Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (4 page)

A similar fog hangs around the monarchy. Buckingham Palace used to say the annual bill to every Briton for the Queen was no more than the price of a cup of coffee, but that was before affluent urbanites became used to shelling out $4.60 for a venti cappuccino, far more than the 90 cents per head the Palace now reckons the Queen costs. The Palace’s calculation seems to be based on dividing her taxpayer funding, the Sovereign Grant of $58.2 million in 2013–2014, among the entire UK populace instead of just the taxpayers who shoulder the expenditure. Their annual per capita outlay must be closer to $1.92, or significantly higher if an estimate for policing is included—the sum for guarding VIPs including the royals is thought to be around $206 million a year.

She’s not cheap, but the Queen isn’t the most expensive head of state either (a distinction one university study awarded to the French; the purely ceremonial German presidency turned out to be only marginally less dear than the UK royals).
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A British president and his or her apparatus might not prove any more economical. But a president would preside over citizens, not subjects. The real issue about privilege—the reason some people will never accept the monarchy, and the essential injustice that could well induce twinges of guilt in a thoughtful heir apparent—is that the head-of-state role is inherited, not earned.

Nor is the monarch just a figurehead. The Queen holds a constitutional role that is surprisingly substantial. She is the so-called Fount of Justice, head of the Armed Forces, and Supreme Governor of the Church of England; she signs off on legislation and has the power to prorogue Parliament. She advises the Prime Minister of the day and has twice been forced to choose a new premier when the governing party failed to replace its leader. She has mostly adhered to the convention that royals should remain disengaged from politics. Her eldest son does not do so.

Charles seeks to perform the most delicate of maneuvers, “highlight[ing] issues which are of concern to himself and to others in the aim of opening up a public debate … over what he sees as vital issues to the health of the nation while avoiding party political issues.”
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His position simultaneously gives him a platform for his views and deafens a swathe of his audience to messages they might applaud from other sources. Nevertheless, with his idealism untempered by the limitations that confront most campaigners, his vision unclouded by the need to seek election or carry board members with him, he has developed into a formidable operator with potent convening powers who has exerted a significant impact across a wide range of fields—indeed far more significant than many of his supporters or his critics recognize. His thinking, similarly unfettered, leads him to wilder philosophical territories than most people beyond his inner circle realize.

The book the Prince coauthored with Ian Skelly and British environmentalist Tony Juniper, published in 2010, opens with a startling sentence: “This is a call to revolution.”
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Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World
is his manifesto. Worried aides did as little as possible to promote the text because of its unsettling content. Charles had already caused consternation in some corners of Anglicanism in 1994 by suggesting that he would alter the monarch’s title of “Defender of the Faith” to “Defender of Faith,” a comment misconstrued to mean that he subscribed equally to all religions.
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Harmony
reveals the personal creed that underpins and links his activism in areas as apparently disparate as architecture, integrated medicine, ecology, education, promoting interfaith understanding, and a determination to get people eating mutton again. His philosophy blends perennialism, holism, and other mystically inclined ideas with the narrower faith of the church he expects one day to represent. An edition of the book rewritten for children and published only in the United States concludes with another eye-catching phrase: “I intend to be the Defender of Nature. Will you come and help me?”
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A closer read reveals a fundamental and counterintuitive key to its author. His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, KG, KT, GCB, OM, AK, QSO, PC, ADC, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland, monarch-in-waiting, symbol of entitlement, avatar of the establishment, sees himself as a renegade.

For years he has lobbed opinions into the public discourse and watched debates ignite. “Because of his position he can be an amplifier of messages and a conductor of ideas,” says his friend Patrick Holden, an organic farmer and the founding director of the Sustainable Food Trust (and no relation to Charles’s biographer Anthony Holden). “This sense of service goes right to the heart of the man.”
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The amplification sometimes enables important ideas to be heard; at other times it proves devastatingly loud. Monarchists and republicans alike argue that the Prince should be more like his mother, distant and largely silent, a screen to reflect projected ideals of unity and public service. But Charles will never be, in that respect, like his mother. He has more in common with his opinionated, idiosyncratic, foot-in-mouth father, despite documented strains between them. And, in a keen and overlooked irony, he shares many defining characteristics with Diana, Princess of Wales, whose life—and 1997 death in a car crash in Paris—would do so much to define public attitudes to him.

“Diana explained to me once that it was her innermost feelings of suffering that made it possible for her to connect with her constituency of the rejected,” said her brother Earl Spencer in his famous funeral oration. Intuitive, compassionate, and volatile, the Prince, like his former wife, has turned his own pain outward, trying, in helping others, to make himself whole. Like her, he is capable of building things up or tearing them down. By instinct and practice, Charles is a king of hearts, compelled to reach out, to try to make a difference. He has recently come to believe that doing so stands not in opposition to his hereditary role—current and future—but offers a way to invest the monarchy with new relevance.

Yet as he increasingly shares his mother’s head-of-state duties, he is coming under pressure to sublimate these impulses and passions, to protect the monarchy by joining the forces that deliberately or by accident obscure the scope and scale of his activities and influence. This biography is written in the belief that concealment neither benefits the institution whose future relies on him nor serves the needs of the democracies of which it is a constitutional pillar. If the narrative often reads like comedy, that’s because Charles’s life serves up comedy at many turns, from the way people behave around him to the way he himself sometimes behaves. He makes jokes and occasionally the joke is on him. As Emma Thompson observes, “there is a deeply absurd aspect to it all, and he’s a very intelligent man who’s perfectly capable of seeing that.”
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But this book also has a serious intent. Informed debate around the purpose and future of the monarchy is essential for the health of the democracies in which it is embedded. Counterarguments in support of the monarchy require an understanding of the role of the head of state, the gravitational pull of Planet Windsor, and how the destruction of that celestial body might play out back on Earth. This book attempts to bring clarity to both sides of the debate.

