CHARLES
AT SEVENTY
Thoughts, Hopes and Dreams
ROBERT JOBSON
Dedicated to Charles L. Jobson (1933–2017)
A regent, from the Latin regens, ‘[one] ruling’, is a person appointed to administer a state because the monarch is a minor, or is absent or incapacitated. The title ‘Prince Regent’ is given officially to a prince who acts as regent at the monarch’s side.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
1: A MEANINGFUL CONVERSATION
2: ICH DIEN – ‘I SERVE’
3: SHADOW KING
4: ‘YOUR MAJESTY, MAMA, MUMMY’
5: A SUMMER OF DISCONTENT
6: SOFT POWER
7: ‘PERNICIOUS LIES’
8: FATHER AND SONS
9: THE CAMILLA QUESTION
10: HEIR MILES
11: DEFENDING FAITH
12: DISSIDENT AT HEART
13: IRISH EYES
14: FUTURE HEAD OF THE COMMONWEALTH
15: THE GREAT CONVENER
16: POSTSCRIPT – ‘I HAVEN’T GOT TIME’
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
‘I have spent most of my life trying to propose and initiate things that very few people could see the point of or thought were plain bonkers at the time. Perhaps some of them are now beginning to recognise a spot of pioneering in all this apparent madness.’
HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES, 7 SEPTEMBER 2016, IN A SPEECH ON BEING NAMED ‘LONDONER OF THE DECADE’ AT THE EVENING STANDARD’S PROGRESS 1000 PARTY, HELD AT THE SCIENCE MUSEUM TO HONOUR THE UK CAPITAL’S INNOVATORS
INTRODUCTION
‘The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.’
CARL JUNG, SWISS PSYCHIATRIST AND PSYCHOANALYST, 1875–1961
In his seventieth year, His Royal Highness Charles, Prince of Wales, has travelled hundreds of thousands of miles around the world on official business, from the tiny Lady Elliot Island, the southernmost coral cay of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, to the former New Hebrides colony, now Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, where the indigenous Melanesian people honoured him with the title ‘paramount chief’. In that time, too, he has carried out hundreds of public duties representing the Queen in his role as heir to the throne, meeting presidents and princes as well as ordinary people going about their daily lives on visits to villages, towns and cities across the UK and the Commonwealth.
On a visit to the Caribbean, he toured Antigua and Barbuda and the British Virgin Islands, where the Queen is head of state, as well as the former crown colony Dominica, to see for himself the destruction caused by Caribbean hurricanes Irma and Maria, which he described as ‘utterly devastating’. In Europe, too, he visited Ireland, France and Greece on overseas visits that further cemented Britain’s ties with our closest neighbours in this uncertain post-Brexit Europe. A few months before the start of his seventieth year he conducted a major tour of the Commonwealth on behalf of the government to Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and India, and, before that, to Romania, Italy, Austria, the Papal See and Malta. In that time, too, it was confirmed he would be the next head of the Commonwealth, and it is now assured that he will succeed his mother, the Queen, in that non-hereditary role when the time comes.
His increased workload sees the prince regularly working fourteen-hour days and he carries out more than six hundred engagements a year at home and abroad; and increased responsibility means he is much more than a deputy, stepping up to stand in for the Queen. As we approach the end of 2018, a more accurate description of Charles’s role is ‘Shadow King’, as it is he, not Her Majesty, who is now doing most of the ‘heavy lifting’ for the monarchy at home and abroad while representing Elizabeth II, who turned ninety-two in April 2018.
The Queen has not travelled on long-haul flights since her visit to Australia in 2011. Her last state visit overseas was to Germany in June 2015. The previous year she paid a state visit to France and went by Eurostar. She now restricts her journeys to short flights, ‘away-days’ by royal train, commercial railway or car all within the United Kingdom.
Her once ever-present ‘liege man’, her loyal consort and husband of more than seventy years, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh (who turned ninety-seven in June 2018) has effectively retired from public life having, as he put it, ‘done his bit’. With perfect timing, he walked off the royal stage in a summer downpour on 2 August 2017 at Buckingham Palace, doffing his bowler hat as he departed. He marched off the forecourt as the Plymouth Band of the Royal Marines played ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. As he went back inside he made one of his trademark quips, joking with two Royal Marine corporals, who had run 1,664 miles over 100 days as part of the 1664 Global Challenge (which recognised the year the Royal Marines were founded in 1664), that they should be ‘locked up’ for the corps’ fundraising efforts. It was certainly the end of an era. His departure from public life, however, marked a new beginning for his son the Prince of Wales. With his father no longer ever present at the Queen’s side, Charles would now be the lead man in the unfolding royal story.
Throughout the prince’s milestone seventieth year (and several months before that, in fact), I have accompanied him at home and abroad, as he crisscrossed the globe on official business, joining him aboard royal jets and following him in support helicopters as he ventured deep into rainforests and other remote regions. I was there, too, at his early seventieth Birthday Patronage Celebration in the immaculate gardens of Buckingham Palace, and also enjoyed conversations with him, aboard a royal jet and at royal receptions overseas, as well as being his dinner guest at Dumfries House, an eighteenth-century Palladian country house set on a 2,000-acre estate in Ayrshire, Scotland.
