No seat for Camilla at Di service

Aug 17 2007

HAS the rain addled British common sense? Why, in what should be our balmy summer days, have our movers and shakers become barmy?

It's ludicrous, for a start, that Camilla Parker Bowles, that old boot now elevated as the Countess of Cornwall, could be in the front row with Charles at Diana's memorial service a fortnight today.

This is the woman of whom Diana spoke as the third person in her failed marriage. This is the woman whom Charles took away for discreet weekends at sympathetic friends' homes while Diana fumed.

Most of all, this is the woman who invoked sneers at her cuckolded husband as the man who lay down his wife for his future sovereign.

It's been suggested that the Queen is uneasy at the prospect of Camilla at the ceremony at the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks - where, incidentally, the Parker Bowleses were married.

Apparently it is Prince Charles who insists on Camilla's presence.

Despite his meddling letters on ecology, architecture and young people, Charles is not a bright man or original thinker. Totally self-absorbed as he is, he lacks his mother's canniness, her finger on the public pulse.

I'm not a Diana fan. She was manipulative, vain, cunning and, oddly in a woman who has suffered at an adulterer's hands, she threw herself at other women's husbands.

But if she is to be so publicly remembered, then let it be done in a seemly way: which means Camilla developing a dose of diplomatic diarrhoea or tactical tonsillitis.

If she turns up, I hope she and Charles are booed.