Charles at Seventy

by Robert Jobson

  This, then, leads others to call him ‘elitist’, which he certainly is not. Many believe his point is valid. Others feel it represents the ramblings of somebody born into great wealth and privilege who thinks he is superior but has no right to limit the dreams and advancement of others.

  He is somebody who bucks trends, often on purpose flies in face of convention. He loathes the glib way experts describe the so-called advancements of the twentieth century. ‘I have always wanted to roll back some of the more ludicrous frontiers of the 1960s in terms of education, art, music, and literature, not to mention agriculture,’ he wrote in a private letter dated 21 January 1993.

  Charles’s royal rank means it has not always been easy to get close to him and those who are in his inner circle are protected by an outer layer – an elite Praetorian Guard of modern times, if you like. I have, however, done my best to do so and with some success, having had conversations with the prince personally during the course of my research and undertaken a number of off-the-record interviews with some who have served and continue to serve him.

  I also, in the course of my research, read most of the many books and newspaper reports written about the prince, spanning years. I would like to thank those authors for their insight, in particular Jonathan Dimbleby, Penny Junor, the late Ross Benson and Antony Holden. I would also like to thank Sally Bedell Smith, Catherine Mayer, the late Alan Hamilton and Tom Bower, whose books I read with interest. It was odd, given his at times scathing assessment of the prince, that Mr Bower felt it appropriate to take his seat at a ceremony in Buckingham Palace in June as Charles was honouring his wife, former Evening Standard editor and now the Arts Council London Area chair, Veronica Wadley, with a CBE for services to the arts. I suppose if Veronica, one of my many former editors and an accomplished newspaper professional, asked him as a guest for the ceremony it was perhaps appropriate that he was there.

  My view of Charles may differ considerably from that of Mr Bower and those of some other writers. That does not mean I do not respect their diligence and expertise – far from it. Every one of these tomes on Charles is revealing in different ways.

  I would like to thank my publisher, John Blake Publishing, now an imprint of Kings Road Publishing, part of the international Bonnier Publishing group, for supporting this project. I would like to thank John Blake himself too, who has since left the company he established, for commissioning the project and for his many years of friendship and for supporting so many of my book ideas. Of course, I would also like to give a big shout-out too to the masterly editor of this book, Toby Buchan, for his unwavering guidance, sharp eye and editorial skill and intellect to help make this book and those we have worked on together in the past the best they can be.

  I would also like to thank Inspector Ken Wharfe MVO, Ian Walker, Arthur Edwards MBE, the late Felicity Murdo-Smith CVO, Patrick Jephson, Victoria Mendham, Richard Kay, Geoffrey Levy, the late Geoff Crawford CVO, Charles Anson CVO, DL, Colleen Harris MVO, Karen Jobson for her unstinting support and professional editing skills, Roya Nikkhah, Emily Nash, Rodney Cook of the Hearst Foundation, Bernice King, Jack Lefley, Mark Wilkinson, Doug Wills and all my friends and colleagues at the Evening Standard. Thanks, too, to Michael Pell, Hugh Whitfield, Jimmy Cannon, Samantha Armytage, David ‘Kochie’ Koch, David ‘Dougie’ Walters, Natalie Barr, Mark Beretta, Edwina Bartholomew, Monica Lepore and all at Sunrise on Australian 7 Network. I would also like to thank my colleagues who have travelled around the world with me on countless royal tours and made them fun: Alan Jones, Chris Ship, Camilla Tominey, Phil Dampier, Robin Nunn, Kent Gavin, ABC’s royal producer Carolyn Durand, Chris Jackson, and Tim Rooke. I must also give a ‘Trunks Up!’ shout-out to all the ‘Happy Elephants’ – they know who they are. Cheers, lads. Thanks are also due to my mother, Jean Jobson, for inspiring my love of history, and my son Charles for being a constant source of joy and pride in my life.

