The Firm. Penny Junor

them which always put the Prince in a bad light. He was adamant, nevertheless, that there should be no retaliation and instructed his friends to say nothing.

      Charles has never publicly criticized Diana. Whenever I have pointed this out to people they say, ‘Ah, but he got his friends to do it for him.’ This is untrue. Some of his friends did feel that the injustice meted out to him by Morton’s book was intolerable and I, for one, was encouraged by several of them to try to redress the balance, but they were not thanked for their trouble and neither was I. I had been planning to make the television documentary that Jonathan Dimbleby finally made, to mark the Prince’s twenty-five years as Prince of Wales. I had had discussions with Christopher Martin, the producer of the Prince’s previous films – one on his views about architecture, the other about conservation called The Earth in Balance. Christopher and I had been to a private lunch at Highgrove to discuss it with him. Suddenly I was dropped from the project and discovered very much later the reason why. I had defended him too vigorously in the media.

      What Morton’s book had done, as none other had done before it, was point the finger at Camilla Parker Bowles as the principal cause of Diana’s unhappiness. Diana had seriously considered calling off the wedding two days before she walked down the aisle, he said, because of Prince Charles’s ‘continuing friendship with Camilla Parker Bowles, the wife of a member of the Queen’s household’. Today the name Camilla Parker Bowles is almost as well known as that of the Prince of Wales, but until 1992 she was scarcely known outside her own circle of friends – and neither was her relationship with the Prince.

      Morton’s book changed all that. It didn’t convince everyone that Charles and Camilla were having an affair. Some thought there was a chance that he had got it wrong, that it was just more tabloid tittle-tattle; but a substantial number of people did believe that what was written in Diana: Her True Story was true, and overnight Camilla’s peaceful existence in the heart of the countryside was shattered. The press set up camp outside her house and followed her wherever she went. She wasn’t safe even in her own garden; photographers were waiting with their long lenses. Hate mail began to arrive accusing her of breaking up the royal marriage. For someone with no experience of being the object of such hatred it was extremely unnerving. It also put her husband in a difficult situation, and wasn’t easy for her two children, Tom and Laura (then both in their teens), or for her elderly parents. But Morton was as nothing compared with what followed in relatively quick succession: the Camillagate tapes, the Dimbleby documentary and Panorama. The first two put an end to Camilla’s twenty-one-year marriage; the third brought the Prince’s marriage to an end.