Publish the Prince’s diaries: they would become an instant classic
Prince Charles was low in the water during the early 1990s. The collapse of any marriage is painful. In the case of the Prince the agony was magnified beyond endurance by a merciless public scrutiny with which the royal publicity machine, whose armoury of lethal weapons included the raised eyebrow and the old boy network, was ill equipped to deal. Looking back, the Prince must have drawn on enormous reserves of moral courage in order to cope at all. Relief came only with the arrival in 1996 of Mark Bolland, smart, gay, and educated at a comprehensive school.
Five years later Bolland was rightly named PR professional of the year. The job he did for the Prince was awesome. Bolland’s official rank in the Prince’s office — deputy private secretary — concealed his real role. He did not merely mend Prince Charles’s damaged public image. Camilla Parker Bowles, who had at times drifted dangerously close to pariah status, was a ‘non-negotiable part of the package’. Showing great skill, sensitivity and flair, he nursed Mrs Parker Bowles and the Prince towards the more secure though still by no means unassailable position in British public life which they occupy today.
Bolland’s methods were a study. He delightedly cast aside the remoteness and fastidiousness favoured by Buckingham Palace. He struck deals, exchanged access for good copy, made expert use of the art of apparently casual indiscretion. Mark Bolland is a less ruthless and more honest man than his friend Peter Mandelson. But at precisely the moment that Bolland was getting to work on the Prince, Peter Mandelson was brilliantly solving the surprisingly similar problems faced by New Labour. During the 1980s the Labour party, like the royal family, had become estranged from the British media, and as a consequence the object of humiliation, ridicule and misrepresentation. ‘Of course we want to use the media,’ declared Mandelson right at the start of the New Labour project, ‘but the media will be our tools, our servants; we are no longer content to let them be our persecutors.’ Bolland set out on the same path on behalf of the Prince of Wales, using some of the same techniques.
The price paid by Tony Blair for his reliance on Peter Mandelson is now a matter of public record. Mandelson’s connivance with certain Fleet Street editors and reporters, and his tolerance of a culture of deceit, secured political success. In the process he destroyed New Labour’s reputation for integrity as well as wrecking public trust in government. Many feel that the Prince of Wales is paying an equally disagreeable price for employing Mark Bolland. There is strong evidence that Bolland used his excellent press contacts to promote the interests of the Prince at the expense of other members of the royal family, in particular Prince Edward and the Duke of Edinburgh. Simon Heffer, writing in The Spectator four years ago, described Bolland as ‘an out-of-control operator with the full support of the Prince of Wales, who seeks to undermine all influences upon him with utter disregard for the institution of which he is a part’. The Heffer attack accurately reflected the mainstream Buckingham Palace view. Not long after the Heffer diatribe, Bolland was forced out.
He clearly feels hard done by, and not without reason. It is conventional for departing royal employees to receive a gong for their good work. There was none for Bolland, and every reason to speculate that it was blocked by Buckingham Palace. The News of the World wasted little time in offering Bolland a column, where he made free with criticisms of the Prince and his advisers. Now there are signs that Bolland may cease to be a mere nuisance and become an enemy. This week’s witness statement on behalf of the Mail on Sunday in its copyright battle with St James’s Palace can be construed as treachery. It is inevitable that Bolland will soon write a book about his life with the Prince, supposing that he has not already done so. Some courtiers now believe that last week’s hearing is ‘the most dangerous moment yet for the Prince of Wales’. Happily, there are reasons to believe that this cataclysmic view of events may be wrong. The letters which the Prince is so eager to stop place him in a charming though eccentric light. Ten years ago a member of John Gummer’s private office told me how the letters would flow in from the Prince of Wales, semi-literate, with heavy underlinings, many exclamation marks, some apparently written in green ink. It was hard to tell what perplexed my informant more: the letters themselves or the pleasure Gummer took in answering them promptly and at equal length. Likewise many Labour ministers enjoy receiving the Prince’s letters, regarding them for the most part as a harmless but agreeable diversion to their day. Newspaper columnists regularly receive the same sort of unsolicited mail. I always try to read mine with care and answer courteously unless the writer has been gratuitously offensive or is obviously mad.
It would do no harm at all for the Prince of Wales’s ministerial correspondence and diaries to be published. His heart is in the right place. Most of us can agree about the excellence of the Dalai Lama and fox-hunting — and even more strongly about the wretchedness of GM foods and the Iraq war. Even those who dispute the Prince’s judgment would never challenge his agonised sincerity or palpable decency. Mark Bolland revealed in this week’s witness statement that the Prince once toyed with turning his diaries into a book. Were he to do so, it would instantly become a literary classic and create national gaiety on a scale not experienced since William Donaldson’s Henry Root Letters. Sadly Donaldson, who would have been ideally suited to annotate the Prince’s work, died last year, but doubtless some suitable replacement can be found.
The Prince’s predicament today bears comparison with the downfall of the actor Tom Cruise. For years Cruise employed as an agent the legendary Hollywood publicist Pat Kingsley. There is nothing nice or admirable about Kingsley, but she does her job very well. No magazine or newspaper ever dares to attack her clients. In a moment of carelessness, Cruise made the calamitous error of sacking Kingsley in favour of his sister Lee Anne DeVette, a Scientologist. Since then everything has gone horribly wrong. There is a legitimate case to be made that Prince Charles should never have hired Mark Bolland in the first place. Nevertheless he did so, and would be well advised to seek a rapprochement with his former employee.
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