  Naturally, I would like to thank His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales personally for sparing his precious time to speak to me

  That said, despite the amount of shoe leather I have used during the research and writing of this book, and the scores of conversations I have had, this cannot be considered in any way an official biography. Clarence House officials have not been asked to read my manuscript or to change the text in any way. I would not allow that and neither would my editor or publisher. With that in mind, however, any mistakes are therefore mine and mine alone and I will take full responsibility for correcting them in later editions. This, after all, is my assessment of Charles and mine alone, based on what I have observed for myself during my travels alongside him, and from a number of impeccable sources close to him whose views and recollections I trust implicitly.

  I can only hope that my ambitions for this book have been realised and that this is an authentic, fair and honest portrayal of the man who is destined to be our next king.

  ROBERT JOBSON, November 2018

  Chapter One

  A MEANINGFUL CONVERSATION

  ‘I believe the world needs so desperately and so urgently a “fair go” for people, our planet and for Nature herself.’

  PRINCE OF WALES AT THE QUEENSLAND GOVERNOR’S RECEPTION AT GOVERNMENT HOUSE, BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA, 6 APRIL 2018

  ‘Well, that was a triumph,’ Australia’s then foreign minister, the immaculate Julie Bishop, declared enthusiastically. She was standing in the doorway between the cabin for the royal household and staff and the one occupied by the few media as we flew to Cairns after a visit to Vanuatu, the string of more than eighty islands sitting between Fiji and New Caledonia in the South Pacific, 1,240 miles east of northern Australia. She was in high spirits – and had good reason to be.

  Known for her prowess in politics and icy stares, Ms Bishop, then sixty-one, was buoyed, along with the rest of the delegation aboard, by the warmth and energy of the traditional welcome we had all received in Port Vila, the capital. Thousands had turned out to welcome their prestigious guests, cheer and wave their flags and perform traditional, colourful dance displays. But there was more than that at stake.

  The possibility of China’s establishing a permanent military presence in the South Pacific on Vanuatu was potentially a big headache not only for her and her boss, PM Malcolm Turnbull, but the Trump administration in America, too. During the visit, Vanuatu’s Prime Minister, Charlot Salwai, had privately told her it was not interested in hosting foreign military bases and declined, too, to hold talks with Beijing. Vanuatu, she had been assured, was a ‘non-aligned country’.

  We were about an hour into the Royal Australian Air Force No. 34 Squadron (VIP transport squadron) return flight aboard the chic, especially configured, twin-engined Boeing 737 Business Jet, known as the BBJ. Crewed by two pilots and four uniformed RAAF flight attendants with space for up to thirty passengers and a range of 6,800 miles costing of £2,500 per hour, it is designed to fly the Australian PM and VVIPs. I was one of just twenty-five souls on board.

  Ms Bishop had just given a prerecorded television interview on the jet in the seat behind me to an acclaimed documentary film-maker, the august John Bridcut. John, like me, with his team cameraman Jonathan Partridge and sound technician Paul Paragon, had embarked on a project assiduously chronicling the seventieth year in the life of the Prince of Wales.

  John wanted the perspective of the Australian foreign minister on the prince and the monarchy. He had run this by the prince’s team of advisers before asking the Australian political team, and they had agreed. The interview took place in the seat behind me, and I could not help eavesdropping. When asked about the prospect of Australia’s becoming a republic and another referendum on the future of the monarchy, she casually shrugged it away, suggesting such matters were a long way off. But what if Federal Labor’s Bill Shorten, leader of the opposition, won the election? After all, he had vowed to make ditching the monarchy a priority. ‘Bill says a lot of things,’ she added dismissively.

  Towards the front of the luxury jet sa
t a man such matters would impact on, Prince Charles – His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, to give him his correct title – working though his correspondence in a sealed-off private section. Outside was an adjoining corridor leading to the pilots and crew at the front and the open area equipped with large, luxury, cream leather seats for the officials.

