Charles at Seventy

by Robert Jobson

  Charles was extremely relaxed. He knew the form on state occasions like this, when all the senior, and many of the so-called ‘minor’, members of the Royal Family were on parade. Everything had to be done in almost military fashion. Royalty would arrive according to ascending order of rank, with the most senior, the Queen herself, arriving last at exactly the time listed in the programme. ‘It may sound a little absurd, but this is how the business of monarchy works and state banquets, when the principals turn out in all their finery, tiaras, dress uniforms, evening dress, decorations and all, is when the business of royalty becomes very serious indeed. Diana did not quite see it like that. As far as she was concerned, a state banquet was just an irritation, something she had to do,’ Ken said.

  She asked if she could head off early and she didn’t want to hang around waiting at the palace any longer. The Scotland Yard officer explained that they couldn’t go because they had to stick to the order, and Princess Anne had been delayed in traffic. ‘Ma’am, it’s really not as simple as that, there is an order…’ But, before Wharf could finish, she snapped back, ‘Ken, I know all about their bloody orders. All about them. I want to go now. Simon [her chauffeur] is ready, and I want to go now.’

  Fortunately, Charles, also in evening dress, appeared in the hall right on cue, tugging on his shirt cuffs as is his wont in his slightly nervous manner, like an actor in a West End comedy. He clearly sensed an impending tantrum from his volatile wife.

  ‘Are we ready to go, Ken?’ he asked. There was a stony silence from both of them as the policeman again pointed out that it was not their slot yet.

  ‘Have I got time for another martini, then?’ the prince asked politely. Wharfe, finding the situation and the prince amusing did his best not to laugh. It struck him as all rather absurd. The frost emanating from Diana became icier towards her policeman.

  ‘Is anything the matter?’ the prince asked, not directing his question to anyone in particular. Diana was spoiling for a fight and he sensed it.

  ‘Well, Charles, there is, actually. I want to go now. I don’t want to hang around here. Why can’t we go now?’

  ‘Diana,’ Charles replied reasonably, ‘you know the system. We have to go at the set time, so that we arrive just before Her Majesty.’ He took a measured step back as though preparing himself for an onslaught. Diana, drawing herself up in her high heels (or ‘tart’s trotters’ as she called them), turned on him.

  ‘But Charles, why can’t you go on your own? I can get there earlier. Nobody will worry about me,’ she said.

  Of course, she knew that if she turned up without her husband the waiting media would plaster it all over the front pages, speculating, quite rightly, that the Prince and Princess of Wales had had yet another row. When Charles pointed this out to her, however, she became even more frustrated.

  The prince retreated to his study, asking butler Harold Brown for yet another martini. As his wife paced up and down like a caged animal, she shouted, ‘Charles, I have really had enough of this. I’m off.’

  ‘No, Diana, we really have to wait,’ he insisted. Whereupon he ordered another martini from Harold and departed again. At this point, Wharfe let out a little chortle.

  ‘Do you find my husband funny, Ken?’ Diana snapped. ‘Well, do you?’

  Wharfe replied, ‘Well, actually, I do, ma’am. I think he has a great sense of humour. It’s not too far removed from my own.’

  Diana was clearly exasperated. ‘So, what kind of humour is that?’ she retorted curtly. Ken was destined for the doghouse for days after that. For the rest of that night she said not one word to him.

  It was an amusing incident but also a telling one. It demonstrated the extent to which the relationship between Charles and Diana had soured and how difficult it could be for anyone caught in the crossfire.

  Charles rarely realises when he is being amusing, which makes him even funnier. I remember reporting on an engagement the prince was undertaking in the Iwokrama Rainforest in Guyana in February 2000 during his first official visit to the Caribbean, a nine-day tour that covered Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Jamaica. In the welcoming ceremony the prince happily donned a crown of eagle feathers as he was made honorary chief of Surama village, home to Amerindians deep in Guyana’s Amazon Basin rainforest. He then took part in a traditional welcome ‘dance and lovers’ jig, joking, ‘I think given half a chance…the old one-two and the two-step can come in handy.’ Once again, he was hysterical without even knowing it.

