COURT IN THE ACT

Charles's spin doctor may be good for the Prince's ego, but is he good for the royal family and the nation? No, says Simon Heifer

IF the royal family is divided on some issues — and we are frequently told it is — there is one on which it appears, with one exception, to be fiercely united. The issue is the advisers of the Prince of Wales in general, and one of them in particular. With the one exception — the Prince of Wales himself — all the royals seem to think that there is considerable room for improvement at St James's Palace.

The main target of their ire is one Mr Mark Bolland, whose Mandelsonian attempts to keep out of the limelight while shaping events took a knock earlier this month. Although technically the Prince's deputy private secretary, 35-year-old Mr Holland was named by PR Week as 'PR

Professional of the Year'. This was, apparently, in recognition of his heroic work in making the Prince of Wales a much-loved figure again after the regrettable events surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. Mr Bolland, who is known as Tip Gloss' to some of his less reverential colleagues, reluctantly accepted the award. Those who know him suspect that he loved every minute of it.

Whatever Mr Holland might officially be called, he is a spin doctor. In that capacity, there is no one to touch him in any part of the Court. From the moment he arrived at St James's Palace in 1996 his mission was to improve the standing of his boss, and specifically to have the public come to accept Mrs Parker Bowles. Not even his worst enemy (and there is some competition for that post) could say that he has failed. What does concern many around the Court, not least members of 'the firm' itself, is at what price he has bought this success.

The Prince of Wales is devoted to Mr Bolland. He will not hear a word said against him. He recommends his services to others disobliged by the media. Whoever is Mr Bolland's enemy becomes the Prince's. This has applied even to Mr Hugh van Cutsem, the Norfolk landowner and horse-breeder who for many years held the position of bestfriend-in-chief to the heir to the throne. Mr van Cutsem believed that Mr Bolland briefed a newspaper that his children were a bad influence on Prince William. He wrote to Mr Bolland threatening legal action unless a full apology was made. Mr Bolland denied absolutely that he gave the briefing. Mr van Cutsem and his family have been consigned to outer darkness by the Prince, in punishment for daring to impugn the integrity of Mr Bolland.

The appointment has just been announced of the new private secretary to the Prince, Sir Michael Peat, who has been engaged in recent years in cleaning up the finances of 'the firm'. Sir Michael provides another object-lesson in the Prince's devotion to Mr Bolland. Although Sir Michael was not especially popular at Buckingham Palace, it was believed by the Queen's advisers and by members of her family that he would see off

Mr Bolland when he got to St James's Palace. However, the Daily Mail revealed last week that Sir Michael had agreed to take his new job only on the condition that Mr Borland remained at his right hand. 'It's love me, love my dog,' a courtier told me. 'Peat is ambitious. He'd love to be private secretary to the next monarch. He knows that the key to Prince Charles's heart these days is to be a chum of Bolland's.'

Mr Bolland is a friend of Peter Mandelson's. Those who saw the twice-disgraced exminister operate as a Labour party spin doctor in the old days recognise many similarities. Mr BoRand, a media junkie, does not himself usually brief the press on the record; he has a woman to do that for him. He has, instead, a white commonwealth of royal correspondents who can be relied upon to write about the Prince of Wales in a way that furthers the image of the Prince. These people are briefed privately by Mr Bolland, and in return for their co-operation are kept very well informed, The system is based on everybody doing everybody else favours. It is a million light-years from the stiff, mindyour-own-bloody-business world of the late Commander Richard Colville, for 20 years press secretary, first to George VI and then to the Queen. He regarded the press as a low form of life, and his catchphrase, even off the record, was 'no comment'.

The problem with spin doctors, as any politician would tell the Prince of Wales, is that they rarely end up doing the job for which they are intended. In the present government, for example, spin doctors are supposed to put the best possible gloss on what a minister does in order to strengthen the popularity of the administration against the opposition. This rarely happens. The spin doctor develops a loyalty to his master, not to the institution. Doing down the opposition will not normally further the interests of his master. Doing down his master's colleagues normally will. Since the Princess of Wales died there has been no opposition in the context in which Mr Bolland works. Therefore he furthers the interests of his master by making him look good next to the collection of fuddy-duddies, losers, wasters and misfits that much of the press would have us believe is the House of Windsor.

