Charles at Seventy

by Robert Jobson

  The duchess, seventy-one at the time of writing, is said to have told friends previously that she would be ‘happy’ to use the lesser title when her husband ascends to the throne. The title issue will be decided in the court of public opinion and by the prime minister of the day. Clarence House has always fudged the issue and claimed that the constitutional issue surrounding the title would be ‘a matter for the government of the day’. There was no such precedent for the title ‘Princess Consort’.

  All previous wives of British kings have been known as queens. Women married to a monarch have historically been crowned as ‘Queen Consort’ except Queen Mary II, who, together with her husband King William III, reigned as joint sovereign from 1689 to 1694. Legislation might have to be amended if she insists on not being called ‘Queen’. The new title could also have to be approved by the seventeen parliaments for which Charles will be head of state.

  In 2002, on the death of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, at the age of 101, Charles was devastated. He said, ‘She was quite simply the most magical grandmother you could possibly have, and I was utterly devoted to her.’ But her passing came at a low point in the prince’s life when he was beginning to feel that he might never be king. It is, some observers say, a fear that is highlighted with every passing birthday. If the Queen lives to the same age as her late mother, Charles will be almost eighty when he takes the throne, while Prince William will be forty-five. But as the prince told the NBC network interviewer Brian Williams when asked about the prospect of his becoming king, ‘It’s much better not to…You think about it a bit but it’s much better not to. If it comes to it, regrettably it comes as a result of the death of your parent, which is not so nice to say the least.’

  Camilla has assuaged Charles’s loneliness, but knows when to leave him alone. When on the public stage, their togetherness makes them a redoubtable couple. He is the most prepared heir to the throne the country has ever had – wise, funny, intelligent and connected to his people in so many ways. All the talk that Camilla, should the situation arise, will not take the title ‘Queen Consort’ on her husband’s ascension is wide of the mark. It is also totally self-defeating. Make no mistake, Camilla will be queen. There would have to be a change in the law in Britain and several other realms before Charles becomes king for her not to be. There is little or no appetite for that.

  To alter her status would be a PR own goal, like insisting a president’s wife should not be allowed the role and title of ‘First Lady’ – especially when the government plans to use the royals to bolster our status on the world stage. She rarely puts a foot wrong on tour while representing the Queen or when supporting her husband. Camilla has earned her stripes – the Queen acknowledged this in 2012 when she awarded her daughter-in-law her highest personal honour, Dame Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, to mark the seventh anniversary of her wedding to Prince Charles.

  Camilla has earned her stripes through the love and loyalty she has shown to her husband and by devotion to duty to the Crown. She will, I am told, be deservedly given the correct rank when the time comes. Charles will rightly insist on it.

  Chapter Ten

  HEIR MILES

  ‘I think it would be criminally negligent of me to go around this country and not actually want to try and do something about what I find there. I think that’s my duty to do so. If some people don’t like it, that’s too bad, isn’t it, frankly, because I think there are more important things to worry about, which is this country.’

  THE PRINCE OF WALES IN AN INTERVIEW WITH SIR TREVOR MCDONALD IN MAY 2006

  Half asleep, dazed by the dull hum of the auxiliary power unit at the back of the plane and trying to ignore the myriad clanking and whirring noises from the two Rolls-Royce Trent 772B turbofan engines on the converted RAF Voyager Airbus A330, I spotted the prince’s new head of communications, Julian Payne. He was at the back of the jet nicknamed ‘Cam Force One’ (a play on America’s presidential jet ‘Air Force One’ and the former UK prime minister who had sanctioned the financing the plane for government and royal use, David Cameron). We were heading back to Britain at a maximum speed, around 490 knots, after a demanding eleven-day Commonwealth royal tour to Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia and India with the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, and Julian appeared, understandably, to be in good spirits.

  A few hours earlier, just before take-off from Palam Air Force Station, New Delhi, the prince and the duchess had ventured to the back of the plane for an informal chat with the handful of photographers and writers who had accompanied them and reported on the visit. Charles was in ebullient mood and thanked us for our interest in the visit. The duchess seemed relieved that the testing schedule was at last complete. The choking smog that had descended on the city (the result of crop burning in the north of the country) had taken its toll on her, she admitted.

