Free Diana's Nightmare - The Family by Chris Hutchins, Peter Thompson Page A

medical attention: i don't want a bloody doctor.' The Prince, his face twisted in agony, lay down at full stretch behind the wheels of an ambulance until the pain eased. At Highgrove, he called in Sarah Key, his Australian physiotherapist, to massage and manipulate his spine. Friends revealed that Charles suffered from a crumbling disc which put pressure on the spinal nerve. The man who had made his wife's life 'real, real torture' was exposed as tormented, crippled and disturbed himself. Despite every conceivable warning, he was back in the saddle again within a couple of weeks.
    The vagaries of Charles royal birthright troubled him so much that he was once compelled to explain himself to complete strangers. 'I've had to fight to have any sort of role as the Prince of Wales,' he told a group of editors at Kensington Palace. 'I am determined not to be confined to cutting ribbons.' One editor who dined with Charles mused: 'I sometimes wonder what he does in the morning. Does he wake up and say, "I think I'll be an admiral today" and the valet fetches the right uniform out of the wardrobe?' According to Stephen Barry, the wardrobe contained no fewer than forty-four uniforms. After the break-up, Diana sent them all over to St James's Palace on a mobile clothes rail.
    Charles had, in fact, been given at least one excellent opportunity to play an active role. When James Callaghan was Prime Minister, he put Charles on the Commonwealth Development Corporation, but he quickly lost interest. 'He should stop pretending that he has never been given a chance to test himself to the ultimate,' one of his critics remarked at the time.
    At the core of Charles's problem is what he sees as his rejection by his parents as a child. Wanting for nothing in material terms, he had yearned for parental approval. While his father was a technocrat and pragmatist at heart, he had turned into a dilettante. Even at Highgrove he couldn't settle. 'He loves his garden, but as soon as he's finished sorting out every inch of it he will get bored and take up something else,' said Diana. 'Like most men he does what he wants to do.'
    Moreover, his search for a Holy Grail with such spiritual sherpas as the writer Sir Laurens van der Post has met with only limited success. He described Sir Laurens, with whom he went meditating in the Kalahari desert, as 'the most formative influence on my life'. Another guru, the violinist Sir Yehudi Menuhin, taught him the relaxation and meditation techniques of yoga. But neither has equipped him for his role as the stereotyped but wholly human component of an everyday eternal triangle. 'There are very few relationships, certainly in Western society, that can survive that sort of triangulation,' said Andrew Morton. 'Three into two doesn't work.'
    Infidelity, Charles discovered after the full Camillagate transcript was published in Australia on 13 January, 1993, was a great leveller. He now ranked uncomfortably alongside the milkman, the window cleaner and the travelling salesman as the butt of dirty jokes. He had cuckolded a friend and although it might be argued that the circumstances were different, the morality was the same. Never again could the Prince of Wales take the moral high ground.

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THE CAMILLA CONSPIRACY
    'Your greatest achievement is to love me'
    Prince Charles
    CAMILLA Parker Bowles's father, Major Bruce Shand, was known more for his bravery than his imagination. But he was, in his own way, quite a ladies' man. 'When I met him, he was a single man in his twenties, a dashing cavalry officer who was considered rather good looking,' said Lady Edith Foxwell, then a beautiful debutante of nineteen. 'He rode well and looked good on a horse. He was considered to be a ladies' man but, to be honest, I thought he was rather dull. I was a bit naughty myself and I always liked unusual people. We went to lots of parties together and Bruce was always a very nice escort.'
    Major Shand's eldest daughter was far more direct in