It is his unquestioned loyalty to the man, and not to the institution, that is the problem for other members of 'the firm', and for old-school courtiers, They worry that things which really should never get into the public domain — for they are known only to the royals themselves and to their most trusted advisers — are nonetheless becoming widely known. Much-cited recently have been aspects of the fracas over Prince Edward's Ardent production company breaking the agreement about filming the arrival of Prince William at St Andrews. Details of a private telephone call between Prince William and his father appeared in the press. How? Details of the humiliation allegedly inflicted on Prince Edward by his elder brother appeared likewise. How? It was put about that Prince Charles thought that his brother ought to be removed from the Civil List. Who put it about?

All this is the classic craft of the spin doctor. One man looks good because others are denigrated. When one royal hires a man who, though he may have the title of deputy private secretary, acts as a spin doctor, others feel they need one too. Under such a dispensation, the individual can thrive only at the expense of the institution. 'Mark is definitely not a team player,' says a friend of the Prince's. 'He's done wonderful things for the Prince, but he doesn't care if BP [Buckingham Palace] suffers in the process.' One of the Queen's friends says that she is deeply disturbed by the whole Bolland operation, but her son is as inflexible towards her about it as he is towards everyone else who criticises his man.

In fact, the Queen has tried to exact far more from the Prince than just having Mr Bolland put back in his box, and has failed. When he became the Queen's private secretary nearly three years ago, Sir Robin Janvrin had a plan. It was, effectively, to close down the separate court at St James's Palace and to bring all the Prince's staff back directly under Buckingham Palace's control. His plan had the support of his predecessor, Lord Fellowes, whose life had been made a misery by the various warring factions of previous years. More to the point, both Lord Fellowes and Sir Robin knew that the fastest

way to undermine the royal family was to keep up the torrent of stories of divisions within it that were appearing in the press. Although at that stage Mr Bolland had hardly got into his stride, Sir Robin knew that St James's Palace was a source of conflict, and the sooner it was brought to heel the better. What he and the Queen hoped for was a period of silence while 'the firm' did what it was best at — good works, public service, and no ostentation.

However, when the plan was put to the Prince of Wales 'he threw his toys out of the pram', as a courtier put it. He would not be humiliated in this way. He was painfully conscious, after the roasting he received in the media before and upon the death of his ex-wife. that he had a public-image problem. He would not, he knew, solve that by being put back in the hands of Buckingham Palace. Nor would he achieve an aim that had been nurtured since before his ex-wife's demise, and which had had to be put on hold for a year or so after it — that of gaining public acceptance for Mrs Parker Bowles. Mr Bolland had been brought in not least to do that. He only came to work for the Prince in the first place because of a recommendation about his work as director of the Press Complaints Commission, in which post he had handled aspects of the press's treatment of Mrs Parker Bowles's private life most helpfully. However, the chances of his being allowed to advance her cause if he had to answer to Buckingham Palace were zero; indeed, the chances of Mr Bolland remaining in the Prince's service would, in those circumstances, have been almost as slight. The Queen chose not to pursue the confrontation to its logical conclusion. Rank was not pulled. The separate court, spin doctor and all, remained.

From then on Mr Bolland had carteblanche. He mounted, with immaculate precision and ultimate success, 'Operation PB'. At the end of it Mrs Parker Bowles is seen as a jolly, caring, unstuffy woman who does abundant good works and who might, incidentally, be a perfectly acceptable consort to the Prince one day. That, at least, is almost certainly her due: the public's previous view of her was moulded by ignorance, sentimentality and hysteria, and cried out for correction. However, the more successful Mr Bolland became, and the more 'favours' he did to win the admiration of grateful journalists, the more he started to tread on others who could not match his operational skills.

One such is Stephen Lamport, an utterly decent ex-Foreign Office man whom Sir Michael Peat is about to succeed as private secretary. Mr Lamport is a team player. Completely loyal to his boss, he is no less loyal to the institution, and moreover is nobody's fool. Nonetheless, colleagues and friends of Mr Lamport's have spoken in the last couple of years of 'difficulties' he has had because of Mr Bolland. I've seen poor Stephen cut off at the knees,' a fellow courtier remarked. 'He's given the Prince perfectly sound advice on something, only to have Bolland go in there and tell him the complete opposite. The Prince, in those circumstances, backs Holland. It's become impossible for Stephen.'

