Publish the Prince’s diaries: they would become an instant classic

Prince Charles was low in the water during the early 1990s. The collapse of any marriage is painful. In the case of the Prince the agony was magnified beyond endurance by a merciless public scrutiny with which the royal publicity machine, whose armoury of lethal weapons included the raised eyebrow and the old boy network, was ill equipped to deal. Looking back, the Prince must have drawn on enormous reserves of moral courage in order to cope at all. Relief came only with the arrival in 1996 of Mark Bolland, smart, gay, and educated at a comprehensive school.

Five years later Bolland was rightly named PR professional of the year. The job he did for the Prince was awesome. Bolland’s official rank in the Prince’s office — deputy private secretary — concealed his real role. He did not merely mend Prince Charles’s damaged public image. Camilla Parker Bowles, who had at times drifted dangerously close to pariah status, was a ‘non-negotiable part of the package’.