All knickers and knockers

Whatever else this is, an intimate portrait of Mrs Parker Bowles it is not, or at least not one written by the author. This is a scissors-and-paste job, the bones of earlier would-be biographers whitening in every chapter, which gives it an air of California or Bust. Clearly done at speed, there are many errors of punctuation and of typography (Welsh has a lower-case throughout), and one can almost hear the prayer, ‘Lord, there be 2,000 words by lunchtime, and nothing decent on TV this afternoon. Oh dear, why ever did I sign that contract? Ah well, that’s paid the nanny for another six months.’

Because, with the exception of Jilly Cooper who gives the project her imprimatur on the dust jacket (‘I’m a great fan of Rebecca Tyrrel’s … she writes beautifully’), the author did not have access to anyone who knew, or would talk about, Mrs Parker Bowles, she takes refuge in generalisation at long range and in the sort of compound adjectives beloved of Dylan Thomas, sometimes in both.

People like Camilla don’t worry about getting dog drool over the steak and kidney pie filling and they have black lines under their finger- nails from weeding round the taddle stones in the front of the house or plunging their hands into buckets of steaming bran mash on a winter’s morning.