No one can blame the Prince for feeling that he needed someone to defend him when Mr Bolland turned up in 1996. His exwife was briefing the press in an almost treasonable and usually unhinged fashion about him and his family. No secret was too intimate, no confidence too great that she could not pour it into the ear of one of her obliging confidants in Fleet Street. As the Australian said when watching Larwood bowl bodyline, there were two sides out there, but only one was playing cricket. Although he ought to have known better, the Prince felt that he had better stop playing cricket too. His first attempts to set the record straight went badly wrong — the Dimbleby interview most notoriously, and the naivety with which the accompanying book was handled. If the Prince was going to get involved in this sort of thing, then he needed someone who understood the media to help him — which is where Mr Holland came in.

Now five years later. the St James's Palace machine runs smoothly. It is, though, like a slick political operation rather than one designed to maintain respect for a royal family. In his concern for the image of his boss, Mr Bolland will stop at nothing — such as, for example, ensuring that he controls any public appearances by Prince William. This is not to protect the delicate prince, but to ensure that he doesn't upstage his father. If any other royal looks like getting too much of the action, a scheme will quickly be devised to put the spotlight back on the Prince of Wales. This strategy means that Mr Bolland will have his work cut out in the immediate future, when the Queen celebrates her golden jubilee, and some of the reptiles might want to write nice things about her.

However, the press generally are pretty tame. This is not merely because, like Mr Mandelson before him. Mr Bolland cuts off without a penny those who do not return his 'favours'. He also happens to be the inamorato of Guy Black, who succeeded him as director of the Press Complaints Commission, and someone most editors would not want gratuitously to offend. It may all be very incestuous, but it certainly works well to serve the purposes of Mr Bolland's employer. Indeed, Mr Black hosted a PCC party earlier this year at which the Prince, Prince William and Mrs Parker Bowles were guests of honour — the whole event a showcase for Mr Bolland's success in gaining public and press support for the new royal couple. The end result, though, cannot be measured just by the beneficial personal effect it has had on the Prince of Wales. Those other members of 'the firm' who have found themselves on the receiving end of one of Mr Bolland's briefings about their general waste of space utterly hate him, and wish that he would go somewhere else. Some of them worry, too, about his connections with New Labour, and fear that he may seduce the Prince into embracing a modernising tone so fierce that it un-royals the royal family. Also, there is much more demand for the services of royalty than there is royalty available to meet it. There are countless charities that want patrons, there are hospices, hospitals and schools that need to be visited, events that have to be opened and projects that need to be endorsed. The Prince of Wales cannot do everything, and even with the help of all his parents, siblings and cousins, the royal family is still stretched to do all there is to do. If some of them are to be run into the ground as a result of their not being the Prince of Wales, then 'the firm' will have serious logistical problems.

That is just one of the reasons why the royal family is not susceptible to the activities of spin doctors. Being the Prince of Wales, or any other royal for that matter, should not be a calling which one enters in a spirit of competition. This is, however, how the Prince is being shaped now. It is causing demoralisation, resentment and mistrust. By comparison, the so-called (and much exaggerated) curse of overpaid, lazy and selfindulgent royalty is pretty harmless. Nobody begrudges the Prince of Wales the good opinion of his future subjects, which he ought in any case now to have earned by his hard work alone. The Diana phenomenon has passed, and she is no longer there to upstage him. He does not need to U.), so hard; or, rather, he does not need the likes of Mr Bolland to try so hard for him. What is now a matter of private concern for a few at and around the Court could in time become a very public embarrassment, and cause the Prince real harm because of the damage it would be perceived to be doing to the monarchy itself.

He will not want to part with Mr Bolland. However, the Prince could legitimately observe that a difficult chapter in his own life has been successfully dealt with, and that a new, less vulgar and competitive approach to his hereditary duties would now be in order. The next phase, surely, is about sharing with a few of his kin the light that now happily shines on him for the widest benefit of what Bagehot called 'a family on the throne'. It is, after all, very much in the Prince's interests that the institution of monarchy sustains as few attacks as possible. No doubt Sir Michael Peat, when he takes up his responsibilities next year, can find something even further behind the scenes for 'Lip Gloss' to do — something that would stretch his considerable talents, yet not require any intimacy with the gentlemen of the press.