RICHARD KAY Lifts the Lid on Team Camilla’s ‘Head Girl’

When they are together, there is a lot of laughter. It’s the kind of warm, contagious, and intimate humor that best friends enjoy.

But their bond is one that transcends simple shared interests, as both have had loved ones touched by tragedy.

That’s why the Marchioness of Lansdowne sprang to defend Queen Camilla when Prince Harry tried in his memoir to portray his stepmother as “dangerous” and a “bad guy” who had sacrificed him “on her personal PR altar.”

Camilla was ‘hurt’ by such personal attacks, Lady Lansdowne said. “It bothers her.”

Her ringside position in the domestic crises and storms that have engulfed Camilla, 75, and the Royal Family has fostered an acute sense of right and wrong and it was clear she was stung by the perceived injustice of Harry’s words.

Tellingly, it was the only direct response to Harry’s claims, as he lashed out not only at his father’s wife, but at his brother and sister-in-law as well.

Lady Lansdowne’s comments also provided insight into Camilla’s coping strategy. “She won’t let it get to her,” was the message.

“Her philosophy,” the Marchioness added, “is always, ‘Don’t make a big deal of it and it will settle down—recovered soonest anyway.”

It’s a saying that could also apply to the tall, slender Marchioness. Like Camilla, the decorator, known professionally as Fiona Shelburne, had to wait several years before husband Charlie, who was previously married to the daughter of the Earl of St. Germans, put a ring on her.

But since her marriage to the Marquess of Lansdowne in 1987, Fiona, 68, has played a key role in Camilla’s life as part of her ‘support system’.

She was one of six friends appointed a Queen’s Companion to assist in last month’s coronation.

Fiona’s presence did much to ease Camilla’s nerves and cemented her position as ‘chief maid’ of the Queen’s Companions, which also included Sarah Troughton, Jane von Westenholz, Lady Katharine Brook, Lady Sarah Keswick and Baroness (Carlyn) Chisholm.

A few days later, the self-righteous Lady Lansdowne played down the remarkable transformation in her friend’s life from the maligned mistress and third person in marriage of Princess Diana to the admired queen.

“Never in a million years,” she said when asked if Camilla thought she would ever be queen. While this may have been a comforting reassurance, it rather contradicts the evidence of Charles’ coordinated campaign to make his wife his crowned consort.

But perhaps we should excuse such exaggeration. The Marquise has always been present in some of Camilla’s darkest times.

When Princess Diana died, it was Lady Lansdowne who took Camilla out of the public eye, and when the Parker Bowleses’ marriage ended, she provided Camilla with refuge for five months at Bowood, the Wiltshire seat of the Lansdownes.

While the King is on his current bachelorette holiday in Romania, friends like Fiona will be on standby when the Queen wants entertainment.

So what makes the architect’s daughter, born Fiona Merritt in Maldon, Essex, so indispensable?

“She’s a very confident, happy, glass-half-full type,” says an old friend. “But best of all, she can laugh at herself. That certainly appeals to Camilla. Camilla has narrowed her circle of friends since becoming queen, but she always has time for Fiona.”

One of the Marquise’s other qualities is discretion, essential for any royal companion.

But for the infamous Camillagate tape, the illegally recorded bedtime conversation between the then Prince of Wales and Camilla, the friendship with the Lansdownes would have remained private.

The tape revealed the network of country houses where the couple, then married but not to each other, would meet – Bowood, a Grade II listed 18th-century pile of grounds laid out by Capability Brown, was one such retreat.

While Camilla and Fiona have been friends for 50 years, Charles and the buffalo-hunting Lord Lansdowne, now 82, have known each other since childhood and the Prince stayed at his parents’ Scottish home, Meikleour House in Perthshire, in 1955.

The following year, the house was the scene of a terrible tragedy – one that would be repeated less than a decade later. In 1956, Lady Caroline, the 17-year-old sister of the future Marquis, was killed in a gunfire incident.

Nine years later, Charlie’s American-born mother Barbara, who had been a British clay pigeon champion, took her own life with a 12-caliber shotgun. Mother and daughter were buried side by side in the nearby parish cemetery of Kinclaven.

After the death of his wife, the then Marquis, former Foreign Minister, withdrew from public life.

Eight years later he gave Bowood to his son Charlie, who had married Lady Frances Eliot. The marriage did not last and by 1980 the couple had become estranged.

Around that time, Charlie acquired the intriguing nickname “the comforter.” According to gossip, this was due to his habit of often being the first on the phone when a well-bred couple broke up to offer the woman a date.

He was linked to Lady Leonora Lichfield, estranged wife of the photographer Earl of Lichfield.

However, he was also secretly dating Fiona, a former debutante, who had worked for wallpaper designer Colefax and Fowler and was part of a team hired for the restoration of Bowood House.

Although Fiona was seven years younger than Camilla, she was part of her nationwide network for a long time. She was godmother to Camilla’s daughter Laura and spent the night before her wedding to Charlie at the Parker Bowleses’ house.

When Camilla’s marriage ended in 1995, she and her dogs Freddie and Tosca stayed with the Shelburnes at Bowood House.

Fiona is a regular at Camilla’s side. She helped organize a surprise party in Highgrove for Charles’s 50th birthday and joined Camilla on a holiday in the Aegean in 2007 when she escaped the crowds on the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death.

When Camilla’s mother died of osteoporosis, Prince Charles asked Charlie and Fiona to represent him at the memorial and lent them his chauffeur-driven Bentley. Bowood was later the setting for an osteoporosis fundraiser that Camilla organized.

No one has been more reliable to Camilla than the “head girl.”

Their friendship not only emerged unscathed from all the drama, but stronger than ever.