Prince charles

We're closing 2020 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here's No. 4: Camilla Tominey on the Prince of Wales Three years ago, Sir Christopher Geidt departed as the Queen’s private secretary. For years, he had done much to hold The Firm together, but his influence was resented by Prince Charles. The festering acrimony between Buckingham Palace and Clarence House came to a head in 2017 when Geidt, a Cambridge-educated former Scots Guard, convened a meeting of staff to announce Prince Philip’s retirement without first consulting Charles’s aides. Geidt ended up being forced out after a decade of unwavering service.

In the clearest sign yet that the coronavirus does not care about status, wealth or class, Prince Charles announced today that he has tested positive for the disease. According to a statement released by Clarence House, the heir apparent felt ‘mild symptoms’ on Sunday night, but ‘otherwise remains in good health’. Charles was tested on Monday by NHS Aberdeenshire. He and Camilla (who tested negative for coronavirus) are now self-isolating separately in Scotland, while the Queen continues to self-isolate in Windsor castle. Charles’s last public event was a dinner in aid of the Australian bushfire relief, on 12 March at Mansion House. It has been reported that he last came into contact with the Queen on the same day.

We often complain that our politicians are all bluffers who know very little about a lot. But is the very structure of our political institutions at fault? And speaking of bluffers, Theresa May is so far successfully fudging her way through the Brexit negotiations, but can she survive after March 2019? And last, maybe all this politics has made you long for the good old days of monarchy. With Prince Charles’s art collection on exhibit, we talk about how it reflects Charles’s One Nation Toryism. PPE – that notorious Oxford degree that ostensibly teaches its students Philosophy, Politics, and Economics – and apparently, how to govern a country. Or at least, how to sound like you’re governing.

It has long been my belief that whereas the quality of gentiles drawn to Judaism is very high (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, myself), the dregs are drawn to Islam. And leaving aside the dozy broads who gravitate to it for kinky reasons after watching one too many Turkish Delight ads (Vanessa Redgrave, Lauren Booth), there is something about this religion which attracts the very weakest of Western men. We think of those often half-witted types who learn to build a bomb online. Then there are the imam-huggers of the left who never met a wife-beating mad mullah they didn’t like. A lot of the reason left-wing men seem to have so much time for Islamism is to do with suppressed feelings of resentment towards the march of feminism, which they could never in a million years admit to.

Our guest on today's Holy Smoke podcast is A.N. Wilson, author of a hugely admired biography of Queen Victoria and – as you'll hear – the most mischievous intellectual in the land. Cristina Odone and I started out by asking about Victoria's vigorous (and possibly whisky-fuelled) persecution of Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England: the Queen lobbied hard for the legislation that sent several of them to jail for popish "ritualism". But that was the just the beginning of Wilson's hilarious whistlestop tour of the passions and prejudices of Queen Victoria.

Twenty years in August since Diana died. The anniversary is sad for me on many levels — she was definitely the final famous person I’ll have a pash on, and it reminds me that I haven’t yet earned back the whopping advance I was given for my book about her. To be fair, the book was an absolute stinker, written through a haze of gin, tears and avarice, containing such clodhopping clangers as ‘with blue skies in her eyes and the future in her smile’ and ‘affection swooshed out of her like a firework from a bottle’. Nurse, the screens! But there was good stuff in it, too. Namely, the way I served it to the Prince’s Party who continue to curdle Diana’s memory much as they tried to ruin her reputation during her lifetime.

The Duke of Edinburgh is finally to retire in the autumn, after more than 70 years of public service, just after his 96th birthday. Philip – a former first lieutenant in the Navy – is one of the last prominent figures in British life to have served in the second world war; he’s also possibly the only one worshipped as a living god, as far as I know. Yet this man at the very heart of the British Establishment has come to be known as a sort of arch-reactionary, an English colonel figure who goes around insulting foreigners ­­– either to our amusement or utter horror. He was once, in the distance of time, the royal family's most progressive reformer; the newcomer from impoverished Greek-German nobility (though his first language is French).