Charles at Seventy

by Robert Jobson

  William has total respect for the Queen. When she talks, he listens. She is the one person, perhaps with the exception of his wife Catherine, who is able pull him in line with a quiet word. Indeed, it was she who made it clear to both him and his brother that their noble Heads Together mental-health campaign appeared too separate from the rest of the royal family and the traditional type of engagements expected of the family.

  Given his seniority in the royal pecking order, William expects deference from his younger brother and the other royals. However, he does not always show his father the same level of courtesy he demands. William was, for example, happy enough for Harry to pursue his passion for the Invictus Games. The Games have been a major success and this still slightly peeves William. He makes sure his younger brother is aware he is No. 1 in the hierarchy of status. All the staff, even the palace switchboard, know William can be ‘difficult’ or ‘a little grand’. He hates ‘sucking up to’ people and lobbying for the country. This was evidenced by his dislike of lobbying FIFA delegates for England’s 2018 World Cup football bid. When it all fell by the wayside, William looked for others to blame for putting himself in that position.

  Less than a month later, all eyes were on a slightly edgy Meghan, the newly ennobled Duchess of Sussex, as she walked a few paces behind the Queen for a series of engagements in the walled city of Chester in Cheshire, England, on the River Dee, close to the border with Wales. Without the reassuring presence of her husband, Harry, who had been constantly at her side on every public occasion up until this moment, this was quite a test. It involved unveiling the Mersey Gateway Bridge at Catalyst Science Discovery Centre in Widnes, Cheshire, and also opening Storyhouse Theatre together. They then had lunch in Chester’s Town Hall with, of course, the Queen taking the leading role.

  Meghan passed this nerve-shredding introduction into royal life with flying colours and the laughter and whispered asides between Queen and granddaughter-in-law were both spontaneous and entirely natural. Not even a mix-up over who should be first into the royal limousine spoiled the rapport between the two women. Some were surprised at the speed of this first joint engagement of the Queen and Meghan. The decision was taken because it was felt the Duchess of Sussex might need extra help to adjust to life inside the Royal Family.

  What commentators were unaware of was that, behind the smiles for the cameras, the two women had disagreed over the younger woman’s choice of headgear. The Queen’s aides had, on instruction, advised the duchess that the Queen would be wearing a green hat to match her green outfit (a nod to those who had died in the Grenfell Tower fire disaster a year earlier). The message from the Queen was effectively an advisory notice to Meghan that she would be expected to comply. The Queen, however, was a little baffled to learn that the duchess had decided she would not be wearing a hat.

  ‘I don’t think the duchess fully understood,’ one senior figure close to the Queen said. ‘This was not a request. They are for others to make, not the Queen.’ In the end the duchess, showing the stubborn streak her father had claimed in one of his many newspaper rants that she had inherited from her mother, ran the gauntlet and went without a hat. After being dubbed ‘inappropriately dressed’ for having bare shoulders at the Queen’s birthday parade a few days earlier, she stepped off the Royal Train looking demure in a cream-coloured, very much over-the-shoulder Givenchy sheath designed by the brand’s British stylist and artistic director Clare Waight Keller. Clearly, she didn’t want to be criticised again. Her stubborn streak and lack of deference, even respect, had been duly noted, particularly by the Queen’s senior staff.

  The Prince of Wales is a stickler for showing deference to the Queen and her office. His two sons aren’t quite the same, however, at acquiescing to him and his office. In the build-up to the royal wedding and beyond Harry, had begun to show his father, who was, after all, bankrolling the entire event, much more respect. Charles, after all, did everything he could to ensure his youngest son had the wedding he wanted. To this day, however, Charles admits he often finds it difficult to gauge either of his sons’ occasionally unpredictable moods. ‘In that aspect of their nature, both princes are very much like their mother,’ one close source confirmed. ‘They both have quite extreme mood swings, just as Diana did, said a former courtier. She could be your best friend one minute and the next your worst enemy.’

  Inevitably, much of the source of any tension between father and sons came down to Diana and their perception of the way he treated her. Somewhat in the mix, too, is their confused relationship with Camilla. Charles, who detests direct confrontation, often did not quite know how to react when such refractory situations exploded before him.

  The previous summer, twenty years on from Diana’s death in that car crash in a Paris tunnel, relations between the prince and his sons may not have been glacial but they were certainly frosty. The prince had to remain tight-lipped as the ghost of his late wife came back, once again, to haunt him, as the world relived her tragic story – the story of his betrayal that, according to a Diana-obsessed press, resulted in her becoming the ultimate victim. He was never going to win this one, and he knew it.

  Again, just as his acceptance ratings had been on the rise, the woman who infamously publicly questioned her husband’s suitability to be king in her 1995 BBC Panorama interview with Martin Bashir was again uppermost in the nation’s mind. Once again, from beyond the grave, footage of her resurfaced and showed her mocking the prince with yet another rapier thrust.

  Back at the height of their marriage crisis on 20 November 1995, a huge 22.8 million people tuned in to watch Diana’s jaw-dropping, heavily rehearsed performance. That programme damaged Charles’s reputation so much that it led to serious calls from senior establishment figures for the crown to skip a generation to Prince William after the Queen’s death. Diana’s actions, they said, had been an affront to the monarchical institution and forced the Queen to decide ‘enough is enough’ and instruct her son to divorce. One ICM poll for Prospect magazine backed her decision.

  Afterwards a bruised Charles confided that interest in his fractured marriage had wounded him: ‘I feel so unsuited to the ghastly business of human intrigue and general nastiness…I don’t know what will happen from now on but I dread it.’

  Ultimately, Charles agreed with the Queen that there was nothing else left but divorce, but the prince was deeply concerned by what came next. ‘God knows what the future will hold,’ he had written in a private letter after the announcement of his separation from Diana on 11 December 1992. What came next, Diana’s death in a tragic car accident in Paris on 31 August 1997, almost shattered Charles’s chance of becoming king and rocked the institution of monarchy to its foundations.

  Diana’s death had led to a mass outpouring of national grief the like of which had never before been seen. There was an intense opprobrium towards Charles, Camilla and the Queen over their perceived coldness and aloof, haughty response. They were the villains, she the saintly victim. The facts didn’t seem to matter.

  I attended Diana’s funeral as a journalist. Twenty years on, it was still fresh to me. A great calm fell over central London that morning, 6 September 1997, as millions took to the streets to pay their respects, lining the route along which the princess’s coffin would be borne on a gun carriage, from Kensington Palace to the Abbey. Roads closed. Everywhere her famous face peered out from the thousands of newspaper and magazine special editions being sold on the streets. It seemed the nation had come to a complete halt. More than two billion people sat and watched the sombre event. Bathed in warm sunshine, thousands upon thousands packed the funeral procession route as the muffled sound of the bells of Westminster Abbey tolled. That day the Prince of Wales, his two sons, the Duke of Edinburgh and Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, heads bowed, walked with the coffin.

  Inside there were 1,900 invited guests within the spectacular Gothic interior of the Abbey. Then, as the bells of Big Ben tolled eleven, the procession reached the west door. Eight We
lsh Guardsmen, bare-headed, their faces taut with strain, carried the quarter-ton coffin on their shoulders as they slow-marched the length of the nave and a hush fell over the Abbey. Prince Harry broke down when the coffin passed. As the tears flowed down his small face, his father pulled him closer and his brother William laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. As the ‘Libera Me’ pierced the air and our souls, I felt the emotion of that magnificent piece fill the Abbey, moving every one of the throng of mourners. Prince Charles looked as though he was being torn apart as the music played. Then he had to endure the rapier-thrust eulogy of Diana’s brother Charles Spencer.

