Charles at Seventy

by Robert Jobson

  There was a time, after all, in the aftermath of Diana’s death – and even more recently than that, when many long-serving staff at Buckingham Palace were quite convinced that they were serving the penultimate monarch – when Charles wouldn’t have had a crown left to hand down to William. But the temperature has undoubtedly changed. Through hard work and consistency, and perhaps the popularity of his sons and their wives, the goodwill they have generated, such fears have all but subsided. The prospect of Charles the silver-haired king seems at last to have been embraced by the wider public.

  Mindful of her lengthening reign, the Queen was prompted to urge a resolution to the ‘Camilla problem’ through marriage. Mindful of his duty, Charles complied. This was a smoothing of the way forward to the next generation, not simply the glorious resolution of Charles and Camilla’s enduring grand romance. It was made clear to Charles that he had to fit in with the bigger picture and accept the shifting shape of the monarchy as envisaged by the Queen. It was a calculated risk and it appears to have paid off. The warm receptions given to Charles and Camilla when on tour, and the more positive press coverage of Camilla, is increasingly gentle but never effusive.

  There is no escaping the lingering feeling that, while Charles may have many supporters, his greatest asset is also his greatest weakness. Camilla, as consort and Duchess of Cornwall, is a constant reminder of his personal failings of the past. However, more than a decade of marriage, and the fact that his second wife undoubtedly gives strength from their mutual and obvious love, should be taken only as a positive.

  But, no matter how optimistic the palace try to be, the reality is that Charles and Camilla have both brought far too much baggage to the relationship, particularly that they committed adultery, which at the very least contributed to the breakdown of his marriage to Diana, for it to be presented as anything approaching love’s young dream. For years the prince bemoaned what he felt was an unfair portrayal of the woman he loved. He reportedly said to respected journalist Gavin Hewitt in a 1998 interview discussing his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles (according to Hewitt’s book A Soul on Ice: A Life in News), ‘I thought the British people were supposed to be compassionate. I don’t see much of it.’ Over time the general public has grown to accept Camilla. She may not be universally popular but she is at last now getting credit for the public work she does and her role supporting the heir to the throne, For the general feeling is that, with Camilla at his side, Charles is a less abrasive, even spoilt, figure, and behind the scenes the groundwork has undoubtedly been laid for the shift in responsibility from the Queen to Charles.

  Just as it seemed accepted that Her Majesty was slowing down, following the retirement of her consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, and with her celebration of her ninety-second birthday in April 2018, the figures didn’t match the newspaper stories. Despite claims to the contrary, her workload had increased by 25 per cent, according to a new study. It was no surprise, however, that Charles clocked up the highest number of engagements in 2018 so far. Research conducted by Write Royalty showed the Queen had carried out 125 engagements at that point since January. Prince Harry did not even make the top ten, as he had been busy planning his May wedding to Meghan Markle, and neither did the Duchess of Cambridge, who welcomed her third child, Prince Louis, into the world in April. Charles was thrilled, and with the name, too, a nod to his beloved great-uncle.

  ‘A Royal Family sweetens politics by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty events,’ the great constitutional theorist Walter Bight wrote. This world had stood the test of time, for the world delighted in one of those ‘pretty events’: Louis’s birth on St George’s Day 2018 (23 April). Once, again the world’s media had gathered in their hundreds behind steel pens outside the Lindo Wing in Paddington, London, excitedly reporting the birth of the new fifth in line to the throne, the Queen’s sixth great-grandchild.

  ‘He is the first baby to be impacted by the change in the ancient law of the feudal system of primogeniture,’ an American anchor said, struggling to pronounce that word, trying to explain how boys no longer automatically leapfrog girls. Louis had replaced his uncle Harry as fifth in line to the throne, but, due to the new rules, he was still ranked lower than his sister, Charlotte. A republican self-publicist, shouting at the top of his voice on a megaphone, was loudly booed and drowned out by royal fans’ cheers as Prince William and Kate emerged on the steps of the maternity wing with their baby, wrapped in a G. H. Hurt & Son shawl.

