Camilla - princess for our times?

Camilla-Parker Bowles embodies that eternal paradox – the fabulous fairytale served up cold, congealed and larded with reality. At a matronly 58, her skin leathery and wrinkled because she is visibly old and smokes too much, and with a body thickened and coarsened by childbearing and dining too well, Camilla has achieved every girl''s dream. She is to be a real princess.And she will be queen in the heart of a real king. She will reign over King Charles when he accedes to the British throne and by extension, she will queen it over her sceptred isle.
She will glint alluringly in the reflected blaze of a thousand tinkling chandeliers in a hundred pillared halls. And she will have the sparkling jewels and shimmering gowns afforded to a woman married to a king. She can be whatever she chooses. Except for Diana. Camilla can never be a Diana. Perhaps therein lies her charm.
With Prince Charles''s announcement of his betrothal to the woman he has always loved – not wisely, but too well – for nearly 35 years, the ghost of Diana may be well and truly laid to rest. Charles could not have found a less Diana-like person than Camilla. In taking her for his second wife, Diana''s tormented former husband and widower may be making a passionate statement of intent for all the world to hear. He is finally done with Diana.
True enough, Camilla can be no reminder of Princess Di, except for what she isn''t. She isn''t beautiful. And she isn''t languishing for want of love. If there were ever a woman less calculated to set hearts aflutter, it is Camilla. If there were ever a woman who could, in Salman Rushdie''s description of his fictious heroine Neela, stop the traffic and the planets and cause men to walk into lamp posts, it was Diana.
If there were ever two Englishwomen poles apart, it is Diana and Camilla. The first had a leggy, luminous beauty, a flirtatious star quality, youth, contemporary streetspeak, the grace and instincts of a celebrity fashionplate and a tendency to modern psycho-angst. The second has the well-worn face and body of a woman who vaguely resembles an ageing yellow Labrador, she throws on her clothes any old how and is old world in her discretion, devotion to duty and passion for upper class country pursuits such as hunting to hounds and riding.
There are only two points at which Diana and Camilla''s paths converge. The first is education – or the lack of it because both obtained just the one, undistinguished high school-leaving pass. The second is Charles.
In every other respect, the two women contrast wildly. In all her emotional confusion and heartaches, Diana always seemed younger than her years and always remained ready to talk her way through a crisis. But despite at least two tough, turbulent decades as the ''other woman'' in the royal marriage, Camilla has always remained rock-steady and rock-silent.
For all that Diana was a child of the 60s, a pop music aficionado and the world''s first and only royal rock chick with a fan-following of millions, it is publicly-reviled Camilla who may be the more modern epitome of 21st century European monarchy. Never forget, Camilla is the divorced adulteress who is to marry her divorced adulterer prince.
Diana was that old-fashioned virtue from out of a mediaeval fairytale – the virginal young girl deemed a suitable match for a jaded royal bachelor boy. Camilla almost, but not quite, updates the monarchy''s moral mores, forcing it and the world to embrace a stout, fifty-something, chain-smoking, divorced mother of two as a princess for our times.