Mistress Of The House

‘WHEN you think of a Prince and then of his mistress, the images you have of her are clear.

‘Mummy, daddy, why do they all stare?’

At night, the scarlet woman is what Evelyn Waugh would call a “Toulouse-Lautrec odalisque”, a woman of sensual beauty and sexual accessibility.

In the daytime office job, she is bit of fluff, a coquettish tease in shiny colours. She posts her warm knickers to her master in the internal mail and passes her time bending over to pick up paper clips from the floor and examining the crack in the ceiling above the boardroom table.

In public, she is vivacious, a captivating presence. When others chatter at the dinner party table, she charms with insight and wit.

What she is not is Camilla Parker Bowles. And this has long been Camilla’s complaint – no-one can fathom what it is Charles sees in her.

But now she’s legit, Camilla seems to fit in. Looking at Hello!’s pictures of the new Duchess of Cornwall’s debut at the Trooping of The Colour, the obvious thing to note is how at home she looks among the Windsors.

Whereas Princess Diana cocked her head to one side like a marionette with a broken string, Camilla sits bolt upright, meeting the snapper’s lens with her steady gaze.

For that annual Royal balcony shot of the entire clan – the one where we’re all waiting for a trap door to open and swallow them up – Camilla is hard to pick out in the crowd.

Not for her an original dress, a bright blouse and Duran Duran hair, rather a beige hat, an off-white long jacket over a sensible skirt and some matching gloves.

Like the Queen, and the Queen Mother before her, Camilla has gone for the Windsor girls’ uniform of a single colour frump fest. No fuss. No show. She’s almost invisible.

Which as well as making her appear very much one of the gang, offers a hint at how she managed to conduct a largely clandestine affair with Charles for so long – no-one noticed her…’

Posted: 17th, June 2005 | In: Media Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink