Penny Junor - The Duchess - The Untold Story – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail

Then the Prince spoke, his voice unusually croaky. He had a bad cold but it may also have been nerves. He is never easy around his parents: ‘It is a great honour Your Majesty is able to be with us today,’ he began before listing all those to whom he was indebted for helping him turn his dream into a reality. Then he invited his mother to unveil the statue in memory of his ‘darling Grandmother’ and to declare her Square open.

If either of his parents were proud, it wasn’t immediately obvious. For most of the ceremony there was not a hint of a smile, not an admiring look; they might have been sitting with strangers. Only when the cloth cover was successfully off the statue did the group show any animation or chat to one another, but it was brief. Then, after greeting a handful of the people who had waited so patiently for this moment, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh prepared to leave. As he got into the car, the Duke put his hands together a couple of times by way of a congratulatory clap to his son and said, ‘Well done.’ It was as rare as it was unexpected. His only other remark was that there was no echo in one of the rooms they’d been in. His mother smiled but offered nothing.

And so it has been throughout his childhood and his adult life. If he has a successful foreign tour, visits Tottenham after the riots, or offers comfort at a disaster scene, he hears nothing; if he makes a good speech, or launches an interesting initiative, there is silence. The last time the Queen and Duke showed any public interest in anything he has done was in 2012. During the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee tour of the country, the Prince’s office had an unexpected call from Buckingham Palace to say that she and the Duke would like to visit the north country town of Burnley, once the world centre of the cotton industry, where six of the Prince’s charities have worked hard to revitalise the town. They wondered whether the Prince might join them. When Charles was told he thought there must be some mistake. ‘The Queen wants to visit my project in Burnley? That can’t be right.’

The person who has given Charles the courage and the encouragement to do half of the things he has done in the last few decades is Camilla, and whether she will be called Queen or Princess Consort is immaterial. What matters is that, finally, he feels loved and supported by someone close.

2

The Prince of Wales first met and fell in love with Camilla Shand in the summer of 1971. They were introduced by a mutual friend, the glamorous Chilean historian Lucia Santa Cruz. Lucia and Charles had met in 1968 shortly after he began as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Lucia was not a student; she already had a degree from Oxford and was a few years older than Charles. She was working as a research assistant to Lord Butler, the distinguished former Conservative minister who was then Master of Trinity, and was writing his memoirs, The Art of the Possible . Rab and Mollie Butler were good friends of Lucia’s parents, the Chilean ambassador and his wife, and they invited her to dinner at the Master’s lodge to meet the Prince, thinking they might enjoy one another’s company. They did; they became lifelong friends – but never in a romantic way. Lucia has repeatedly been credited with being the Prince’s first lover but this could not be further from the truth. She already had a serious boyfriend, the man who is now her husband, Juan Luis Ossa Bulnes, and they have children and grandchildren together in Chile. Charles is their eldest son’s godfather.

Lucia’s parents went back to Chile in November 1970, after Salvador Allende became president, bringing in a Marxist government and bringing an end to her father’s time at the embassy. It was a difficult period for her but because of the political uncertainty, she stayed on in London to fend for herself, living at Stack House, a block of flats in Ebury Street, Belgravia. She was on the first floor and her neighbour in the flat below was Camilla Shand, then sharing with her friend the Hon. Virginia Carington, whose father was the Conservative politician Lord Carrington.

Lucia and Camilla already knew one another socially – they moved in the same circles – but as neighbours they became good friends and Camilla took Lucia under her wing. They were in and out of each other’s flats every day, borrowing clothes, going to the same parties and dances – and at weekends Camilla would take Lucia down to her parents’ house in the East Sussex countryside. Lucia spent that first Christmas with the family and woke up on Christmas Day, as all the young did, to a pillowcase full of presents at the end of her bed, delivered by Father Christmas. And downstairs there were more presents. Every time she went, she was made to feel at home; they were always welcoming and generous to friends, and with her own parents so far away it meant a lot. One of her most treasured memories was asking Camilla’s father, Bruce, about the Second World War, whereupon he described to her some of the experiences that led to his capture by the Germans. He went on to write a book about it, Previous Engagements , published in 1990, but at the time his family had never heard him speak about it.

Camilla was dating Andrew Parker Bowles, and Lucia inevitably knew all about him. They had first met in March 1965 at her ‘coming out’ party as a debutante – a cocktail party for 150 people given by her mother at Searcy’s, a smart venue behind Harrods in Knightsbridge. He was twenty-five and a rather beautiful officer in the Household Cavalry; she was seventeen but remarkably self-assured. She was good company, well read and intelligent – but neither university nor serious work had ever been in her game plan. She wanted nothing more than to be an upper-class country wife with children and horses and an enjoyable social life.

Being a debutante is a custom long gone – some would say mercifully – but the upper classes once used to launch their seventeen-year-old daughters into society in the hope of finding them an eligible husband. For the season, a year, they partied seamlessly night after night, weekend after weekend. Each party was a concentration of privilege and titles, all chronicled in two glossy magazines, Tatler and Queen . The highlight, and the glitziest of the lot, was Queen Charlotte’s Ball, a huge charity event held at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane, a confetti of conspicuous wealth. And if nothing else, that season ensured these young women would have connections and invitations for life. The men were known as ‘debs’ delights’ and while the girls could only do one season, the boys – so long as they were bachelors – could carry on reaping the benefits of other people’s hospitality year after year. All they needed to ensure the invitations kept coming was access to the right kit – namely a white tie – and an ability to charm the mothers.

The whole thing dated back to 1780 when King George III held a ball in honour of his wife, Queen Charlotte, to celebrate her birthday and to raise money for the maternity hospital which bears her name; the centrepiece was a large cake. It became an annual event at which several hundred nubile girls were formally presented at court – and it was held at Buckingham Palace until 1958, when the Duke of Edinburgh pointed out that the whole thing was ‘bloody daft’ and his sister-in-law, Princess Margaret, said that ‘every tart in London was getting in’. By the time Camilla came out, Queen Charlotte’s Ball was held at the Grosvenor House, and the ‘Queen’ to which the girls were presented was nothing more regal than a giant cake.