You have to love a documentary in which Queen Camilla reveals that as a teenager one of her favourite books was The Scarlet Pimpernel because “I was sort of obsessed at that time by the guillotine”. ’I’m sorry, what? Could we back up a moment? I have a few more questions I’d like to ask.
Alas, she goes on to refer to the tricoteuses in A Tale of Two Cities as “ghastly women”, so hopes of Camilla’s coronation as the end of a very long seditious play by the Shands are ultimately dashed. But if anyone was ever going to be an aristocratic sleeper agent primed to bring down the monarchy from within, it would be Camilla. Clearly born the very gamest of girls, she has a gleam in her eye as she recalls her younger self that still makes you wonder …