  About two hundred Amerindian villagers had waited to catch a glimpse of the royal visitor. Some of them had walked up to sixty miles across difficult terrain for the prestigious event. I was standing behind a group of indigenous dignitaries lined up to meet him in their traditional dress as the prince cheerily shook hands while sporting the Indian headdress that had been given to him, much to the delight of the travelling photographers.

  ‘That’ll get in the linen [newspaper],’ one of the snappers said rather too loudly, and drew a frown from the prince. I was not bothered about the niceties of the latest tabloid snap but in what the prince said as he engaged with them through an interpreter. One unfortunate Amazonian Indian chief seemed particularly interested in the prince and looked a little stressed. He was with his wife and baby and she appeared animated and upset. Instinctively and sympathetically, the prince asked, ‘Is everything all right?’

  It clearly wasn’t. With a hangdog expression, the chief, in his local dialect, explained that he had been travelling with his wife and children for two days to get to meet him. The prince, who had flown in on a light aircraft, pondered the problem for a few seconds and responded, ‘The trouble is you’ve got to go all the way back.’ He clearly had no idea how funny his remark was, made all the funnier by its timing, what the two of them were wearing – Charles in his beige safari suit and headdress and the chief with barely a stitch on – and the fact that there was delay as their chat was translated. I couldn’t help chuckling to myself.

  Diana’s death, as the documentary film in 2017 showed, scarred William and Harry terribly. It was clear by the comments they made that it was still raw. Their film sidestepped sensitive issues such as both parents’ infidelity. Inevitably, it was a stilted portrayal of the princess, perhaps an idealised version of her that lived in her sons’ minds. I, however, found myself thinking more than once about Charles, and why he had just been airbrushed out in this way.

  Charles had endured a miserable ‘August horribilis’ (summer 2017) but he weathered the perfect media storm. His mantra, to put up with it and shut up, worked. He was never going to win this PR fight against his now iconic, almost saintly, dead wife. The media made hay dragging up the so-called ‘War of the Waleses’, but the retelling of this sorry tale twenty years on felt tired even for the tabloids. It was, in the assessment of the prince and his team, a passing dark cloud. Yes, there would be rain, but it would pass. But what did upset him was his sons’ decision to completely write him out of history.

  Opinion polls showed his popularity had dipped. The prince and his staff noticed this, but said nothing. He retreated to Scotland with his wife and prepared for his busy schedule of events starting in September.

  In the last of the Diana documentaries to be aired in the UK in August 2017, Diana: 7 Days, the BBC focused on the days between her death and funeral. During the documentary, one of Charles’s sons spoke up for him publicly. Harry praised his father for looking after him and Prince William in the aftermath of the tragedy.

  ‘One of the hardest things for a parent to have to do is to tell your children that the other parent has died. But he was there for us, he was the one out of two left. And he tried to do his best to make sure that we were protected and looked after,’ he said.

  Many close to the prince said it felt like too little too late. But the prince was pacified.

  Chapter Six

  SOFT POWER

  ‘Power is the ability to influence the behaviour of others to get the outcomes one w
ants.’

  JOSEPH S. NYE JR, SOFT POWER: THE MEANS TO

  SUCCESS IN WORLD POLITICS

  Although newspaper headlines in the UK screamed about his troubled past, focusing on his failed relationships and even his resulting mental-health issues, the Prince of Wales seemed unconcerned. He cheerily got on with the job and let it all go over his head. At this late stage in his life he had seen these so-called media ‘scandals’ come and go before and learned to take them in his stride. What was all the fuss about? he mused. ‘It was all such a long time ago,’ the prince told an official.

  ‘The prince has an important role to play today,’ the official told me as I accompanied the Royal party aboard the RAF Voyager jet, the royal plane used on such official overseas visits, on the spring tour of Europe in April 2017. The emphasis in this short comment was on the word ‘today’.

