Charles at Seventy

by Robert Jobson

  On a wall leading into the big kitchen garden, there are sculpted portrait busts of ‘worthies’, people of special importance to Charles, among them Miriam Rothschild, champion of meadow wild-flower gardening and kindred spirit, and Vandana Shiva, the great environmentalist from India. He finds India, with its ‘functioning chaos’ and ‘unending crowds’, irresistible and has visited officially many times. However, he longs to return there privately so that he can avoid what he has described as ‘the excessively dreary calls’ on politicians and others ‘who seem incapable of behaving as reasonable human beings’. A friend and mentor to Charles, the late Laurens van der Post (whom we’ll meet later), is not visible, but the Bishop of London is. Carved on the gateway in Egyptian hieroglyphics is an inscription that reads poetically, ‘The stars in the sky are represented by the flowers of the earth.’ He even has four busts of himself, cast and given to him at different stages of his life, inset in alcoves.

  ‘Did you notice the busts of me?’ he asked one his team once. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Very good likenesses, sir,’ the nervous retainer responded.

  ‘Yes, but they always get one thing right: my bloody ears,’ he bemoaned with perfect comic timing.

  On board the Australian Government’s BBJ aircraft somewhere over the Coral Sea, however, I had my first meaningful one-to-one conversation with the heir to the throne, and it was certainly helpful with his project in mind. Having listened to the voice of the prince reading his book in the audio version of Harmony (essentially a distillation of his beliefs about nature, spirituality and the allure of life) several times driving in my car while I carried out research for this book, it seemed perfectly natural, oddly, to be sitting opposite him and striking up a conversation about the trip and all sorts of issues he cares deeply about. It helped, too, because I felt I had a good grasp of his thoughts on key issues as the conversation ebbed and flowed.

  Inside his section of the plane, with its luxury fittings resembling the inside a top-of-the-range Jaguar car, the prince was sitting at his desk in a comfortable, dark-grey leather chair surrounded by papers and his handwritten letters. One of them, sealed in an envelope, was addressed to his ninety-six-year-old father, HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who was recovering in hospital after a hip-replacement operation. We were joined in the room by Julian, Charles’s eyes and ears when it came to the media, who sat on my right; the prince was opposite me. Scott, his private secretary, collected his papers and duly left.

  We shook hands and I told the prince honestly that, in my view, I felt his visit to Vanuatu had been a ‘triumph’ (shamelessly stealing Julie Bishop’s phrase). The prince, sitting in his seat with his lightweight-wool Anderson & Sheppard tailored suit and silk tie still on, doesn’t seem to take praise that well, but actually my comment seemed to please him. He smiled warmly and said, ‘Yes, I was very touched by the warmth of the welcome.’ It had, he added, felt like something from ‘history, from another time’. He was right. At times the power of the energy created by the hundreds of dancers, the men with bare backsides and penis sheaths and the bare-breasted women in grass skirts performing a kastom dance, had seemed almost hypnotic and overwhelming to one watching for the first time.

  We chatted for a few minutes about the Great Barrier Reef and I showed him a picture I had snapped of a giant loggerhead turtle that had poked out its head as his glass-bottom boat went by. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I never seem to see anything when I go out on those boats.’ Suntanned, his skin was perhaps a little reddened, his hands slightly swollen, and he seemed a tad weary from his relentless schedule. But there was a genuine warmth about him. ‘Imagine what it would be like coming into that harbour [Port Vila] aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, with all the small craft to greet us,’ he said, bemoaning, but without bitterness, the loss of that vessel.

  He had a valid point. It was not as if the Royal Family were all going off on junkets all the time on the yacht, using it as a private craft. It was, Charles felt strongly, part of the process of trying to represent Britain abroad, ‘entirely motivated by a desperate desire to put the “Great” back into Great Britain’, as he puts it. What truly concerns him, however, is the erosion of Great British values by deliberate cynicism and ridicule.

  One could immediately envisage the advantages of such a vessel: hosting leaders on board, being able to spend more time in the region, having more time to recover and recharge fully, instead of charging around in jets from one engagement to the next. But it was more than that. It was what this ocean-going palace could achieve for the greater good that interested the prince. ‘It really did have great convening power,’ I said, ‘and helped raise billions’ for the UK economy, referring – like the former Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson – to the clear ‘soft power’ benefits of such a yacht.

  Britannia’s pulling power, after all, was the stuff of legend. We recalled how one could invite the world’s busiest and most powerful business leaders to breakfast, lunch or dinner in the swankiest restaurant and you might get a handful of takers; or, in the case of this trip to Lady Elliot Island on the Great Barrier Reef, for a round-table meeting with big-business CEOs to thrash out challenges facing the world’s reefs, and they’d all come. Sadly, as the prince noted, although the meeting had been overwhelmingly positive, senior representatives from Australia’s mining industry had failed to show up despite saying they would come; and other industry leaders sent more junior executives to represent them at the table. He was clearly a little peeved about it, but had soldiered on regardless.