  Across the table from the prince on the left sat his most senior aide for this visit, forty-year-old career diplomat Scott Furssedonn-Wood, his deputy private secretary, who had been seconded from the British Government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office. A lofty six foot four tall, the Merton College, Oxford, graduate strikes an impressive figure. His credentials are impressive, too: he is a former Deputy High Commissioner of Eastern India who had also served a five-year stint at the British Embassy in Washington, DC, where he was the Head of Strategic Threats as well working on counterterrorism and counter-proliferation issues. Later he became the head of the Political Section and was responsible for coverage of the 2012 presidential election in the US. Scott is not only charming but inescapably, extremely bright – an essential quality when working for somebody as perspicacious as the prince. The two of them were running through the schedule for the remainder of the visit. There were still three days of the Australia tour left to run and the prince, as ever, wanted to ensure he was across every detail, no matter how small.

  The Prince of Wales had been the headline act during the flying visit to Port Vila, not Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop, who had accompanied Charles as he is still heir to the throne of the realm of Australia. It was an important visit for both of them: Charles, by his presence and taking part dutifully in key ceremonial events, and Ms Bishop, with the odd quiet word here and there. Both were able to remind the leader of the South Pacific nation who its true friends really were.

  It had been Prince Charles, after all, who had insisted on including Vanuatu – discovered in 1774 by Captain James Cook, who had named the islands the New Hebrides, a title that would last until independence in 1980 – into his packed schedule. It had been the proposed destination to host the summit known as the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) at the end of 2017, but the venue was moved to London and Windsor in the United Kingdom because Vanuatu was no longer able to host the event due to the damage done by Cyclone Pam to the island nation’s infrastructure.

  Charles may not have godlike status like his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, who is treated as a ‘divine being’ by a cult on one of Vanuatu’s tiny islands, Tanna, but he was given a most spectacular and uproarious welcome, befitting a king, much as his mother and father had been forty-four years earlier. Greeted by the locals in traditional dress and with painted faces, he smiled and waved as he walked across woven red ceremonial mats, a profoundly respected local tradition. After meeting with Vanuatu’s president and being given the first of many traditional garlands, he went shopping at the Haos Blong Handikraft market with the Pacific as the backdrop, admiring local handicraft.

  ‘They do make such wonderful gifts, don’t they?’ he quipped, snapping up a bag for 6,000 vatu handed to his aide, Scott, by the British High Commissioner, David Ward, who looks after the Solomon Islands as well as Vanuatu. When the prince finally emerged, he was greeted by loud cheers and went on to shake hundreds of hands. At the final stop, Charles, as ever, gamely donned a grass skirt, to the delight of the travelling photographers. These included the exuberant professional photographer Tim Rooke of the international picture agency Shutterstock and Steve Parsons, a photographer from the UK’s 150-year-old agency the Press Association. Both went into overdrive taking a series of brilliant shots of the historic and colourful scenes unfolding before them at the Nakamal, a traditional meeting place for tribal chiefs.

  Others may have been reduced to fits of the giggles at the absurdity of it all, but not Charles. After a sip or two of special kava, known as Royal Kava, a powerful concoction reserved for special occasions, he seemed genuinely touched and humbled by the welcome and its attention to detail as he stood with a huge palm leaf up his back and a grass skirt over his lightweight suit, and splendidly bedecked with a white salusalu (garland) made from from indigenous natural rope fibres, leaves and flowers around his neck.

  The Malvatumauri Council of Chiefs had honoured Charles, making him ‘Chief Mal Menaringmanu’. With the Queen’s Royal Standard, the official flag of the reigning British sovereign, fluttering on his chauffeured car, there was an easy symbolism in the heir to the throne being made ‘paramount chief’. At long last he had been given a coronation of sorts. Indeed, he had been touched at the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast a few days earlier, when the entire Vanuatu team stopped in front of the of the royal box and bowed deeply in his honour. Charles in turn delighted the crowds, who had turned out in their tens of thousands, many in traditional dress-fibre skirts for women and loincloths for men, as opposed to Western-style clothing worn in the city during the Port Vila visit.