  We chatted about a visit deep into the Borneo rainforest on which I had accompanied him, and where he came face to face with six of the great apes at a feeding spot at the Semenggoh Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre. The species has experienced a sharp population decline and this deeply concerned him. A century ago there were probably more than 230,000, but the Borneo orangutan is now estimated at about 104,700 and is classed as endangered. The prince recalled the moment he had been photographed offering a banana to an orangutan, against the better judgement of his Scotland Yard PPO, Inspector Jim Fishwick, who had quietly voiced his concern to his principal. Charles took the decision to go ahead, anyway, to the delight of the photographers as the orange-reddish brown ape, the size of a small man and around seven times stronger than a human, reached out to him.

  For a split second they had touched hands in a Michelangelo The Creation of Adam moment. This comparison seemed to tickle the prince, although, in a chilled mood, this wild animal could easily kill a human with his bare hands in seconds. ‘It was a truly remarkable experience,’ the prince said, before joking that perhaps we would have had a much better story and photographic opportunity if the ape had grabbed him by the arm and swung him over his head and launched him into the jungle. The jovial ambience, which was genuine and warm, came to end when the prince was asked by a member of the RAF crew to return to his seat as the captain had made an announcement that he was ready for take-off.

  The last stop on the so-called ‘Commonwealth Tour’ was to New Delhi, where the prince held talks with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, at Hyderabad House. On the agenda were trade and bilateral talks and the upcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in London. In terms of wealth per head, or living standards, India remains far behind the developed world, but, in terms of global power and the Commonwealth, it is massive, set to overtake the UK to become the Commonwealth’s largest economy as well as most populated one.

  In his last public engagement on what had been dubbed ‘The Commonwealth Tour’, Charles delivered the third of his speeches underlining the importance of the Commonwealth and its diversity. Addressing guests at the British High Commission, the Prince hailed the bonds between Britain and India and urged the public to cherish their diversity. Using an Urdu word to refer to his wife as ‘darling’, he told an audience, ‘I cannot tell you how delighted my mehaboobaa and I are to be back in India, a country that is so very special to us both.’ Saying he had always believed the ‘sheer diversity’ of the Commonwealth is one of its greatest strengths, he warned, ‘This diversity is to be celebrated and cherished, not only because it is so central to our identities and our sense of belonging, but also, if I may say so, because it offers us the best hope of addressing the most pressing challenges of our time.

  ‘A one-size-fits-all approach to globalisation simply cannot be the answer and will, I am convinced, lead us into a sterile, monocultural homogeneity that creates ever greater problems whilst simultaneously robbing us of the solutions to address them.’ Saying the world’s challenges are ‘already as urgent as they are profound’, he pointed to climate change, food insecurity, over
fishing and pollution as key concerns, and said he had great hopes for the combination of traditional knowledge and cutting-edge ingenuity within the Commonwealth’s population. ‘The challenges we face together and the aspirations we share make it as relevant and as necessary as it has ever been,’ he said. ‘It offers us all the hope that by working together, and drawing strength from our diversity, we might secure a safer, more prosperous and fairer future for our children and our grandchildren.’ It was his third major speech about the Commonwealth during his trip, leading up to the CHOGM in London.

  After a change in venue because of the thick smog engulfing New Delhi, the prince was quizzed by children from Lajpat Nagar-III School about his plans for when he is king. He took the grilling in good humour. One nine-year-old girl had a very specific query in mind: was he planning to build a fort when he was king? The pupil, named Pragya, was reassured as the prince agreed, ‘I will!’ to make the class laugh. He clarified afterwards that he did not, in fact, have specific plans for fort-building. It was a light moment in the final day of a long tour, which had seen the prince and duchess visit Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia and New Delhi.

  Another asked for his favourite book. The prince took time to mull over the question carefully before responding. ‘What do you think it might be?’ he said. ‘There are so many to choose from.’ He then said, ‘Have any of you read the Harry Potter books yet? They are very good books.’ A second child then asked for his favourite actor, with the prince replying, ‘Gracious me! When I think about it there are so many of them. There is a very good actor called Sir Antony Sher, who is a brilliant Shakespearean actor, and everything else. There are lots of others, though.’

  The royal flight was about three hours into the return leg to RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, and most of the passengers on the plane were by now lost in a deep sleep. A few of the small media contingent were laid out across four seats and snug under a duvet requisitioned from the business-class section by the RAF cabin crew, their heads resting on pillows. Julian Payne, who had worked tirelessly to help achieve maximum positive publicity for his boss on the visit, was a little demob-happy, clutching a piece of paper with handwritten scrawl in red ink all over it and on the back. Nobody could overhear us.

