later, he writes, Camilla turned his bedroom at Clarence House into her personal wardrobe. Let’s remember he was in his late twenties at this point. “I tried not to care,” he writes. “But especially the first time I saw it, I cared.”
Aged 38, Harry is stuck in trauma, as if it’s 1997 again and Harry is 12. But is Camilla also doomed to return with Harry to that same date, the time she became the most hated woman in Britain? Is the image we have of her now as a jolly horsey grandma the result of a slick and ruthless PR operation, known informally as “Operation PB"? Or is Harry’s depiction of Camilla as a witch in a 1980s blow-dry purely misdirected anger at his father for cruelty to his mother, and to his mother for dying?
The answer lies in what we know of press leaks around two incidents. The first is Camilla’s initial meeting with William. The second is Harry’s use of drugs when a teenager. Both occurred at a time when public opinion towards Camilla was French revolutionary. When her name was mentioned during a live TV debate on the royals in January 1997, many in the audience booed loudly.
After the death of Diana later that year, Camilla was so vilified that she had to hide from public view for eight months; she was reported to be smuggled into Highgrove under a blanket on the back seat. Charles had already pledged, via a press leak in 1995, never to marry Camilla. But a faction within the palace argued that Charles, like his great-uncle the Duke of Windsor, would have to give up his mistress or the right to the throne: her very presence was destabilising the future of the monarchy. Robert Fellowes, Diana’s brother-in-law, and the Queen’s private secretary at the time, was reported to have pressed this case on the monarch.
But Camilla had, on the recommendation of her divorce lawyer, met Mark Bolland in 1996. The scene is fictionalised in the latest series of The Crown, which depicts Camilla as saying she wanted to go for the dream and become “the Q-word”, unthinkable or unsayable at that time. Charles took Bolland on as spin doctor: the joint strategy to rehabilitate Camilla and Charles as a couple was dependent on William and Harry, towards whom the public were reverently protective. William did meet Camilla at the couple’s London residence, York House, in 1998, nine months after Diana’s death.
Then 15, he consented to a brief private conversation with a very nervous Camilla, who emerged saying, “I need a gin and tonic,” but was relieved at William’s generosity. This very intimate moment was soon reported in the tabloids. A private investigation was launched, according to Penny Junor in her book The Duchess: “William didn’t trust his father’s office and would think someone had been spying on him.” The meeting was found to have been accidentally leaked in an off-the-record conversation by Amanda MacManus, Camilla’s private secretary, who then resigned. Days later, Junor writes, Camilla asked MacManus to return and she served Camilla in total for 25 years.
The second press leak occurred in 2002, with an account in the tabloids of Harry’s illegal drug-taking while still a teenager. According to Robert Lacey’s 2020 book Battle of Brothers, Harry had used “Club H”, a “cellar converted into a disco-rumpus room” at Highgrove, and the nearby Rattlebone Inn, a pub in Gloucestershire, to smoke cannabis. However, a family friend, Mark Dyer, had taken Harry to the Featherstone Lodge rehab centre in London as part of a concerned intervention. According to Lacey, this visit happened weeks before Charles knew of Harry’s drug-taking. Yet in 2002, when the story appeared in the tabloids, Lacey said Bolland left the press with the understanding that Charles had ordered the visit as a responsible parent. “This twist of timing,” Lacey wrote, “turned a narrative that might have suggested parental out-of-touchness into a fable of fatherly redemption.”
In the years that followed, photo opportunities with Charles’s sons were publicity gold: Sandhurst, skiing and various “humanising” documentaries, with the father affectionately mocked by his sons, such as when he sat flanked by William and Harry for an interview with Ant and Dec. Camilla is known to be un-Windsor-like in her friendliness to the press on royal tours. It is not clear which incidents are attached to the further “leaks” that Harry alludes to, presumably mostly related to his wife, Meghan.
However, at the time of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002, Camilla was seated symbolically directly behind the monarch. Operation PB had been a slow but resounding success: in 2005 the Queen gave a wedding toast to the couple, comparing their relationship to a brutal ride at the Grand National, saying, “My son is home and dry with the woman he loves.”
Not so fast. Harry is not ready for that happy ending. Instead, he faces the magic mirror and asks, “Who is the most dangerous of them all?” It may not be Camilla after all. The mirror is not talking, for now.
The Times