As for the Prince, he deserves to be understood.

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On March 4, 2014, the occupants of Kensington Palace—“KP”—forced themselves to act against the grain: they held a soir
é
e for journalists, and not just any journalists, but royal correspondents, benighted souls contracted to spend their days scratching for stories about the House of Windsor. Princes William and Harry, whose dislike of the profession is visceral, looked uncomfortable. William made stilted small talk and escaped as quickly as possible. His younger brother, a flush spreading up from his collar, took a more combative line, interrogating staffers from the
Daily Mail
about the news organization’s quick-fire online operation and in particular its paparazzi-driven gallery of short news items, the so-called sidebar of shame. Kate, baby George on hip, mingled easily.

It was an odd event, the grudging quality of the hospitality reflected in its location—a corridor linking some of the administrative offices dealing with the young royals’ affairs—and in the meager supply of wine in screw-top bottles. Some of the guests perceived in these arrangements not a potential insult but a positive: that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, as William and Kate have been known since their 2011 marriage, and Prince Harry, who in a plot device worthy of a sitcom lives alongside them at KP, are determined to break away from the formality of their grandmother’s and father’s courts. They are more in tune with the times, so this analysis goes, and thus closer to the people.

Officials articulated this message explicitly before the trio appeared. The Princes had now reached adulthood, William’s military career was over, Harry had swapped his helicoptering for an army desk job, and together with Kate they were embarking on lives as working royals. Their aides could not yet be quite sure what form this would take or which causes the Cambridges and Harry might espouse, but the object of the reception was to position their charges as separate brands, integral to the overarching family firm yet distinct from its longer-established leading marques, Queen Elizabeth II and the Prince of Wales. Harry, preparing that week to launch one of his first big solo projects, the Invictus Games, a sporting competition for injured members of the armed forces, made one thing abundantly clear to those of us with whom, in a soldierly manner, he later engaged: he doesn’t want to build up a sprawling charitable empire—or large staff—like his dad’s. He intends to do things his way.

The problem Harry now faces is one that has defined his father’s life: how to turn an accident of birth into a meaningful vocation. Three generations of Britain’s monarchy are all out and about performing the royal job—that’s eighteen people in total, including the Queen and Prince Philip, Prince Charles, his wife, sons and daughter-in-law, plus Princes Andrew and Edward and Edward’s spouse Sophie, Countess of Wessex, Princess Anne, and a raft of names and faces even royal-watchers would be hard put to identify: the Duke of Gloucester, the Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke of Kent, the Duchess of Kent, Princess Alexandra, and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent—all fulfilling an amorphous form of public service defined largely in the doing of it. There are no manuals and, for those loitering in the lengthening line of succession, few predetermined duties. “To be heir to the throne is not a position. It is a predicament,” observed Alan Bennett, and it’s a line Charles often inserts into his speeches with feeling.
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His productivity can’t be measured by the number of engagements he performs. The Queen still romps through multiple short meetings and events in a day, while her eldest tends to devote larger chunks of time to each occasion. His value is even harder to gauge, like his mum’s entangled in wispy sentiments about national pride and identity, but lacking the core function that gives hers substance: being head of state. The success of the royals, collectively and individually, is however more easily tested: through public opinion.

On that basis the monarchy is doing quite well. The Queen heads the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of fifty-three countries, most but not all former British colonies, and reigns as head of state over sixteen of them: the Realms of Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, and the United Kingdom. (She is also head of state of the Crown Dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man, which are not part of the UK, and of twelve Overseas Territories, remnants of Empire: Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Antarctic Territory, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, the Pitcairn Group of Islands, Saint Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia on Cyprus, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.)

Jamaica’s Premier, Portia Simpson Miller, returned to power in January 2012 promising to make the country a republic; a poll later the same year suggested her compatriots are narrowly against such a move.
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“This issue still remains the subject of ongoing discussion in Jamaica and no final decision regarding the exact course to be pursued has yet been taken,” wrote Diedre Mills, Jamaica’s Deputy High Commissioner in London, in response to an e-mailed query in April 2014 about concrete plans to realize Simpson Miller’s pledge.

Australians were given an opportunity to break from the Crown in 1999. In a referendum 54.87 percent opted to keep the hereditary head of state compared to 45.13 percent voting to replace the monarch with an elected president. The monarchists still appear to be winning. A Nielsen poll released in April 2014, as William and Kate arrived in Sydney, saw republican sentiment plummet to thirty-five-year lows, with young Australians leading the revival in support for the royals.

New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key instituted a debate about redesigning the national flag as part of a wider discussion about ditching the monarchy, an outcome he believes inevitable if not necessarily desirable. The New Zealand flag has incorporated Britain’s union flag since colonization in the nineteenth century. In 2014 came a new invasion. William and Kate arrived on New Zealand shores, streets filled with excited throngs eager to wrap themselves in the flags of Britain and New Zealand, and Key revised his assessment. “I think in my heart of hearts it probably is inevitable [a republic] will happen, but the time frame has moved considerably further out.”
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