The queen is dead, long live the king! I don’t think that’s said anywhere else in the world. And I am old enough to remember when it was said the other way round. Charles is not much younger than I am and if he had died before leaving us an heir, his sister, the Princess Royal, only a year younger, would have become queen. But did you notice how, out of respect for her brother, she contrived to walk alongside, but half a step, behind him? I’ve watched them, all my life. I wrote about Charles’s university days and attended his investiture as Prince of Wales. I went hunting with Princess Anne in the north country and was accused of pre-empting her first marriage to her fellow Olympian, Captain Mark Phillips, by declaring “It’s love!” on the front page of the Daily Mirror… even though knowing that he was known in Catterick Barracks as ‘Foggy’, on account of his being thick and wet. Years later, when a chief constable introduced me, “I assume you don’t know Mr Revel Barker…”, she told him: “That’s an astonishing assumption to make. Mr Barker and I go back more years than either of us would care to remember.” With her emphasis on the last bit, meaning “don’t remind me!” Well, that’s...
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