  The following day the prince issued a charming statement about the birth of his third grandchild, saying it was a ‘great joy’. ‘The only trouble,’ he added affectionately, ‘is I don’t know how I am going to keep up with them.’

  The reality was that the Queen’s increased workload was down to the debilitating cold that had forced her to cancel a series of engagements over the same period the previous year, not that she had decided to go on some manic work drive. She hasn’t changed her schedule much for years. Her routine is well ordered, too. After breakfast, she scans some of the newspapers before reading her correspondence. She receives 200–300 letters from the public each day. She chooses a selection of letters to read herself and tells her staff how to respond to them accordingly.

  She will then meet with her private secretaries and examine official papers. Policy papers, Cabinet documents and State papers are sent to her in ‘red boxes’ and, where necessary, she signs and approves them. Then there will be a series of official meetings followed by the likes of ambassadors and high commissioners. The Queen and each visitor meet alone, usually for no more than twenty minutes. If there is an investiture, the ceremony begins at 11 a.m. and lasts just over an hour. If the Queen is on engagements, she usually has three visitors per morning. Then she will have a private lunch.

  Afternoons are usually spent on public engagements, but these are carefully selected from hundreds of invitations sent to her each year, often by lord lieutenants, the Queen’s representatives in the county, and her team ensure her programme is shaped appropriately so it is not ‘overly taxing’. Queen Elizabeth’s evenings include a weekly audience alone with the prime minister when they are both in London, usually at Buckingham Palace at 6.30 p.m. on a Wednesday. As with her private meetings with Charles, no written record is made of these meetings and tradition dictates that communications between the Queen and prime minister remain totally confidential.

  She once helped bring Tony Blair back down to earth the morning he became prime minister by reminding him of his relative youth and inexperience of government.

  Recalling the meeting on 2 May 1997, at which she formally invited him, he was reminded of the prime ministers she had dealt with before he was born. ‘I got a sense of my, er, my relative seniority, or lack of it,’ said Mr Blair, who was forty-three at the time and had never held a government office

  At about 7.30 p.m. on weekday evenings, a report on the day’s parliamentary proceedings, written by one of the government whips, arrives. The Queen insists on reading these the same evening. She sometimes attends film premieres, charity concerts or a reception for a charity of which she is patron, but more and more the younger members of her family are representing her at such events. She also hosts official receptions at Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Other receptions or dinners may be linked to a state visit.

  The Prince of Wales, like the Queen, is devoted to duty. His wife, Camilla, is convinced he is a ‘workaholic’. She described life with her husband as ‘exhausting’ in an interview to mark his sixty-fifth birthday. She joked about his reaching retirement age. ‘Luckily, he has caught up with me now. We are both pensioners and he can join in with me collecting the bus pass.’

  She went on, ‘I am hopping up and down and saying, “Darling, do you think we could have a bit of, you know, peace and quiet, enjoy ourselves together?” But he always has to finish something.’ She says Charles is always ‘working, working, working’ and is ‘not going to stop’. ‘My hu
sband is not one for chilling,’ she added. The duchess also disclosed that her idea of ‘bliss’ would be to sit in the sunshine with her husband enjoying some peace and quiet, but that she rarely got the chance.

  Others close to the prince say, however, that time is catching up with him. The fact that he eats so little, too, means he sometimes finds himself exhausted by early evening. ‘Yes, his workload sometimes does take its toll on him. He admits it himself, but he is a driven man and wants to do as much with the time he is allotted to make a real difference,’ the source said. ‘Sometimes he is so tired he almost falls asleep over his papers. But nobody can tell him to slow down, not even the duchess, who leaves him to do his thing,’ said the source.