I have enjoyed tea and conversation with the prince, too, at his beloved country estate, Highgrove House, his private residence, also built in the late eighteenth century and situated southwest of Tetbury, Gloucestershire. I have been invited to a tour of the gardens, where in the Orchard Room he joked of his ‘backyard’, by which he meant the magnificently cultivated Royal Gardens at Highgrove (they are well worth seeing, and are now open to the public on select dates between April and October each year). It has been a life’s work and clearly reflects the deeper side of the man. ‘The garden at Highgrove really does spring from my heart and, strange as it may seem to some, creating it has been rather like a form of worship,’ he wrote in an introduction to a book about the estate published in 1993.
I was the only British journalist present at the Cotroceni Palace on 29 May 2017, when Prince Charles was formally welcomed to Romania by President Klaus Iohannis, and he seemed baffled that there was no photographer present. The Romania head of state pointed out his official photographer, while Charles looked around for a UK photographer, but our pool man had failed to show, so he pointed at me saying, ‘Well, he’s been following me around the world for thirty years.’ ‘It’s not quite that long,’ I mumbled, not knowing if a response was invited or if it was best that I say nothing in response, although I suspect the latter. Later at a reception, after he had joined in with a troop of Romanian dancers earlier in the day of engagements, he joked that he would quite like Romanians dancing in all the costumes at his seventieth birthday party.
As a result of devoting so much time to following, observing and chronicling what the prince has done publicly over eighteen months or so, I have been able to watch our future king with a discerning eye as I have scrutinised him at close quarters. I note what the prince does on a daily basis when on overseas tours and
how he meticulously prepares for and goes about his business. Despite the fact that I have reported on the British Royal Family as a Fleet Street correspondent for national newspapers for nearly three decades, even for me, refocusing the lens and not just looking for the daily story or news photo-opportunity, but trying to see the bigger picture, has been an illuminating experience. Only when you take time to do that do the dots in the bigger picture join and the integrity and passion of the man emerge.
The prince himself noted in his trailblazing thesis Harmony, ‘Perhaps I should not have been surprised that so many people failed to fathom what I was doing. So many appeared to think – or were told – that I was merely leaping from one subject to another – from architecture one minute to agriculture the next – as if I spent a morning saving the rainforests, then in the afternoon jumping to help young people start new businesses.’
Understandably, there is a degree of exasperation in the tone of his writing. It is only when you examine all that he does in detail that the integrated and interrelated picture of his life’s work becomes clearly visible, not diluted or reduced to a few half-baked soundbites for the evening television, or to silly picture captions of him pulling bizarre facial expressions or wearing daft costumes that some of the photographers who follow him encourage, forgetting who he is and what he represents. Even as a journalist who once took the Murdoch shilling when I worked for the tabloid Sun newspaper, I found myself cringing at the cheap caricature they painted of him in October 2017 after a passionate speech at the Our Ocean summit in Malta.
Charles told delegates it was now crucial to create a circular economy that allows plastics to be ‘recovered, recycled and reused instead of created, used and then thrown away’, and pointed out that plastic is now ‘on the menu’ in the fish we eat the next day. The Sun, however, decided to mock up a photo of him wearing a pirate’s hat and stuck it on the front page. They had plucked out a quote (and said it had caused a ‘storm’, which of course it hadn’t) in which he said gangs of pirates off Somalia had been ‘fantastic’ for fish stocks. It was, of course, taken out of context and once again the messenger had done the prince and readers a disservice, making the heir to the throne appear ridiculous.
It is risible, too, when every year the prince is criticised for what is reported as an excessive royal travel bill. At the time of writing in 2018 the figure was revealed to be £4.7 million, the most expensive trip being £362,149 for the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall to visit India, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore. But it is a visit taken at the government’s behest and, not least for security reasons, it is the government, too, that decides that, as heir to the throne, he must use the RAF Voyager – the same one used by the Prime Minister – when carrying out such overseas visits on behalf of the Queen for the country. These are often gruelling Foreign and Commonwealth Office diplomatic missions packed with scores of back-to-back engagements, important speeches and state dinners, not private sightseeing jaunts.
The official visits in which I have accompanied the prince have come at a period of subtle but still great change for the British monarchal system, as we gradually progress from one reign to the next in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. We are, after all, at a watershed moment for the century-old royal House of Windsor, and, as heir, Charles is of course central to that ongoing transition.
The overseas visits on which I have accompanied the prince and his team have been, near as damn it, state visits, as our sitting monarch, Elizabeth II, due to her advanced age – she is both the oldest and the longest-reigning monarch in British history – no longer undertakes long-haul travel, which in this modern era is necessary if one is to be a fully active head of state. In effect, as far as the monarchy is concerned we are in unchartered waters, with perhaps two captains on the ship’s deck, if not necessarily at the helm.