  What I remember most as part of the congregation was the extraordinary sound that, like a distant shower of rain, swept into the Abbey, through the walls, rolling on and on to the alter. It was a wave of noise that eventually reached its crescendo. It took me a couple of seconds to realise that it was the sound of people clapping outside after hearing Spencer’s address on loudspeakers. The earl had spoken the plain truth as he saw it, and the people respected him for his courage as well as for the tribute he had paid his sister. William and Harry joined in the applause; so too, generously, did Prince Charles. The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen Mother sat unmoved in stony-faced silence.

  England’s rose may be dead, I thought, as I walked back along the Victoria embankment towards my office at the Daily Express, but she had certainly made the world sit up and take notice while she was here. She was a magical person, a woman of great character, strength, humour, generosity and determination, but also one prone to deep depression. It is a truism to say that someone’s death tends to make us view that person through rose-tinted glasses.

  The twentieth anniversary of Diana’s death exposed an unhealthy breach between father and sons. In Channel 4’s anniversary offering, Diana: In Her Own Words, endless footage of the late princess conveyed how Charles had always treated their marriage as a sham, and reported that, when she went to see ‘the top lady’, she was told there was nothing to be done because her son and heir was ‘hopeless’. Worse, in ITV’s Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, her sons William and Harry paid heartfelt tributes, but in doing so – whether consciously or not – they wrote their father out of the script.

  When Prince William said that his mother gave him ‘the right tools’ for life, some heard a hint that his style of monarchy will perhaps be different from his father’s and his grandmother’s. Her sons also organised a rededication of their mother’s grave this year. Instead of using the twentieth anniversary of her death on 31 August, they chose her birthday, 1 July. This date came during Charles and Camilla’s planned tour of Canada. The Archbishop of Canterbury was there, as was the then-three year old Prince George. But the Prince of Wales wasn’t, and it seems likely his sons had planned it that way.

  It is difficult to know whether the prince’s reputation, so often damaged by Diana, will ever be rehabilitated enough for him to be as cherished a monarch as he would like to be. In some ways, however, Diana’s untimely and tragic death was a liberation: it meant that Charles could marry Camilla and ensured too that the House of Windsor wasn’t eclipsed by a superstar freewheeling in their world. She remains an ever-present threat, certainly as far as certain media organisations are concerned. If everything is going well, then the late princess isn’t mentioned. If there is a blunder, Diana’s name is cited to suggest how out of touch Charles is.

  The bottom line is that Charles and Diana were not compatible, and their ‘fairytale’ marriage, unlike the marriages of his sons, was doomed from the start and the prince knew it. The couple shared that infamous and deeply awkward engagement interview when asked about love. ‘I had a long time to think about it, because I knew the pressure was on both of us. And, um…it wasn’t a difficult decision in the end. It was what was wanted,’ Diana said, adding quickly, ‘It’s what I want.’ Asked if they were in love, Charles followed up Diana’s quick ‘of course’ with that infamous and damning line, ‘Whatever “in love” means.’ They were words that would be repeated on air, in books and in newspapers time and again and established the parti pris narrative of an uncaring older husband who wilfully wrecked the life of the pure young woman who was devoted to him.

  On 29 July 1981, the world watched the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer in awe. A 600,000-strong crowd packed the streets of London in the hope of catching a glimpse of the couple as they made their way to St Paul’s Cathedral.

  Around 750 million more people viewed it on television all over the world, making it then the most watched programme ever broadcast. Britons enjoyed a national holiday to mark the occasion and watched as Lady Diana, dressed in an ivory silk, taffeta and antique-lace gown designed by Elizabeth and David Emanuel, made the three-and-a-half-minute walk up the red-carpeted aisle, her twenty-five-foot train following behind her. Unlike his sons William and Harry, however, over their own marriages, Charles knew that his to Lady Diana was a mistake long before he made his wedding vows. It is something he deeply regrets to this day.

