Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (6 page)

Michael Elliott, then the
Economist
’s political correspondent (and one of its rare grammar-educated staffers), now president and CEO of the campaigning organization ONE, recalls a discussion that foundered before coffee for lack of common reference points. “Most of the conversation was taken up with an agonized appraisal of the Prince’s proper role, together with much royal muttering (conventional wisdom in 1985) that Britain had lost the dynamism for which it once was famous. I begged to differ, and implored the Prince to consider the new, entrepreneurial, street-cred economy being created at that very moment in the clubs and streets, the fashion houses and TV studios and advertising agencies of Soho and Covent Garden. I remember to this day the look of utter incomprehension on the Prince’s face as I made my case. Only later did a colleague point out the obvious; that with the exception of visits to the Royal Opera House, it was highly unlikely that the Prince had ever visited Soho and Covent Garden, much less wandered its streets picking up the vital signs of the new Britain.”
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As Elliott points out, there was only one royal capable of recognizing that new Britain and speaking its demotic language: Diana. The Princess might have helped connect her husband to that reality. Instead, as their relationship festered, she used her gifts to undermine him.

*   *   *

Charles, for all he is among the most exposed figures in the world—his progress relentlessly charted from birth through his first day at school, his first drink at a bar, his first girlfriends, his first marriage, the first signs of discord, the first signs that this discord would disfigure lives—remains obscure. “It bothers me that people don’t get him, but in the broad sweep of history he absolutely will be seen for who he is,” says Elizabeth Buchanan.
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She’s right, but the Prince and all the apparatus around him have long put faith not in transparency but control. “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic,” observed Walter Bagehot, the great Victorian essayist and
Economist
editor, in his analysis of monarchy.
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Bagehot, who remains a touchstone for constitutional historians—and for palace press managers—defined the role of the monarch in relationship to the government as a series of rights: to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn. The monarch-in-training has always felt impelled to exercise the last of these rights with exceptional vigor.

As a teenager looking down from Planet Windsor, Charles saw what man had made and behold, it was very bad, at least some of it. “I couldn’t bear the physical aspect of destroying town centers and historical places, digging up all the hedgerows, cutting down trees, making terrifying prairies covered in chemicals. All that stuff. I thought this was insanity,” he says of his young self.
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Even now he is driven by alienation and urgency. Traveling more widely and meeting a greater range of people than most ministers, he routinely shares with those ministers insights gleaned from his encounters via lengthy handwritten letters, dubbed “black spider memos” by Julia Cleverdon, a longtime member of his team, now Vice President of his charity Business in the Community and Special Adviser to his charities on responsible business practice. Charles writes prodigiously, sometimes dispatching as many as ten memos after dinner, often to staff or ad hoc advisers, and he also keeps journals of his travels. Relying on the protection of layers of official secrecy plus three envelopes, each marked “strictly confidential,” according to a former Cabinet minister who received such missives regularly, the Prince expresses himself freely. “I’ve never had a problem with him,” says that former minister. “He is entitled to opinions.”

By no means everyone agrees. The reasons, explored in this book, relate both to the constitutional role of the monarchy and, even more so, to the often controversial nature of the Prince’s ideas.

Because Charles is a man of the strongest convictions. He now needs the courage of them in a world that has become too porous to rely on secrecy. Half-truths and orphan facts seep almost daily into the public domain. Revelations appear without context. The
Guardian
, under Alan Rusbridger, has been exploring legal avenues to bring much greater scrutiny to bear on the Prince and especially his memos.

Most republicans assume, as Rusbridger does, that familiarity with royalty, and especially with Charles, will breed contempt—that his mystery is his life. Exposed for who and what he is, this royal joker will break the consensus that sustains the Crown. They may be right. To know the Prince is not necessarily to love him, whatever love means. He has admirable qualities, an arsenal of jokes, and a cupboard full of vulnerabilities that explain much of what he does, while not giving him a free pass. He means well. He cares. He spends his life trying to contact the world in order to save it. He is “a man who has no ambition but to make a difference for the better and to do good,” in Buchanan’s view.
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He is also complex, difficult, more than occasionally intemperate, not infrequently wrongheaded, and on some issues plain wrong. This biography attempts to draw a balance among those flaws—and the flawed outcomes they sometimes produce—and the closely woven skeins of positive influence and good works that, like Charles’s letters, remain routinely hidden. There is murk around our understanding of the role of the head of state, the meaning of neutrality, and whether Britain’s king of charitable endeavor is suited to become Britain’s King. Let daylight in.

