KEY POINTS:
Sarah Goodall, who has just written a book called The Palace Diaries, breezes into the bar at Blakes Hotel in South Kensington an hour late. She is a former Lady Clerk to Prince Charles and so should know better.
I should have been quite cross with her but
that would be like being cross with a poodle puppy that hasn't yet been house trained. She doesn't apologise for being late. I suspect she is often late. Instead she says something in her "posh but not aristocratic" yah yah accent about how I was supposed to call her. I did. Which is presumably why she is here, where we arranged to meet. When I called her.
But she's already bored by that subject. She's off on a recital of the celebrities she's met recently. I hadn't asked but she's had her picture taken with Paul McCartney, met Bob Geldof, Simon Callow, Gordon Ramsay. She didn't like him; he had a bad "vibe" apparently. She went up to Ramsay - I can just imagine this - and introduced herself "one author to another". That didn't go down very well, he was rude, she says, but breezily.
She is of a forgiving nature. She writes in her book that she has decided to forgive Camilla for, she says, having her sacked. This is jolly good of her and no doubt will come as a relief to the wife of the heir to the throne.
Whatever her sins, real or imagined, the Palace must be a duller place without Goodall. She doesn't so much as enter a room as burst into it, already talking, saying whatever comes into her head, which is mostly nonsense. She asks if I've read her book (oh yes!) and whether the copy I have is written in English. No, I want to say, it's written in Swahili, which is what we speak in the Colonies. But even if she'd stopped talking long enough to hear anything I said, it would have gone whoosh, right over her head - most things do.
She was a Lady Clerk which involves answering the Prince's fan mail, and general secretarial tasks but quite a bit of time seems to have been taken up gossiping, having sex romps and drinking very strong gin and tonics poured by the Prince.
After having read her book (in English) I still had not the faintest idea why she'd been sacked after 12 years of adoring service to HRH. And after having spent a couple of hours with her I still wasn't much the wiser although, at a guess, she wasn't brilliant at time-keeping. She says in her book that Camilla had it in for her, although there is scant evidence of this. She says that she and Camilla got on well at first. Actually, she thought, or says she thought, that Camilla was her friend. This is patently bonkers, because why would Camilla want to be the friend of a lowly Palace wage slave? But Goodall says they sat together at a dinner and talked about their mothers and made some sort of connection.
"Hers was dying and mine had died. She was a little bit spiky to talk to. I had to push her a bit for information, she wasn't particularly forthcoming, a bit abrupt with her answers." Goodall presumably was doing her normal non-stop yak? "Ha. Thank you! No, a bit more reserved." This would not be very reserved, would it? "Just a tad, you know."
How she could have imagined Camilla would be her friend is beyond me. At least that's what I thought before I met her. Before she arrived, I sat thinking, "Well, of course she's not going to turn up. She doesn't really exist. She's a creature of fiction."
On almost every page of her book I'd scrawled: "Really?!" and "what tosh" and, most frequently just "!!!!" I suspect she didn't write much of it. Her co-author is journalist, Nicholas Monson. An agreement with the Charles office was made so that the subtitle is: A Story Inspired by Twelve Years of Life Behind Palace Gates. This is meant to make readers think it might be fiction. And nobody, I thought, could be as much of a ninny as Goodall. The woman in the book lives in la la land. She fantasises about the prince; about how much he likes her. Is he, she wonders at one point, checking out her marital status? She gushes about his physique. She thinks he's sex on a polo pony. She is thrilled beyond belief when he invites her to watch "a film show". She falls asleep.
" 'We tried to shake you awake last night at the end of the film but nothing seemed to rouse you,' " HRH says the next day. He looks at me with a twinkle. 'Yes, er, I thought you were dead!' My heart melts once more. Darling HRH, I simply cannot help myself. I love you." And so on - gush, gush, gush.
When she's not banging on about the Prince, she's telling all about her sex life, her inability to pay bills, her visits to the pawn shop, her drinking. She gets caught short at Highgrove and decides to pee in the garden which is what she is doing when Charles wanders by. "Oh, darling HRH, if only you realised that you have a loyal and faithful but terrified Lady Clerk just feet away from you with her knickers round her ankles!"
From her vantage point she hears HRH confiding in his chickens. This, she says, is the most revelatory moment in the book: "Where I say the Prince is talking to his chickens." I say I don't think it comes as any great surprise. We already know he talks to plants. Yes, but, she says, "It's ditzy, isn't it?"
There is ditzy, then there's ditzy. And Goodall must, I thought, have exaggerated her ditzyness. But, no, she hasn't. All that stuff about fancying Charles must be rot, though? It isn't. "I did and do fancy him. He's got lovely eyes. Have you met him at all? No? Well, if you meet him you'll see his big, blue, lovely eyes. You'll be smitten." She'd have bonked him in a second. "Definitely. Yes. Ha, ha, ha. I know there's no accounting for taste."
She says plenty of people believe she did bonk HRH. I, for one, am glad she did not. Her book is already quite Jilly Cooperish enough. She writes of thinking of the Honourable Rupert Fairfax, Temporary Private Secretary, who she also has the hots for: "Why don't you mount me today rather than a polo pony?"