  The fact that good people do wrong doesn’t make them less good. Equally, however, it doesn’t make the wrongs committed less wrong. Worse, perhaps, is when somebody knowingly makes a dreadful decision, a life-changing one, and doesn’t have the strength to reverse that decision before it is too late. Very often that person has to live with it or the consequences of that moment of indecision for a lifetime. For Charles, his big ‘wrong’, or certainly that big ‘wrong decision’, was marrying a totally incompatible twenty-year-old woman when he knew in his heart it was not right. It led to deep unhappiness for him and Diana, to their both committing adultery and the pain that causes, and also both being forced to admit it publicly in excruciating television interviews.

  The holier-than-thou brigade persist in lambasting the prince over his treatment of Diana and choose to ignore the obvious good in the man and his lifetime of service, his vision and his passion for the world and humanity. They’re fixated on his apparent neglect of his young bride and his subsequent adultery (seemingly ignoring her adultery with at least three other men), which in their blinkered view marks him out as deeply flawed, some kind of pariah and unsuitable for kingship.

  The prince has accepted there is no point in fighting against this bigoted and distorted portrayal of his character, particularly in the aftermath of Diana’s death. For some, as far as he is concerned, the mud has stuck and no amount of hard work by the prince will remove the stains. The prince also knows that the failings of his first marriage and the tragic circumstances of Diana’s death continue to severely dent his popularity. The truth is he has agonised over his mistake for years. He believes he let down not only the monarchy but himself and Diana, too, through his inability to call off the wedding.

  What frustrates him to this day is that one version of history, Diana’s version, is so ingrained in the popular psyche that it has gone down as ‘historic fact’ when, in his view, it is a tissue of lies peddled by a Machiavellian princess at the time to a sympathetic press. What’s more, after years of soul searching, the prince, his circle say, wants what he has described as ‘unbelievable and pernicious lies’ reproduced in the tabloids corrected.

  The truth is that Charles was deeply unsure of Diana’s suitability as his wife at the time and after a few meetings believed they were totally incompatible. Long after Diana’s death and after he had wed Camilla, his frustration over the matter boiled over into a sense of profound injustice over what he believes are ‘lies’ that are both deeply malevolent and harmful to his reputation.

  He has candidly told his close circle of friends, ‘I desperately wanted to get out of the wedding in 1981 when during the engagement I discovered just how awful the prospects were, having had no chance whatsoever to get to know Diana beforehand.’ The prince was, of course, when referring to the ‘awful’ prospects, speaking of Diana’s bulimia and her alarming and irrational mood swings and temper, which he found impossible to deal with.


  He had started dating the beautiful Lady Diana Spencer, third daughter of Earl Spencer, by 1980, at a time when the pressure for him to marry was beginning to gain momentum. He soon realised just how ill-matched they were. In the middle of one conversation in the weeks leading up to the wedding, Charles was talking to Diana about his day and his work commitments, when she would stare back at him blankly. She seemed incapable of grasping any of the intellectual thread of what he was saying. Then she would, he recalled to friends, for no apparent reason, well up and burst into tears. A sympathetic man, Charles was at a total loss as to what to do. He did seek professional help. But as the media frenzy unfolded, despite his sense that there was something very wrong, he felt it was impossible for him to back out of the wedding.

  ‘Things were very different in those days,’ Charles explained [to close friends], ‘the power and influence of the media driving matters towards an engagement and wedding were unstoppable.’ Charles was right of course. The so-called ‘Fourth Estate’ was all powerful and the ruthless tabloids were driving the story at relentless speed. It was a fraught atmosphere for all the characters involved. Photographers and tabloid reporters were hounding Diana in a way that would be totally unacceptable today. Grown men would surround her car, thrusting their camera lenses towards this teenager like a swarm of locusts. They were completely out of control. Diana felt under siege and said so. This frenzied situation was becoming dangerous.

  Diana was just nineteen years old when she first started dating the prince. She was chased by the media in their cars countless times and was frequently forced to race through traffic lights after they had turned red. She was risking her life. ‘They chased me everywhere,’ she said. ‘We are talking thirty of them.’ She never complained about the press to Charles – she didn’t feel confident enough to – and she got zero practical support from Buckingham Palace. She was on her own. So she had no choice but to put her head down out of fright and smile her way through the ordeal.