  The prince regularly carries out around twenty-five royal engagements a week. Like his mother, he is up early, usually before 7 a.m. His ‘calling tray’ consists of the days’ newspapers and Radio 4’s Today programme in the background. From 8 a.m. onwards, if he hasn’t got early engagements, he spends the next two hours poring over paperwork and making handwritten notes in black ink. Over the phone he also chases up projects ranging from the environment to organic farming, architecture and the improvement of interfaith relations.

  If he is on an engagement, he likes to use the Royal Train, as it gives him the security and privacy to work. Most engagements start at around 10 a.m. He is often met by the local lord lieutenant or his or her deputy. Flanked by a royal-protection Range Rover, a police Range Rover and six bikes, Charles’s dark blue Jaguar pulls up at the entrance of the said engagement. He will meet local dignitaries and perhaps unveil a foundation stone to commemorate a new building. He may be called upon to deliver a speech or off-the-cuff address. If it is a keynote speech, he will have worked on it for hours; if it is just a few remarks, he will manage that with a few tried and tested quips.

  There are many similarities between mother and son, and while there was undoubtedly some tension after the publication of Jonathan Dimbleby’s brilliant biography – when the author revealed Charles felt his parents lacked affection towards him as a child – this has subsided. It led to a period of tension between parents and son, particularly with his father.

  Even before the Dimbleby book, Charles had voiced his concerns of his relations with the Duke of Edinburgh. He wrote in a private letter, with a strong nod to his own paternal misgivings, on 27 September 1987, ‘Relationships with fathers can be such complex ones…So often, I suppose one must long to have got on better or to have been able to talk freely about the things that matter deeply, but one was too inhibited to discuss.’

  They have grown closer in recent years, but the duke and prince will still loudly disagree, so much so that, if a stranger walked into a room during one of their debates, one would have thought a serious fight was about to take place.

  When he is called upon to take the lead at milestone moments for his mother – and in recent years there have been many – the prince has always delivered them graciously. On the Queen’s ninetieth birthday, with a few heartfelt and carefully chosen words, Charles spoke for the nation as he paid a touching tribute to her. Her actual birthday, 21 April, is usually an entirely private affair, but on this special occasion the Queen – accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall – was joined by crowds of well-wishers in the shadow of Windsor Castle to light the first of a thousand beacons in her honour. Charles wished his mother, our first-ever nonagenarian monarch, the ‘most special and happiest of birthdays’.

  He spoke too of the love and affection for her throughout the country and the Commonwealth. He could not have put it better. Then, after drawing a laugh from the crowd by calling her ‘Mummy’ – his affectionate introduction for the sovereign during the royal celebrations – Prince Charles added significantly, ‘And long may she reign over us.’ It was a sentiment shared by all those who heard it there and live on television.

  He then called for three cheers and the enthusiastic crowd duly obliged. With that, the prince handed the torch to the Queen and invited her to light the principal beacon on a six-metre pole at the start of the Long Walk. After the lighting was over, the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince Philip and the Duchess of Cornwall were driven back to the castle for her birthday party of sixty special guests, including twenty-eight members of the Royal Family.

  It had been a long and joyous day for the Queen. Earlier, she had driven through the streets of Windsor with the Duke of Edinburgh at her side, waving and smiling to thousands who had turned out to cheer her. Holding onto the roof of the specially adapted open-top Range Rover, the Queen, resplendent in a lime-green coat and matching flower-adorned hat, stood upright and proud. The crowds, who stood a dozen deep, sang ‘Happy Birthday’ and handed her flowers and presents as the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh walked from her castle to the Guildhall. It was only a short distance. But it took her half an hour to complete, as she diligently thanked them all for their gifts. At one stage, Prince Philip lifted Ethan Lynch, aged four, who had been waiting with his mother in the crowd for four hours with a bunch of flowers, over a barrier so that he could personally hand the bouquet to the Queen. It was a lovely touch.