She lurches from crisis to crisis - Daddy gives her the deposit for a flat and she blows it on polo lessons; when she first meets Charles she bows instead of curtseys. Ditzy doesn't even come close. I've never met anyone quite like her but then I've never met "a quite posh" girl from Shropshire. She went to a "quite nobby posh school" which seems to have educated her to do nothing very much. She wears mummy's pearls which are doubtless worth a lot but she's in her 40s and, until she sold her story, has hardly earned a bean.
You can see that she might get a bit tiring but she is so without guile, and so wants to be liked, that all you can do is laugh. She is straight up about why she wrote the book: to make some money. Of course, the Palace might not be feeling quite so forgiving. She had signed a confidentiality agreement, the Official Secrets Act and, presumably, her employment contract included a clause about telling all. She was suspected of having pinched Charles' personal journals and flogged them to a tabloid. She says she didn't but the press release hints that she may have. She certainly had the journals, and she certainly copied personal letters that love-struck matrons wrote to the Prince. Silly me for attempting to get to the bottom of any of this.
She wrote down letters for her private scrapbook, she says, including the one from a Millicent of Little Springs, Milwaukee, who wrote to Charles: "I take regular exercise and attend Church every Sunday. I am also a passionate woman, so you won't be disappointed in that department, if you know what I mean."
As for leaking Charles' journals, well, "I've spoken to the Mail on Sunday and I've got contacts there, obviously, at the top level, and I'm their baby, if you like." She sold her story to them. She did have the journals and "happened to show them to a friend and he said 'I might be able to make you some money ... ' and I let him have them briefly and then he got them back and I rang the Mail directly and I said 'I don't want to deal with you - no money, no deal. I'm not interested.' In fact, I even rang the Palace and said, 'I've got copies of something I really shouldn't have'."
That she had them at all was a mistake, she says. She was kicked off the premises in such a hurry she just tipped out her drawers, handed in her pass, and was escorted from the Palace without being searched.
That "at the top level" is typical Goodall. As is her name-dropping, her mad, sad desire to be a celebrity. She thinks she already is a celebrity. She says, apropos of nothing.
"Actually, I really empathise with Madonna. And, also, the adoption of children is a brilliant thing to do. I actually really support Madonna." I had to bite my tongue to stop saying, "I imagine that will be of great comfort to Madonna." That would have been like kicking the puppy.
She can write with apparently genuine outrage, about the Camilla and Charles' "tampon" phone call: "Can't people be allowed to exchange mushy intimacies without fear of being broadcast around the world? Is nothing sacred?"
I read this back to her and splutter into my Chablis: "Not with you around it isn't!" She just giggles away and whoosh, over her head it goes. God knows how she ever got another job but she says she can easily get jobs because people think, " 'Well, I do trust her'." They get lured into it like a ship to the rocks." Anyway, she says, she only sold her story and did the book for money, not out of spite or anger at being sacked. So that's all right then.
When I push a bit on exactly why Camilla got her sacked, she says, "I think she just didn't want any competition. A bit like your husband's got a secretary who's rather good-looking. It would get on my nerves. I think there was some jealousy there." Does she think she is good-looking? "I am a little bit pretty. I'm aspiring to look better all the time, but we all do don't we? But, apparently, yeah, I'm quite pretty."
As far as I can figure, her great crime was being "too familiar". The amazing thing is that it took the Palace 10 years to figure this out, and to tell her off for it. She does not do restrained.
She does what is called "fashion and social" which is going to openings and launches and parties where celebs will be and being, no doubt, too familiar. She's invited because "I look good. I look the part. And I look quite young as well." She's 42 and she looks about 42 but she is an eternal optimist. She is hoping to get a column in a newspaper or magazine and perhaps get on the telly. "You know, Celebrity Love Island or Get Me Out of Here, I'm a Celebrity."
When she worked at the Palace she was very in-demand and was always being invited to things - just because she worked at the Palace. This went to her head. She got what she calls "red carpet fever". She really thought all those people who sucked up to her because of her connection with HRH were her friends. "Goodness, I seem to be popular these days. People listen to me in respectful silence: they are frightfully deferential and if I say something only mildly funny they roar with laughter."
Oh, I don't know. She is pretty funny, if always unwittingly. She made me laugh so much I bashed my head on the bar wall. As for the respectful silence, try getting a word in. When she got the sack she stopped being invited. She doesn't seem to have learned anything from this experience, I say, but kindly because you do worry for her. She now really seems to think that celebrities are her friends. She seems to think everyone is, or was, her friend. Charles, Camilla, journalists ... I can't think of any other reason she'd decide to show me some pictures taken by her boyfriend of her in a bustier, and, um, very little else. She peered at the photo and said, very seriously: "I think I might have a G-string on." I think that was the moment I laughed so much I bashed my head.
What will become of her, I wonder, when her little claim to fame is over? As I was paying our enormous drinks bill (she was worth every penny of the 69 quid) I asked the barman if he knew who she was. "Oh yeah, she comes in here all the time. She's famous for something."