  ‘Halo yufala euriwan,’ Charles said from the podium (a rough translation being ‘Hello, everybody’). ‘My visit, while far too brief, has nevertheless allowed me to experience for myself the warmth, generosity and spirit for which the people of Vanuatu are so justly famed.’ He added, ‘Vanuatu, you are number one!’ More deafening cheers followed. ‘I am deeply touched by the generous welcome shown to me today and by the very great honour you have bestowed on me in granting me the chiefly title of Mal Menaringmanu. I know that chiefly titles are rarely given, and that to bear one is both a great privilege and a great responsibility. I can only say that, as Chief Mal Menaringmanu, I will do my very best to honour the four dual principles upon which the Law of the Malvatumauri Council of Chiefs is based – namely, love and happiness; respect and honour; goodness and peace; and goodwill and service,’ he said sincerely.

  Back in the chic surrounding of the BBJ, where I was the only ‘Fleet Street’ correspondent on board, I was tucking into some freshly prepared sandwiches and a glass of Australian Sauvignon handed to me by the RAAF uniformed crew. I was beckoned forward into the middle section of the plane where the Royal Household (Charles’s staff and travelling team) were all seated by his communications secretary Julian Payne. The prince, he said, would be very happy to have a conversation with me for a few minutes. I was elated that he had accepted my request and even more so when that brief audience turned into twenty-five minutes of what was for me an absorbing conversation.

  It seems a little absurd to me for a writer to pen a fair and contemporaneous biography about a living person without actually having met that person, or at least watched them at close quarters. It is different for historians: short of inventing a time machine, what other options are open them apart from digging deep and relying on sourced material they unearth? To claim to get some idea of the person’s real character from just second-or third-hand accounts is implausible.

  Charles is complex. As he himself said in an interview with his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994, ‘I am one of those people who searches. I’m interested in pursuing the path, if I can find it, through the thickets.’ It is Charles’s character – that of a man who admits to getting carried away by enthusiasm in his bid to try to improve things, not just his position in society and royal status – that makes him interesting to write about.

  During my work I have, of course, met and chatted with the prince on numerous occasions over the years that I have chronicled the Royal Family as a royal correspondent, at receptions and as I have followed him at home and abroad. He collected a special Londoner of the Decade award at the Evening Standard Progress 1000 party honouring the capital’s innovators in 2016, an idea I put to the editor, and I was on hand as owner Evgeny Lebedev presented him with the special front page. Charles jokingly described it as ‘one of your better front pages’.

  Charles and Camilla also visited the Evening Standard offices in February, 2015 when the owner and then editor Sarah Sands escorted the prince, and I was on hand to show Camilla
around along with the then deputy editor, Ian Walker. The prince was in fine form. When Ian was introduced to Charles on arrival in the entrance hall, he joked as they shook hands, ‘I’m only the deputy,’ to which the prince, quick as a flash, responded, ‘There are rather a lot of us.’

  In turn I have visited his home, his beloved estate, Highgrove, in Gloucestershire, which he bought, with Camilla’s encouragement, back in 1980. Ever since then, he has poured his heart and soul into transforming its 25 acres into his sanctuary; it is his beautiful, eclectic garden, where he insists on applying his principles, which are strictly organic. There is a sense of bohemian, hippy, shabby chic about it that bizarrely, considering his place in the established order, reflects its owner’s character. The two are intrinsically linked, it seems. And he seems to agree.

  He said when he took over Highgrove it was practically a spiritual experience. He developed an almost unconscious train of thought that seemed to him like some ‘powerful echo that arose, inexplicably, from within’. Entering the garden through a pair of carved Indian wooden door panels – a present to Charles from his late brother-in-law, Mark Shand – one is transported into another, magical world. On the wall beside them was the headless carved bust of a topless Indian lady, another Shand present to welcome attentive gardeners. On the garden’s wall stands the scented modern English rose Jude the Obscure, and nearby chairs and seats have been painted a bright canary yellow to bring more light into the green surrounds.

  No photographs can do justice to the famous stumpery laid out for the prince in imitation of an old Victorian idea – a modern variation of the practice of planting ferns among tree stumps. Work on this started in 1996, when a trailer arrived from the Scottish Highlands carrying 40 tons of petrified wood. Shortly afterwards, Charles took a delivery of giant roots from fallen sweet chestnut trees. ‘I happily talk to the plants and the trees, and listen to them. I think it’s absolutely crucial,’ Charles said to gardener and presenter Alan Titchmarsh during a documentary screened in 2010.