It’s interesting you say this.
Having watched the Vintage Reads podcast on You Tube, I have been reading a book from the charity shop called “Battle of the Brothers” by Robert Lacey, which says on page 94 of the hardback;
“According to Stuart Higgins, a royal correspondent in the 1980s and later editor of the Sun, Camilla Parker Bowles provided him with regular off-the-record briefings about the state of the royal marriage from 1982 to 1992.
‘I talked to her once a week for ten years’ Higgins told Sally Bedale Smith in 1999.
´I talked to her about Diana and Charles. She guided me on things that were not true, or things that were off the beam. Everything was behind closed doors and I didn’t write about her, although I spoke to her all the time during that period. I didn’t sense that she and Charles were out of touch.’
So starting in 1982, the year following Charles and Diana’s wedding, the future Queen Camilla dispensed royal nudges and whispers to one of Britain’s top tabloid reporters in return for his keeping her name out of the papers.”
I can’t believe that more was not made of this when the book was published in 2020?
In fact I had already skim-read this book and failed to spot this passage!
Stuart Higgins is a named source and was the editor of the Sun, an experienced proven journalist, not some self promoting expert on a random podcast.
Diana was therefore only twenty when the briefings from Camilla began. And then she was pregnant twice in her early twenties. She just didn’t have a chance did she being briefed about as she was? She must have been so confused about where all of these stories in the papers were coming from. No wonder she felt the need to strike back with her own book and interview?
The book goes on to describe how Lady Colin Campbell rented an apartment in Cundy Street in the same block of flats in which Camilla and Lucia Santa Cruz had started off their London lives and where Charles had met Camilla.
And funnily enough, it was Stuart Higgins, acting editor of the Sun at that point, who serialised Lady Colin Campbell’s book, Diana in Private, which was markedly pro-Charles and very anti-Diana.
And we know now that Mark Bolland, the PR agent, who was paid a lot of money by Charles, to rehabilitate Camilla’s image, and who it has been speculated in the press, allegedly overstepped his brief and allegedly trashed other members of the RF in the process, according to him, is still in touch with Camilla and lunches with her a few times a year.
And Bolland and his husband Guy Black, now Baron Black of Brentwood, former head of the Press Complaints Commission and Deputy Chair of the Telegraph Media Group,
are apparently both close friends with Rebekah Brooks, who is is currently the CEO of News UK.
(RB has held this position since September 2015, managing the UK media division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which publishes major national titles like The Sun, The Times, and The Sunday Times.)
Two prominent supporters of Rebekah Brooks following the criminal trial in 2014 In which she was found not guilty of conspiracy to hack voicemails, were funnily enough, I will leave you to possibly join the dots or not, were Camilla’s “friends” Piers Morgan and Jeremy Clarkson.
So I think Camilla may indeed have gone
about things “quietly” in public, but behind the scenes, it would appear, allegedly, that she has been pretty active and chummy with her media contacts?