  Another senior member of the prince’s household pointed out that the revelation, far from a negative, was in fact a positive. The aide said that, in his view, seeking professional psychiatric help through Dr Alan McGlashan – who was known to Charles’s friend and mentor, the philosopher Laurens van der Post, not only for Charles’s deeply troubled first wife Diana, but also for himself, to help him cope with the inward strain of an incompatible marriage – showed strength. It demonstrated that he had ‘at least tried very hard to resolve their problems and even tried to save his marriage’. Surely in an epoch when his two sons and daughter-in-law, Kate, were rightly winning plaudits for their tireless work on their brilliant Heads Together initiative – a campaign to get more people talking openly about their mental health – this revelation should have produced positive coverage for Charles in the tabloids. ‘Surely, this is something he should have been given some credit for,’ one of his team said. I couldn’t help but agree but for some reason, perhaps because it was about Charles and Diana, it was seen in a negative light.

  The prince just brushed it all aside. In his view, it was all ‘old hat’ and not worth wasting time thinking about. In this uncertain post-Brexit-vote economic era, the heir to the throne was focused on the job in hand, doing his duty for Britain amid the ‘soft power’ battle to win hearts and minds abroad, at least among those close neighbours willing to listen. His position on Brexit is unknown. His position post-Brexit is, however, clear. We as a country, a great country, have to unite and work alongside the Commonwealth to make the best of our situation. He and his family are determined to play their part as positively as possible.

  Approaching his seventieth birthday after years representing the Queen and her government on diplomatic missions (to date, at the time of writing, he has visited forty-four of the fifty-three Commonwealth countries, many of them on several occasions), Charles has shown himself to be much more than some glorified travelling salesman, circumnavigating the globe with a fist full of trade deals like some faceless politician. Foreign and Commonwealth Office mandarins appreciate that Charles is a unique asset as Britain works to re-establish bilateral relations across Europe and the wide world after the triggering of Article 50 by the UK Prime Minister Theresa May in March 2017. Her signing and sending the letter to the EU’s Donald Tusk, spelling out Britain’s intention to leave the European Union, was just the starting gun being fired. A long and difficult drawn-out process of negotiation has to play out, with as much help as Britain can get.

  When he travels in Europe he is often accompanied by a team of experts and politicians. On this visit he was joined by the brilliant and prepossessing Caroline Wilson, a Cambridge-educated barrister and former consul general of Hong Kong. She was appointed Europe director at the FCO in October 2016, where she leads our European network of embassies and consulates to promote our interests in Europe. Her mantra, much like the prince’s, is ‘trust your instincts, know what you want and believe in your ability to achieve it’. She acted as an adviser to the future king when he was on key visits around Europe such as the 2017 four-country tour to Romania, the Holy See, Italy and Austria until April 2017. She once described the Royal Family as a ‘great national resource’. The Europe minister, Sir Alan Duncan, also accompanied the prince in Italy. When the Queen undertook state visits she used to be accompanied by the serving foreign secretary of the time, for these visits are much more than the series of photo opportunities and speeches at official black-tie dinners they can sometimes seem. Behind the scenes the diplomatic wheel is always turning on these royal tours.

  As the Queen, ninety-two at the time of writing and the most travelled monarch in history, no longer makes these foreign forays, Charles is at the core at this subtle shift of emphasis in government strategy in using the royal brand. Personally, too, Charles is in a far better place these days. In public and in private, Charles and Camilla are an accomplished double act on the world stage. The duchess, in public personable and with a positive approach to the travelling media, came back to chat with the accredited group on the tours several times during our travels around Europe. Self-assured, she happily shared her thoughts about the visit. The prince, too, at the end of the tour, emerged, this time unusually without his jacket in a tailored, pink-striped Turnbull & Asser shirt and a handmade tie from the Italian firm E. Marinella. Laughing and joking, he was at one with himself.

