MEET THE WIZARD

By what mysterious alchemy do you turn the 'Harry Pothead' scandal into a
public-relations master coup?

Jan. 28 issue - Mark Bolland may be better known as the deputy private
secretary to the Prince of Wales. But in fact he's the King of Spin. Even
Tony Blair's handlers, famed for their ability to throw a media googly, may
be no match. You could see those formidable skills on display last week as
Bolland turned what could have been a family drink-and-drug scandal into a
PR bonanza for his boss.

IT BEGAN WHEN A London tabloid went to Bolland with a story about how
Charles's son Prince Harry, now 17, had been seen smoking marijuana and
drinking last summer at the family's country residence-the "aptly named"
Highgrove, as one paper archly put it. By the time Bolland finished
massaging the tale, what hit the newsstands was a wet kiss for Charles and
his deft parenting of his youngest's teen temptations. PRINCE PRAISED FOR
STANCE ON HARRY'S DRUG USE, cooed The Guardian-a republican rag, no less.

Bolland has been performing this kind of magic ever since Charles hired him
in 1996. With Bolland's help, the prince has undergone a complete image
rehab-from cheating cad to doting dad. The British public has lapped it up.
In 1996, the year of his divorce from Princess Diana, only 41 percent of
Britons thought Charles would make a good king; now that's soared past 60
percent. But in the process, Bolland's own profile has also risen a little
too high for his own good. Notwithstanding his efforts to remain behind the
scenes, the palace long knives are out. Jealous courtiers believe Bolland's
single-minded rehabilitation of Charles has come at the expense of other
members of the royal family. Except for Harry and his adulated older
brother, Prince William, says royal historian Hugo Vickers, "Bolland
doesn't care who the hell gets in his way of making Charles look good."

With Bolland's help, the prince has undergone a complete image rehab- from
cheating cad to doting dad.

As his detractors tell it, Bolland is an eminence grise -a postmodern
Richelieu or Rasputin, conniving behind the throne. His promotion of
stories that have done the greater Windsor family no good have some at
court baying for his resignation. Critics point to two especially damaging
episodes, both involving Charles's youngest brother, Edward. Charles has
long held that members of the family are all-or-nothing royals: they must
choose between working for the monarchy or, if money is their goal and
they're willing to forgo their public paychecks, working for themselves.
Any mixing of roles, he believes, undermines the monarchy, still recovering
from its dire days of the early 1990s.

So it was with the first story, featuring the humiliation of Edward's TV
production company, Ardent, when it was caught spying on William, 19,
during the "heir but one's" first few days at university at St. Andrew's in
Scotland. Charles was reportedly "incandescent" with anger and called his
brother, among other things, "a [expletive deleted] idiot." Charles's
detractors suspected strongly that all the publicity was Bolland's
handiwork. Ditto the second story, about Edward's wife, Sophie, and how she
used her royal connections to drum up business for a public-relations firm,
from which she has since resigned. A News of the World reporter posed as a
rich sheik and tape-recorded client- hungry Sophie enticingly spreading
royal-family gossip. Bolland's detractors were sure he had fueled the
story. After all, they said, he was a friend of the paper's editor-the same
paper, as it turned out, that had what the tabs called the "Harry Pothead"
story.

Good as he is, however, Bolland is no sorcerer. And his new notoriety
saddles him with a bit of a problem. For starters, the prince has come into
his own. Charles was in fact never bad raw material for an image- shaper.
Before his divorce from Diana in 1996 and her death in 1997, Charles was a
warmer father than his media caricature suggested. For more than a decade,
he's been one of the world's leading philanthropists, the patron of more
than 360 charities. And the public, perhaps more than his own family, seems
to appreciate his ambitions to modernize the monarchy by, for example,
decreasing the royal family's dependence on public money. All this makes
Bolland, perhaps, a bit more expendable than he once might have been.

That turns attention to his next image challenge: himself. The 35- year-old
Bolland "has an outrageously different character from the rest of the
courtiers," says Richard Kay, a royal correspondent for the Daily Mail. He
is funny, clever and charming-but he's not an old- tie, boarding-school
boy, nor is he Oxford or Cambridge. He went to state schools and (this
needs to be said with a sniff) to university in the north of England. He
also happens to be a gay man whose partner is Guy Black, the director of
the Press Complaints Commission, which governs, among other things, how the
media cover Harry and William. This had led to mutterings of a conflict of
interest, but nothing else as yet-at least, nothing that the long knives
can sink their blades into.

We shall see. Spin doctors are notoriously bad at handling their own
affairs. If Bolland is as clever as some people say he is, he may be an
exception. For now, he's got the right idea: keep your head down. Last week
NEWSWEEK tracked him down by phone at the dulcet Bel Air Hotel in Los
Angeles, where he was vacationing. He had nothing to say- on the record.

Correction: In Perspectives last week, NEWSWEEK mistakenly reported that
Prince William had been involved in the cannabis incident.