I feel like I’ve missed a memo. Is it Camilla Awareness Month or something? Two weeks ago, we had 90 minutes on her charitable activities in ITV’s Her Majesty the Queen: Behind Closed Doors – which, to be honest, amply satisfied my interest in the lady, fond as I am of a doughty dame. Now we’ve got Queen Camilla: The Wicked Stepmother, a documentary about absolutely nothing we haven’t heard before. It looks like the Christmas ruining of the TV schedules has already begun. Seems to come round earlier every year, does it not?
Anyway. To business. Posh folk alongside less posh biographers and journalists assemble to talk about Camilla’s “remarkable rise” to queendom. We begin with her childhood. She was born in a Nottinghamshire mining town and ate nothing but mice and boot blacking until she was four, when she followed her father down t’pit and got to share his midday break and a cup of pneumoconiosis every Thursday.
I’m kidding, of course. She was born to Major Bruce Shand and Rosalind Cubitt, daughter of the 3rd Baron Ashcombe. They split their time between a country house in East Sussex and a townhouse in South Kensington, London. She had siblings and horses. Or siblings who were horses, I forget. It matters not.
Then she got older, an O-level and a reputation as an efficient dispatcher of injured pheasants during shooting season. “She was great fun,” says everyone. She liked dancing, smoking and having a good time, especially with Andrew Parker Bowles, until she was introduced to the then terrifically eligible bachelor Prince Charles and became his girlfriend for a year and a half. Then Prince Charles’s beloved great-uncle Lord Mountbatten stuck his patrician nose in and put the kibosh on a relationship that seems to have been going swimmingly and probably would have saved a lot of people a lot of bother if it had been allowed to continue. Camilla Shand was “clearly not” a virgin, you see, and so 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer was hauled in instead, and ’Mills married Parker Bowles instead.
You’ll never guess what happened next. Except, of course, you know because even the most uninterested of us have absorbed the basics by osmosis over the years. But here they are, trotted out by people of varying vowel-sounds, all over again. Charles and Camilla reignite their affair, Diana is miserable, Diana tells Andrew Morton everything, Camilla is hated by the public (or at least by the tabloids as their supposed proxy), the Queen is worried about the monarchy, then Diana dies and an opportunity to forge a different future presents itself. PR supremo Mark Bolland is brought in to rehabilitate her reputation and it works because no rational person in the country really gave a pearl-sized crap about who in the royal family did what to whom – nor who became queen when Charles became king because none of it mattered in the slightest. Charles and Camilla marry in 2005, Charles looks a tiny bit happier, and the world does not end.
Much is made in the last 20 minutes or so of Harry’s animus towards his stepmother and the claims in his memoir, various television interviews, his Netflix series – and, for all I know, a series of heartfelt scrawls in Oprah’s sandpit – of the palace conspiring against him and his new wife, Meghan, until they were forced to defect to the US. Camilla, we see him hint in archive interviews, was at the centre of it all. Somehow, despite this and claims that some members of “the firm” were racist, the monarchy did not fall and the coronation of Charles as king and ’Mills as queen consort went ahead after the queen died in 2022.
I cannot tell you who this programme is for, why anyone thought it was necessary and what it’s doing on Channel 4 in particular. But it happens a lot – sweeping the cutting room floor and putting scraps of things together to make a new programme that is as old as time. I guess it’s cheap? But does cheap always have to be dull and pointless? And always about the royals or aristocrats? And always about stuff that has only just happened to them, stuff we all remember because it happened almost literally yesterday? That time has neither obscured or yet lent an air of mystery to? I mean what, really, is the point?
Queen Camilla: The Wicked Stepmother aired on Channel 4.
