Meet the Wizard.(Prince Charles' secretary Mark Bolland)(Brief Article)

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."

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 ...