I’m starting to understand why royal reporters and commentators were obsessing over the Duke and Duchess of Sussex during King Charles and Camilla’s US state visit last week. It’s because those commentators were actually disappointed in Charles and Camilla, but they can’t admit that publicly. So they remain forever fixated on the ones who got away. As I’ve said, I actually thought Charles and Cam did an okay job last week – the bar is in hell, but they clomped their way over it. The crazy part was when these Camilla-commissioned praise-pieces started coming out, and royalists kept letting the truth slip out. That no one has any time for Camilla, that she was a frumpy mess, that they’ve basically let this side-chick wear QEII’s jewels (I’m paraphrasing). Well, the Mail’s Amanda Platell actually said the thing, the thing which no one else could say: that watching Camilla stagger around DC and NYC made everyone sad that Diana isn’t around.

There can be no doubt that King Charles’s visit to the United States was a triumph. His funny and powerful speech to the US Congress in Washington was a masterclass in diplomacy. And yet, wasn’t something missing? Dare I say the glamour usually involved in such an epic royal event? And can I be the only one who, while admiring 78-year-old Queen Camilla’s stoicism, grew tired of her formulaic A-lined granny dresses, even alongside millions of pounds-worth of borrowed crown jewels?

Watching Camilla, I remembered a 1985 US visit when Prince Charles and Princess Diana attended a ball with President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy. That was the night Diana danced with John Travolta. She was so beautiful in that velvet, midnight-blue, off-the-shoulder Victor Edelstein gown, a seven-strand pearl choker with a sapphire at her slender neck.

Many of my generation – Diana’s generation – can’t help but wonder what would have happened if the then Camilla Parker Bowles, a married mother of two, had not refused to let go of ‘her’ Prince.

Had she and Charles not divorced, Diana of course would be our Queen, attending those glamorous White House events.

She would be 64 – 13 years younger than the King, at 77 – and you can bet that given her beauty, pictures of her would have gone viral. Despite all the efforts of her stylists, Camilla hardly registered on this trip.

I’ve always believed Charles’ marriage to Diana was sabotaged from the start by Camilla. We are expected to call her ‘Queen’. I refuse to do so. Camilla will never be a queen to me, only a marriage-wrecker.

[From The Daily Mail]

I can’t believe I’m cosigning anything Platell writes, but damn. Hardly anyone in the British media writes this or says this anymore. They’re all bound by the invisible contract, and they’re afraid of Camilla’s power within the institution. But this IS what many people were thinking. I remember someone said this after the coronation as well – Diana’s brother, the Earl of Spencer, was doing a podcast interview, and someone told him that all they could think about during the coronation was Diana and what a wonderful queen she would have been. That really was when the institution collapsed in some way, but the Sussexit was the final nail in the coffin.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.