CHAPTER 1

His Life in a Day

Every one of the six-thousand-plus residents of Treharris, in South Wales, appears to have decanted onto the sidewalks lining either side of the narrow street outside the butcher’s shop, Cig Mynydd Cymru. Inside the small premises, an officer from the Metropolitan Police Service’s special protection unit, SO14, completes his inspection. Despite the potential security risk, he asks the proprietors to leave the back door gaping wide. “Keep it cool,” advises the officer. “He likes it as cool as possible.”

Eight-year-olds Ben and Ryan, swinging from the crowd barriers, wonder what other demands the Very Important Person about to arrive in their midst may make. They are aware that the visitor has special powers. “He bosses people around,” says Ben. Ryan—“fully Welsh, no English whatsoever,” he proudly declares—expands on the theme. The VIP “tells people what to do and if they don’t, he’ll behead them,” he says. When the Prince’s car pulls into view, both boys holler and whoop and the whole crowd, young and old, applauds and waves Welsh flags, demonstrating the sense of local ownership that has always underpinned the strength of the Windsors’ global brand. The last Welsh Prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, died in 1282. Sentiment against the English Crown still flares in some parts of the country, but Treharris lays on a royal welcome.

This is a typical day for Charles, which is to say, it bears little detailed resemblance to the day before or the day after, but in outline appears numbingly similar, a production line of public engagements and sidebar meetings, small talk, the brief sanctuary of the car, then out again to wave and smile and entertain.

On this particular date, July 3, 2013, the third day of his annual summer visit to Wales (“Wales Week”), he has risen early at his whitewashed farmhouse Llwynywermod. (“‘Llwyn’ rhymes with ruin,” a helpful member of his household e-mails. The double L, technically known as a “voiceless alveolar lateral fricative,” sounds “like throat clearing.” Y is pronounced “uh”; “werm” and “od” are as you’d expect.) Most mornings Charles undertakes a series of exercises originally devised to keep the pilots of the Royal Canadian Air Force in fine fettle and practiced by the Prince to alleviate his bad back. “Occasionally,” says Julia Cleverdon, “in the royal train you hear a frightful bump.”
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He will have consumed a small breakfast, likely “a few grains,” according to a staff member, and not a boiled egg culled from a long row of boiled eggs. This will keep him going until dinner. He never eats lunch if he can help it, and the people who work with him quickly learn to carry hidden food supplies for themselves. He’ll also have drunk enough water to sustain him but not so much as to require unscheduled pit stops. “He knows exactly how to hydrate his body to just the right degree,” says his godson Tim Knatchbull. “It’s an incredible talent. As it is to be most of the time—not all of the time, but most of it—an incredibly affable human, happy to listen, talk and be interested. Everyone’s always telling him ‘you’ve got to move along here’ but he’ll get interested and find someone to talk to and do everything at a leisurely pace.”
2

During the first engagement, touring the series set of the BBC sci-fi series
Doctor Who
at Roath Lock Studios in Cardiff with wife Camilla, the Prince has chatted with other alien species, Ood and Sontaran, and been persuaded to use a voice modulator to address a Dalek in a Dalek voice. “Exterminate!” he called out, laughing, “Exterminate!” But much of the conversation revolved around the succession. The reigning Time Lord, actor Matt Smith, is preparing to make way for a new Doctor Who, and Charles seemed keenly interested in the choreography of the handover. Smith won over doubters after taking over the role in 2010 from a popular predecessor, David Tennant. His successor has big shoes to fill.

