As of next month’s coronation, the Queen Consort will at last have ascended to the title of Queen – not Consort, not common-law, but fully legit Queen Camilla – without the world knowing much about her. There are some simple reasons why.
It’s partly because she never gives interviews and partly because she doesn’t reveal much in her actions, which are standardly royal, but not very disclosing: good deeds and horses, essentially. It’s partly because she has functioned, for decades, as a cipher for other conversations. What do we think of adultery, marriage, divorce, the royal family, the leisure class, the finer gradations of social hierarchy? Of Charles? Of Diana? These debates have played out in sometimes hideously microscopic detail, with Camilla as object, but never subject. The result is that she is never more obscure than when everyone is talking about her.