  That wouldn’t have happened if the meeting had been aboard Britannia, we both agreed. Invite anyone – top bankers, presidents, billionaires – aboard for a drink on the Royal Yacht and there would be a 100 per cent ‘Yes, please!’ That was when Britannia did not even have a member of the Royal Family on board, as on one occasion in 1993 when she staged a trade day in what was then known as Bombay and contracts worth an incredible £1 billion were signed. When she was due in port carrying the Queen or the Prince of Wales, the British Ambassador was suddenly the most popular person in the entire country.

  ‘Sadly, the Treasury did not seem to think so,’ the prince said. ‘And, what’s more, the Royal Navy didn’t want to pay to staff it, either,’ he added wryly.

  Surely, a solution could be found just as the RAF had done with the RAF Voyager, the so-called ‘Cam Force One’ (Britain’s equivalent of the US’s presidential jet, Air Force One). This is typically used as a refuelling and transportation jet, but also used by the prince or senior royals such as the Duke of Cambridge when representing the Queen abroad and the Prime Minister for international travel, I suggested.

  ‘You would have thought so,’ Charles said. He clearly likes Boris Johnson’s idea for a privately backed investment for a new royal yacht that would add greatly to the soft power of this country. Charles believes that a new yacht like Britannia would be a statement of serious intent as well as a floating embassycum-trade platform, instantly recognisable and sleek, without being ostentatious. The old lady HMY Britannia is now a tourist attraction docked in Edinburgh, something lamented by the man who will be the only British king since Charles II not to have a royal yacht.

  ‘Blair and Brown…and the Treasury simply wouldn’t have it, so there we are,’ he said, with an air of resignation in his voice. He wasn’t being controversial, just stating a fact. Prince Philip was adamant this was the wrong decision, too. In a forthright interview to mark his ninetieth birthday, he said as much: ‘She should have had her steam turbines taken out and diesel engines put in. She was as sound as a bell and she could have gone on for another fifty years.’ Bizarrely, then PM Tony Blair himself says he regrets the decision. ‘I think if it had happened five years into my time [as Prime Minister], I would have just said “no”,’ he said some years after Britannia was decommissioned.

  ‘Were you with us in Hong Kong for the handover?’ Charles asked me. This was the transfer of sovereignty over Hong
Kong from the United Kingdom to China on 1 July 1997, HMY Britannia’s last foreign mission. It was to convey the last governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, and the prince back from Hong Kong before being decommissioned in front of a tearful Queen and Royal Family on 11 December 1997.

  ‘I wasn’t, sir,’ I responded.

  ‘This is exactly where it could be used to great effect,’ he went on, ‘and in places like the Solomon Islands.’

  I couldn’t help but agree.

  Talk of the handover shifted his thought process to another bugbear of his – China. The Communist regime and its continued grip on our world – particularly on emerging nations – with its financial clout clearly troubles him. He has often spoken privately of what he calls the ‘awfulness’ of the Chinese Communist government and its ‘monstrous’ treatment of its Tibetan and Muslim minorities.

  Unlike the Queen, and his eldest son, William, the Duke of Cambridge, Charles has yet to set foot on the soil of mainland China and is clearly still not enamoured of the Communist regime led by its president for life – and, effectively, the new Chinese ‘Emperor’ of the modern age – Xi Jinping.

  ‘They [the Chinese] are investing everywhere,’ Charles said, with a slight note of alarm in his voice. We both acknowledged the two ugly blots on the landscape concrete-block buildings in Port Vila, funded by Chinese investment. ‘Indeed,’ he said, ‘they [the Chinese investors] are everywhere,’ his brow furrowing further.

  The prince believes the UK and the leading Commonwealth nations, the financial powerhouses of this old club – the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand – are missing a trick. They should, he feels, be combating this issue head on together, putting on a united effort funded with a proper, all-encompassing united financial institution. ‘We should form a Commonwealth Bank,’ he said, a radical idea he had clearly been mulling over for some time. This way, he said, together we could unite in the fight against outside influences and support small Commonwealth nations such as Vanuatu, ensuring too that they know which side they are on when others come to use them for strategic or military reasons. That way our influence as a united Commonwealth club banded together in the fight for the greater good would be real and dynamic. Doing it bilaterally, he felt, was self-defeating, tied up in red tape.

  The Commonwealth would not be so easily dismissed, as it so often is, as just a talking shop made up of Britain and its former empire, but active on the ground in countries where it really matters. The prince is clearly passionate about the Commonwealth, and now he is confirmed as its next head, albeit a titular one, he can slowly begin to put his own stamp on it. One way he has always tried to promote the Commonwealth, as well as by military links in the past, is, where possible, by meeting senior officers of Commonwealth army regiments, such as those in India, which are affiliated to some of his regiments in the UK. However, he has encountered problems doing this in the past, with bureaucrats and politicians suspicious of his motives. ‘Seemingly, old Soviet-learnt habits die hard in Indian officialdom,’ he quipped to a friend.

  His is the sort of free, forward-thinking leadership that this unique voluntary club of fifty-three nations will benefit from a force to take it to another, more effective level. One feels such action and innovative ideas are something he will suggest and push for in conversations with leaders. After all, Charles is not the kind of person just to rubber-stamp decisions after they’ve been discussed around the table: he is one who would want to be at the table too, as a high-level source close to him pointed out to me.

