Royal books. Where do they come from and what the hell are they for? Somewhat to my surprise, in recent years I’ve enjoyed several serious biographies of regal personages, the best of these being Jane Ridley’s Bertie: A Life of Edward VII, a story of sex, sulking and 12-course dinners. I’ve also, on occasion, been known to gobble up the kind of high-class insider gossip favoured by Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair (you’d have to be half dead not to enjoy bits of The Palace Papers). But until now, I’ve never tried out the kind of book that seems only to get published at all for the serialisation that will inevitably follow in the Daily Mail.
As experiences go, this has been quite horrifying; beneath my own coronet, my hair is now, I believe, just a little whiter. A terrible swot when it comes to writing, it’s genuinely shocking to me that Angela Levin’s Camilla: From Outcast to Future Queen Consort has made it to hard covers and not only because it’s already out of date, having been written before the Queen’s death (Levin’s publisher evidently decided not to pulp existing copies, the better that she might add an afterword). Look at its author’s acknowledgments – there is, of course, no bibliography – and in a glance, you’ll grasp its threadbare nature. Where Brown might have spoken to at least 50 courtiers and other top sneaks, Levin has simply chatted to half a dozen of Camilla’s most devoted fans. These include – cue my best Uriah Heep impression – the historian Andrew Roberts, the TV presenter Clare Balding and Craig Revel Horwood of Strictly Come Dancing fame, who once did the cha-cha-cha with her. (“He knows he is not a constitutional expert, but… ” Levin writes, by way of introduction.)
