Friends of Camilla Parker Bowles have told The Daily Beast that attacks on her by Prince Harry as a schemer who cynically plotted for years to become queen—and threw him under the bus as part of her quest to achieve that goal—are “absurd.” And they say King Charles is feeling “betrayed, bewildered, and angered” after the publication of Harry’s memoir, and the interviews and headlines generated by it.
On Thursday, there was a growing sense that the couple may now not be invited to King Charles’ coronation in May, with a source telling The Sun: “There have been discussions among the family, including Edward and Anne. They do not want private conversations at the Coronation making it into the paperback edition of Spare.”
Buckingham Palace declined to comment Thursday on the claims.
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While Harry’s attacks on his brother (a dog bowl-breaking traitor who thinks Nazi uniforms are hilarious), Kate Middleton (a lip-gloss hoarder who can’t own her bridesmaid dress shame) and his character assassination of his father (a feeble old man who still carries around his childhood teddy bear) have stolen the headlines, it is by turning his fire on Queen Camilla, in his memoir Spare, that Harry has risked writing himself out of the royal soap opera forever.
Long before the book’s publication, royal insiders were busily briefing that ad hominem attacks on Camilla would be regarded as a “red line” by Charles.
Indeed, a source told the Daily Beast in October last year: “It is one thing for Harry to attack Charles, he can take it on the chin, but if Harry forces him to choose, by laying into Camilla in his book, I have no doubt he will choose Camilla,” adding that the new monarch is “incredibly protective” of his second wife.
It was notable that neither Harry nor Meghan took on Camilla in any of their previous media interviews. On Oprah, Netflix, and Spotify there was barely a word about her.
It now looks like Harry was saving it all for the book.
In his memoir, Harry directly accused Camilla of launching a “campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the crown” and of planting negative stories in the press about him saying she “sacrificed me on her PR altar.”
If the things he said about Camilla in the book were bad, the comments he made about his stepmother in a series of interviews were far, far worse.
Harry told Anderson Cooper in a 60 Minutes interview Sunday that Camilla was “dangerous,” and suggested she was prepared to destroy him by conniving with the British press if that meant her own image could be improved.
Asked by Cooper why he described Camilla as dangerous, Harry replied, “Because of the need for her to rehabilitate her image… because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade 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 because of that.”
He added: “If you are led to believe, as a member of the family, that being on the front page, having positive headlines, positive stories written about you, is going to improve your reputation or increase the chances of you being accepted as monarch by the British public, then that’s what you’re going to do.”
Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Prince Charles, Prince of Wales and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall attend the Commonwealth Day Service 2020 on March 9, 2020 in London, England.
WPA PoolHarry also seemed to have Camilla in mind when he told British interviewer Tom Bradby “certain members have decided to get in bed with the devil [the British press]… to rehabilitate their image.”
Even when he seemed to be attempting to row back on his remarks in an interview with Michael Strahan on Good Morning America, he actually doubled down, saying: “She’s my stepmother. I don’t look at her as an evil stepmother. I see her as someone who married into this institution and has done everything that she can to, you know, improve her own reputation and her own image. For her own sake.”
While courtiers in the king and queen’s private offices are remaining silent, personal friends of Camilla have been quick to defend her to The Daily Beast.
When asked if they believed Camilla had actively sought to be queen, one friend said: “All Camilla ever did was have the bad luck to fall in love with a prince. Literally the last thing she could care about is being queen. It’s absurd, and anyone who knows her knows it is absurd.”
The friend added that while it was well known that Charles wanted her to be queen, the issue was “at the bottom” of Camilla’s priority list, saying, “All she ever wanted was to support the man she loved.”
Another source, who has also known the family for many years, said the attacks on Camilla represented a watershed moment. “It’s profoundly unfair to drag Camilla into it,” the source said, adding of Charles, “He is betrayed, bewildered and angered by what Harry is doing.”
It is important to note that, as well as attacking Camilla, Harry has also laid out his support for his father's relationship with Camilla, and has also expressed “compassion” for her, saying at one stage, “Yes, Camilla had played a pivotal role in the unravelling of our parents’ marriage, and yes, that meant she’d played a role in our mother's disappearance, but we understood that she’d been trapped like everyone else in the riptide of events. We didn’t blame her, and in fact, we’d gladly forgive her if she could make Pa happy.”
He adds that he and William “promised Pa that we'd welcome Camilla into the family. The only thing we asked I return was that he not marry her.” Charles, he says, didn't answer when they made this request.
He also writes of his happiness watching them be married, as well as his sadness at the thought of not seeing his father as much.
Vanity Fair was told by “a close friend of Queen Consort Camilla” that she has been left “just astounded by the whole thing.”
Other friends have spoken out publicly. The conservative journalist Simon Heffer wrote in the Telegraph, for example, that Harry’s description of her as a mendacious schemer “couldn’t be further from the woman that I have met over the years.”
While one might respond that of course Heffer would say that, wouldn’t he, he makes the point that it was the “express wish of the late queen” that Camilla should be queen consort, although Harry’s supporters would no doubt question his assertion that this demonstration of trust “more than counters any of the halfwittery and fantasy history that the duke expends on his stepmother in his bizarre book.”
Harry’s case against Camilla has not been helped by a provably false accusation made in the book that Camilla leaked details of her first meeting with Prince William to the Sun. It is a matter of public record that it was Camilla’s then-private secretary, Amanda MacManus, who mentioned the meeting to her husband, a journalist, who told a friend who told the Sun. One might argue that this is how journalism works. MacManus actually resigned in shame over the affair. Harry might have been shrewder to argue that the fact she was later reinstated showed how his stepmother had not taken the breach seriously.
(In another unfortunate error, Harry recalls learning of the Queen Mother's death while at Eton in 2002. In fact, he was skiing in Klosters, Switzerland, at the time—with his dad, brother and the British press pack.)
At the Palace there is a determination to get back to business as usual—Wednesday, for example, it was announced that King Charles will make his first state visit to France later this year.
And in just four months, the great engine of state will roll, in full pomp, through the streets of London to mark Charles and Camilla’s coronation, grinding, the royals will hope, the tawdry gossip of recent months to dust beneath its tracks.
It will be one of the defining moments of the decade, but whether Harry and Meghan will be there is once again an open question. A report in the Independent Tuesday quoted a source as saying: “The family will extend the invitation but it would be very hard for Harry and Meghan to be there given everything that has been said in the interviews and the book. The family expects Harry and Meghan to find a reason not to be there.”
It is hard to imagine Harry and Meghan passing up an opportunity to attend one of the grandest public events of the era. It is equally hard to imagine Charles welcoming Harry to the magnificent occasion, after the damage he has sought to inflict on the reputation of the woman he loves.
