“I can’t bear to read it,” Diana, the Princess of Wales, told me. “The headlines are bad enough.” We were in Tokyo where Diana was on tour. But the news was all about a massive brick of a biography about her estranged husband, Prince (now King) Charles. Now, more than 30 years later, the book, by Jonathan Dimbleby, seems to be doing the rounds once again.
The author was given unprecedented access and paints a vivid picture of Charles’s troubled life, from childhood to marriage breakdown. The book upset a lot of people, not just the Princess. Charles’s father, Prince Philip, later disclosed that he thought it was “bloody stupid” of his son to air his grievances in public and it had made him “bloody angry”. As for the late Queen, she had been saddened by it.
Any parent would surely be upset to read about how their son had, as a small boy, been frequently brought to tears by his father’s “bullying” attitude. Philip thought his son was “a bit of a wimp” and frequently belittled him in public, which only served to drive Charles more and more back into his shell, according to a close relation.
Philip would never have acknowledged it, but he was undoubtedly damaged by his own rootless, nomadic childhood. Exiled from their home in Greece, his parents separated after his mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and later founded an order of nuns. He rarely saw his father, and had no real home. But, as he always said, there was no point in complaining or feeling sorry for himself – he just had to “get on with it.”