  After all, its membership is almost entirely made up of English-speaking former colonies that share similar legal systems and very often a constitutional framework that mirrors that of the United Kingdom, with so many professional, trade, sports, educational and cultural associations – eighty in all. It means so much can actually get done and lobbied for outside government circles.

  The Commonwealth talks in high ideals but trades in a much more compromised reality. It confers no trade privileges, has no influence on defence or economic policy, no executive authority and no sensible budget to play a global role. Thus, it remains, those who criticise it say, a glorified global debating society, at best, and, at worst, a costly junket.

  A dynamic central Commonwealth Bank would actually make a real difference where it matters in the world. Such an organisation, Charles believes, would be able to help and fund the indigenous people whose world, like that of the people in Vanuatu, was sinking and being submerged amid great population growth (at the last count in 2018, Vanuatu had a population of 282,117 with more than 2.2 per cent annual change).

  ‘How on earth are they going to live or feed themselves?’ he said.

  Charles was, of course, right and his point was a serious one. One could feel his deep concern coupled with a sense of growing frustration.

  Our conversation was wide-ranging. One minute we were discussing climate change, the next the built environment and Poundbury, his visionary traditionalist village in Dorset. This is so often unfairly mocked as a ‘feudal Disneyland’, but a growing and diverse community has settled there and developed over time, suggesting it has achieved its objective.

  Had I been, Charles asked me. I nodded in the affirmative and expressed my genuine approval. I had, in fact, visited Poundbury three times on media days arranged by his Clarence House office and, essentially, agreed with the concept.

  When we moved on to the subject of London’s scourge of knife crime and violence on our capital city’s streets. The prince was quick to point out that his ‘causes’ are all linked and stressed he does not blindingly leap from one subject or concern to another, as some have suggested. He reminded me that crime and the built environment are intrinsically connected, and lamented the fact that developers and council planners had failed to grasp it, either deliberately or through ignorance. He believes London is a unique ‘city of villages’ now under assault from ‘faceless’ towers, and is ‘poorly conceived’ – so-called mega-developments.

  He said of architecture as far back as 1987, ‘In the space of a mere fifteen years in the sixties and seventies…the planners, architects and developers of the City wrecked the London skyline and desecrated the dome of St Paul’s.’ His opinion hasn’t changed.

  Retaining London’s squares was important, he said, because in this way people get to know their neighbours and ultimately develop a sense of community and of responsibility for that community and the people within it. As a result, people living there would, ultimately, as they had in the past, largely ‘police themselves’. He told me he had spoken at length with the UK capital city’s elected Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, about it. ‘I can’t seem to get through to him,’ said the prince.

  Prince Charles’s thoughts on architecture and the built environment have long been contentious, but have merit and widespread support among the general public. He believes developers, architects and town and city planners must go back to the drawing board and look again, to see the advantages of the traditional mansion blocks, no more than three storeys high, along with those classic Georgian and Victorian squares and crescents of central London, as inspiration for forms of housing that perfectly meet London’s needs.

  My conversation with the prince was not exclusively serious. There was humour, too – with Charles that is almost inevitable. He is a very funny man, with a quirky sense of humour formed from his love of Spike Milligan and The Goons. When I commended his amusing speech at a governor general’s reception in Brisbane, where he had his audience in stitches, he was typically humble. He had joked that he would never again fit into a pair of skin-tight ‘budgie smugglers’ and said, somewhat alarmingly, that his advancing years coincided with ‘bits falling off’. What was so refreshing was the self-deprecating tone in his speech. For years, when forced to travel alone, he was less positive and would moan about struggling to make a difference when talking to world leaders. He described them to friends as ‘silent cronies’ for just sitting there during meetings and paying him
lip service. It made him feel ‘worryingly decrepit’. He would also tell friends how he always liked staying in the ‘old house’ because of its ‘particularly comfortable bed’.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ he said with a smile, before adding, ‘But I’ve never even owned a pair of budgie smugglers in my life,’ with perfect comic timing. Even the way he put emphasis on the words ‘budgie smugglers’ made one chuckle.

  My five-minute ‘brush-by’ had turned into twenty five minutes of intriguing, enlightening and meaningful conversation with the future king. I returned to my comfortable seat for the remainder of the two-and-a-half-hour flight, sipped a perfectly chilled glass of Australian Sauvignon Blanc and made contemporaneous notes of our conversation on my Apple Mac.

  The prince continued with his work, prepping for his next engagement, a church service at St John the Evangelist Anglican Church in Cairns, Queensland. It would be a Sunday service, where he would be greeted by the Bishop of North Queensland, Bill Ray, and the Rev. Rod Gooden. He had short biographies to read on all the people he would meet. Nothing is left to chance. No wonder Charles had expressed regret over the loss of HMY Britannia during our exchange: the pace of this visit to Australia and Vanuatu, in and out in just a few hours, was truly relentless and would have left a man half his age drained.

  ‘It’s going to be even hotter in Cairns,’ he reminded me, as I stood by the door of his office in the air.