  In May 2016, in what many saw as a deliberate attempt to show the public warmth between mother and son in archive newsreels and never-before-seen home movies and photographs, the prince reflected on his mother’s sixty-year reign – both as Great Britain’s queen and as his own mother. Previously unseen photographs and cine films from the Queen’s private collection – many of them shot by the Queen herself – capture family life. The prince also shares footage from various family holidays, including one sequence, filmed by the Queen, in which we see a young Prince Charles and Princess Anne playing in the sand at Holkham beach in Norfolk.

  Highlights include private cine-camera footage, taken on Coronation Day behind the scenes at Buckingham Palace, which shows Elizabeth juggling the dual role of mother and Queen as she walks along the corridor of Buckingham Palace and poses for official photographs.

  There are also cine-film sequences on board Britannia, at Windsor and at Balmoral, all of which give the viewer a fascinating insight into the life of the Royal Family in the 1940s and 1950s. It worked to a degree. But, while there is little doubt that over time mother and son have grown much closer, Charles’s relationship with Philip has occasionally been so egregious that at times they have communicated only in writing.

  ‘Of course they love each other,’ said one source close to the prince. ‘They always kiss each other when they meet, but on occasion they fundamentally disagree about big issues. ‘These discussions may have looked quite heated if you were an outsider looking in for the first time, but actually they are just passionate people, passionate about what they believe in. That doesn’t make them enemies, it just means they disagree,’ the senior figure pointed out.

  In truth, Charles’s unique and at times isolated childhood did leave him lacking in the parental love he craved. In turn, it had an impact on Charles the man and his complex character. Perhaps this has driven Charles to prove himself. He is restless, with an endless desire to prove himself – to whom, God alone knows. ‘The trouble is I always feel that unless I rush about doing things and trying to help furiously I will not [and the monarchy will not] be seen to be relevant and I will be considered a mere playboy,’ he wrote in a private letter of 31 March 1987.

  Nothing much has changed. In reality, a workaholic himself, he now appreciates that neither his mother nor his father should be blamed and over time the prince has grown to understand their position and their position on the issue. After all, the Queen, then Princess Elizabeth, was just twenty-two when her eldest son and the heir to the throne was born on 14 November 1948, almost exactly a year after her wedding. Even then her father, the king, was in frail health and she was preparing quietly for her role as Queen Elizabeth.

  When Charles was born a forty-one-gun salute was fired by the King’s Troop, Royal Artillery, and in Trafalgar Square t
he fountains were floodlit blue; outside Buckingham Palace almost four thousand gathered to watch the comings and goings of the medical team. Such was the prudery of the time that even the princess’s friends weren’t told that the birth had not been easy and she had had to undergo a caesarean section. Like most husbands of his era, Philip was not at his wife’s bedside. Instead, he got so restless pacing up and down an equerry’s room waiting for news that his private secretary, Mike Parker, took him off for a game of squash on the palace court.

  When the king’s private secretary, Tommy Lascelles, brought the good news, Philip bounded upstairs into the Buhl Room, which had been converted into an operating theatre. He then held his firstborn, still wearing his sporting flannels and open-neck shirt. Always matter-of-fact to the point of seeming indifference, he declared that Charles looked like a plum pudding. As soon as his wife came round from the anaesthetic, Philip presented her with a bouquet of red roses and carnations – thoughtfully provided for the occasion by Parker. For the first month of his life, the baby slept in a round wicker basket in the dressing room adjoining the princess’s bedroom, and she happily breastfed him. It was only when she contracted measles that she heeded the advice of doctors and handed him over to the nursery staff.

  According to Philip’s cousin Marina, the Duchess of Kent, he was similarly entranced by the new arrival. ‘I am so happy for Philip, for he adores children and also small babies,’ she wrote in a letter to her mother. ‘He carries it [the baby] about himself quite professionally, to the nurse’s amusement.’ Nevertheless, Philip showed no inclination for being a nappy-changing, handson kind of father. At the time, he not only had his career in the Navy to consider, but he was also fitting in royal duties and trying to maintain a remnant of his former bachelor lifestyle by going out regularly on the town with Parker.