It’s a predicament familiar to the Prince, who has spent more than sixty years preparing to take over from a popular predecessor. The Queen has lumbered her son with two huge problems. In reigning for so long so successfully, she has fixed public expectations about what sovereignty means. If Charles outlives his mother—and the “if” is not inconsequential; the Queen appears in robust health again after a brief illness in 2013 and her own mother lasted to 101—he will inevitably attract criticism simply for not being her. If he does become King, he’ll only have at most one or two decades in which to make the role his own.

In the eternity of the meantime, the Queen has consigned her son to a destiny that is both inescapable and nebulous, like a Sontaran force field. Most jobs come with descriptions and clear parameters. Being heir to the throne has none of these attributes. It is an open-ended contract and, like everything about Britain’s unwritten, fluid constitution, is defined by conventions and precedents and how the incumbent decides to play it.

*   *   *

“A few people are lucky enough to know exactly what they want to do. They’ve got the talent or whatever it is. There’s no problem,” says Charles. “But there’s a hell of a lot of others who don’t really know and may not be obviously academic, who suffer from low self-esteem. I see it absolutely everywhere.” His shoulders rise and fall. This isn’t a shrug of acceptance but an involuntary shudder. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to make a difference to people’s lives,” he concludes.
3

The Prince the people of Treharris are about to meet appears confident to the point of smoothness. He seems to know exactly who he is and why he’s on this planet. Yet his youth was scarred by self-doubt and lack of direction, and he still grapples with big existential questions. Like many philanthropists, in helping others, Charles has found a way to help himself.

Many years ago he embarked on a chivalric quest of his own devising, seeking meaning, enlightenment, and happiness. Capturing any of these grails—and he’s still trying, though happiness is finally in his grasp—depends on his ability to reimagine the possibilities of princedom. In attempting to do so, he has roused fire-breathing dragons and has more than once breathed fire himself, scorching instead of debating. He has appeared at times a heroic King Arthur, defending core values, at other moments a figure of fun, Don Quixote tilting at wind turbines, which he once called “a horrendous blot on the landscape,”
4
only later to recommend their use in
Harmony
, though he still prefers the offshore variety.

A late developer, as a young man Charles often appeared to have little more idea than Ben or Ryan about what being a Prince of Wales might actually entail, but his instincts were always to push at the limitations of his position. Just as his own sons are intent on establishing their own specialisms and styles, he yearned to do things differently from his parents.

“I want to consider ways in which I can escape from the ceaseless round of official engagements and meet people in less artificial circumstances. In other words, I want to look at the possibility of spending, say, 1.
three days in one factory
to find out what happens; 2.
three days, perhaps, in a trawler
(instead of one rapid visit); 3.
three or four days on a farm
,” the thirty-year-old Charles wrote to his Assistant Private Secretary in 1978. He tends to be emphatic in written communications, underlining key phrases and drizzling exclamation points throughout his texts. “I would also like to consider 4.
more visits to immigrant areas
in order to help these people to feel that they are not ignored or neglected and that we are concerned about them as individuals.”
5

He never did escape the ceaseless round, and although he spends more time on average at each engagement than the Queen, he packs serial appointments into every grinding day. His dream of immersion in real-world experiences remains mostly that, a dream, though he has dipped briefly into other lives. “He’s lived in a croft on the outer Hebrides,” says Elizabeth Buchanan. “He’s been on hill farms, he’s been on trawlers, he’s been on fishing rigs down in Cornwall. He’s been in the inner cities all over the country, inner cities everywhere.”
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Charles also does quite a lot of things that his mother does, supporting the armed forces and the charitable sector by holding honorary positions and patronages, conducting around half of all investitures, officiating at events, listening politely to speeches, secretly scrunching his toes in his shoes to stay awake during languorous passages, or ranging across the United Kingdom and the Realms to meet as many people as possible, to be seen and believed. He defines this royal role as supporting his mother in acting “as the focal point for national pride, unity and allegiance and bringing people together across all sections of society, representing stability and continuity, highlighting achievement, and emphasizing the importance of service and the voluntary sector by encouragement and example.”
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Yet there are fundamental differences to his mother in approach and content. The aspirations of his 1978 memo foreshadowed the way he has used his position not as the Queen uses hers, to maintain the status quo, but to campaign for change.