How would you feel about a Queen Camilla, as in the wife of King Charles? Personally I’d be dead against, for reasons I’ll bore you with later, but what matters is how the nation feels. Because the Prince of Wales very much wants Camilla to be queen when he becomes king.
As has been reported elsewhere, there’s now a veritable ops department at Clarence House — jovially called ‘QC’ by its members — who are responsible for ensuring that the middle class is prepared for just this outcome. Actually, that’s probably over-egging it. Seems QC is more of a concept than a war cabinet, but also that if you’re not with the programme, you don’t last long in Clarence House.
Trouble is, this isn’t a good year for the project, formal or informal. It’s the 20th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and you know what that means: a year-long reminder of the existence of the woman who was, is, the great impediment to the Queen Camilla project, indeed who was the living impediment to the relationship between Charles and Camilla even before her untimely death.
So, we’ve got the exhibition at Kensington Palace of Diana in Fashion — where she really shone, for she was, whatever else you say about her, lovely — and the timely reissue of biographies, notably that by Sally Bedell Smith of Prince Charles, which did him no favours, and, still to come, whopping retrospectives for the anniversary by every British newspaper and broadcaster, and most American and Australian ones.
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