During the research for this book I have spoken privately and publicly to the prince and people close to him, and I believe I have, as a result, developed an in-depth appreciation of what makes this diverse character destined to be the next monarch tick. In my time as a royal correspondent – which started in 1990 – I have reported on births, deaths, marriages, jubilees, countless foreign tours and private holidays as well as the public and private lives of the main players in this story, whether for newspapers, radio, television or as an author. In that time I have been acknowledged by my peers with awards and for having broken world-exclusive stories, such as being the only newspaper reporter in history to announce the engagement of a future king (rather than the palace), when I revealed that Charles was to marry his long-term mistress Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. I have also gained notoriety as an author writing several books, among them the No. 1 Sunday Times and New York Times international bestseller Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, written with the Scotland Yard personal-protection officer (PPO) of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, Inspector Ken Wharfe MVO. I have met and interviewed members of the Royal Family, too.
It is fair to say that, as a career, it has been a rollercoaster ride, echoing the vantage point of the front row of history unfolding before my eyes. But, as Philip L. Graham, Washington Post publisher, rightly put it, ‘News is the first rough draft of history.’ For some writers, that’s enough, but I have always wanted to write much more than a ‘rough draft’ and hoped to have the chance to get closer to these historic characters and do more than just scratch the surface but to paint a portrait, not sketch a caricature. I have striven to do this both for my sake and that of the reader, and in years to come it will be for posterity and ultimately for historical record.
This book has been many years in the making. In its evolution it has had many different titles and different areas of focus. But I am pleased to say, on the completion of the first edition, there are sections in it in which I know I have managed to unearth genuinely new material; I am content with that.
Throughout this journey I have been assisted by impeccable inside sources, whom I cannot identify for obvious reasons, but to whom I am deeply indebted. With their help I have been able to unearth groundbreaking new material that goes some way to correcting past inaccuracies that, unless revised at this moment, were in danger of becoming regarded as historic record. There are those who may question my accuracy, but I am confident of my material. These so-called facts that have been reproduced since and reprinted in other books, and articles claiming to be accurate about the prince, were part of the media narrative about him at the time and, much to his understandable irritation, have never been challenged. Some of those reports, the prince told friends, were ‘unbelievable and pernicious lies’ that, unless corrected, were in danger of going down as ‘historic fact’. I am happy to put the record straight.
I have not devoted hundreds of pages to Charles’s so-called damaged childhood, his often overplayed feelings of rejection when packed off to the boarding school in Scotland, Gordonstoun, which his father attended. Nor will I devote too much space to his failed marriage to Diana, Princess of Wales, and her tragic death, or his adulterous affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall. These sorry tales are now frankly démodé and have been addressed and sensationally redrafted many times over in various other biographies. Such issues will be addressed where I believe I have uncovered valuable new material to add to or correct what has gone before.
The core of this book is about our future king, Charles, Prince of Wales, the man, husband, father and grandfather, who he is, what drives him and his raison d’être. My aim in writing this biography was to try to shed new light on the character of this man who, despite being in the autumn of his life, is still on the cusp of realising his birthright and thus cementing his place in history. I wanted to at least get close to revealing Charles’s ‘hopes, fears and dreams’.
The prince emerges from this book, I hope, as a deep-thinking man, one who cares passionately about our world, and who has used his position of privilege to try to make the world a better place, to work for the great
er good. Of course, he has his flaws, too, and would be the first to admit them. It is easy to judge somebody, so the saying goes, until you’ve walked a mile in his or her shoes. I haven’t done that, but I have at least followed his footsteps around the world and observed him closely. It is for you, the reader, to make up your own mind and draw your own conclusions after reading this book.
For me, this book is of special significance, too, due to the timing of its publication and its central character. It is, in effect, the culmination of my three decades of work in covering the royal story, too. For it is not simply a detailed assessment and biography of Charles, Prince of Wales, but my considered attempt to examine the modern-day unelected system of constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, how it functions and an examination of its place – and the place of the heir to the throne – in today’s society and political framework.
This is the first book in which I have focused on Charles, the man, his role, his work and how he will approach his future responsibilities. He has surprised me throughout this process. He is undoubtedly an exceptional man of great conviction and energy, who rightly commands fierce loyalty and demands discretion. But he is also a complex and often contradictory person. One thing he definitely isn’t is dull.
Charles’s views on society, education and culture tend to polarise people. In many ways he is old-fashioned, a traditionalist; in others he is a radical and dissident. The new X-Factor generation, desperate to be television stars or celebrities, can irritate him. ‘What is wrong with everyone nowadays?’ he ranted in a private memo written in 2003, continuing,
Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their technical capabilities? People seem to think they can all be pop stars, High Court judges, brilliant TV personalities or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having natural ability. This is the result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically and socially engineered to contradict the lessons of history.
Charles at Seventy Page 1