  It has not always been this way; his relations with the media chronicling his life’s story have been at times tense. During the so-called ‘War of the Waleses’ between him and Diana, Charles was the victim of negative press. The media seemed determined to make him the villain of the narrative and Diana the victim. The truth of course lay somewhere in the middle, but Charles refused to enter the fray and urged his circle not to do so on his behalf. The result was that his popular ratings plummeted to an all-time low.

  Now, his first wife tragically no longer around to set the media agenda, the narrative around Charles seems to be less about his private life – after all he is now content and happily married – and more about what the prince does, what he believes, what he says and what he can achieve.

  This last decade has seen Charles taking an active lead in monarchal business as his ageing mother slips gracefully towards an unofficial retirement. There are those who insist Elizabeth II is still as spritely, fit and sharp as she was two decades ago. This is not true. She is still sharp on matters of state, but requires her schedule to reflect her age and capacity. Even she thinks those loyal subjects who believe nothing needs to change are deluding themselves.

  The most significant step came when the Duke of Edinburgh publicly acknowledged he could no longer undertake the schedule expected of a consort and announced he wanted to step down and ‘retire’ before his ‘sell-by date’ in May 2017. His decision to step aside and quit public engagements came almost six years after he first hinted at his desire. ‘I reckon I’ve done my bit,’ he said on his ninetieth birthday in a television interview. His decision had the blessing of the Queen, who, aides stressed, would carry on. It would mean, Buckingham Palace explained, that she would carry out more solo engagements and attend more events with younger members of ‘Team Windsor’.

  Since then the Queen has stepped out with Prince William, Prince Harry, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward at her side. She also carried out the first joint engagement with the former Meghan Markle, now Duchess of Sussex, in June 2018 on an ‘away day’ to Chester on the Royal Train, when she insisted Harry should not join them. She has undoubtedly missed Philip’s presence keenly and the regular afternoon tea that they took together whenever possible. Those who questioned her willingness to continue have been proved wrong. How long she will actually continue as an active queen is unknown. But surely now it is only a matter of a year or two at most, from the time of writing, before she passes on the baton to her son and heir.

  Charles and Camilla schmoozed their way across Europe in April 2017 on a nine-day overseas tour, meeting presidents and prime ministers and even enjoying a papal audience with Pope Francis in the Vatican City; he allowed them a tour inside the Vatican Secret Archive, whe
re Charles was in his element. At one point, Charles beckoned over his quintessential principal private secretary, Clive Alderton LVO, to take a look at a particular document. Formally established in 1475, but actually much older, the archive now preserves more than 180,000 manuscripts, including 80,000 archival units, 1,600,000 printed books, more than 8,600 incunabula, printed documents dating from before 1501, more than 300,000 coins and medals, 150,000 prints, drawings and engravings and more than 150,000 photographs.

  They were shown original documents relating to the Catholic Church and Britain. The rare manuscripts, not open to the public, are kept in the Sala Sistina of the Vatican Library. The royal couple were then shown a number of original rare letters, including the last letter ever written by condemned Mary Queen of Scots on 8 February 1587 before her execution for treason. They were shown a letter written in 1555 by England’s Tudor Queen Mary I and King Philip II of Spain, who set about the restoration of the Roman Catholic Church in England. There is a letter by Pope Paul IV condemning Thomas Cranmer, the leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VIII and briefly under Mary I, who put him on trial for treason and heresy. He was eventually executed.

  Later, during the traditional exchange of gifts that followed the private meeting, which lasted almost half an hour in a study within the Pope Paul VI Audience Hall in the Vatican – a modern structure used for papal meetings – the leader of the Roman Catholic Church urged Charles, ‘Wherever you go, may you be a man of peace.’ He said sincerely, ‘I’ll do my best.’ He then gave the Pope a large hamper of produce from his Highgrove estate and framed photos of himself and his wife, while the pontiff presented him with a bronze olive branch, signifying peace, and copies of his writings on climate change bound in red leather, and other papal writings. ‘I hope they’re in English,’ Charles said and was assured they were.