  ‘What’s that you’re holding?’ I asked, knowing full well it was a printout of a double-page-spread commentary I had written for the Evening Standard a few days earlier (headlined ‘A CENOTAPH TRIBUTE OF UTMOST SIGNIFICANCE’).

  The article had given an essentially positive appraisal of the royal visit and had also looked forward to the symbolic moment when Prince Charles would lay the nation’s wreath on Remembrance Sunday at his mother’s behest. The prince had seen my article and it received an efficacious response. I recognised the prince’s spidery handwriting in red ink scrawled all over the piece of paper his press adviser Julian Payne was holding. But that was as close as I was going to get to it. He had got my attention. I was fully awake now.

  ‘But what does it say?’ I pressed.

  Public-relations babble followed, with him saying the fact that the prince had been reading my article mid-flight while others slept showed how engaged his boss was. I couldn’t agree more, but all I really wanted to know was what the prince had written on the page? This, after all, was gold to a writer, a response from the horse’s mouth to an article he had penned about the protagonist and the monarchy. The prince had opened by writing, ‘How Kind’ but I knew the devil was in the detail. I was indeed touched that the prince had taken time to read it and make detailed notes on it. As I audaciously held out my hand, he judiciously folded the piece of paper in two and placed it securely inside his pocket. But, before he returned to one of the fifty-eight business-class seats in the middle and upper sections of the RAF plane, he briefed me, leaving me with some salient points that his boss had covered in his notes.

  My article had addressed how republicans presented a somewhat distorted view of the role of the constitutional monarchy, blinkered by their version of what form of democracy and head of state they want. I argued that republicans’ core belief means that they often miss the point and the subtleties of our current system of parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy, with all its checks and balances, that have developed over a thousand years of history. Critics of the monarchy, I wrote, often site Charles’s so-called ‘black spider memos’ that he writes to ministers on topics he cares about or feels as proof of what they say is the prince’s ‘unconstitutional’ interfering in party politics.

  Those with monarchy in their sights argue that Charles has and is repeatedly operating dangerously outside of his constitutional remit. The antimonarchists’ view is that any king or queen regent (or heir apparent, for that matter) must not be in any way political or at least partisan as that would leave them and the system fatally exposed. It is true, I had written, that the overwhelming majority of prerogative powers are devolved to the sovereign’s ministers, but the monarch can wield power in the event of what he or she perceives is ‘a grave constitutional crisis’. Then, the sovereign can act ‘contrary to or without ministerial advice’.

  Charles has a very different take on it. ‘I don’t see why politicians and others should think they have the monopoly of wisdom,’ he said during an interview with his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994 when asked about his involvement in politics. Indeed, ever since his youth Charles has built a reputation for his so-called ‘interventions’. He has made thousands of public speeches, some controversially addressing areas of social policy. Every one has taken its toll. ‘I find I have a terrible knotted feeling in the pit of my tummy as the courage is plucked from somewhere inside…Having made the speech I then usually have dreadful second thoughts and feel I shouldn’t have done it and it would be so much easier to lead a quiet life,’ he said on making speeches about politics, in a private letter, dated 1 May 1989.

  Charles always agonises over his speeches. He chooses every word carefully. The prince knows, after more than half a century as a player on the world stage, that what he says and when he says it carries weight. At the World Jewish Relief Dinner in the Guildhall on 31 January 2017, for example, he felt it was an opportune time to express his views about the importance of reaching out beyond the boundaries of religion and community. He chose to praise the ‘wisdom and dignity’ of refugees, too. For Charles knew the timing of his words was significant given what is happening in the world in the President Trump era. It was not necessarily a veiled threat to the new US president – rather a clear message from an experienced statesman on the world stage on the importance of spreading a message of compassion and tolerance.

  In my view, he deliberately spoke of the need to reach out beyond religious boundaries. It is something the prince believes in passionately and he has worked tirelessly for years to encourage dialogue among different faiths around the world in his public life. He went as far as he could to state his diametrically opposed view to Trump without actually saying the words ‘Trump is wrong’. Charles’s words came amid claims that, if a Trump state visit were to go ahead, the Queen and royals could be tarnished. He knew that if the elected government were to insist on such a visit, it must go ahead. We know, of course, that Trump’s July 2018 visit to the UK was not a state visit as such. But Charles’s position is unique. He is not, like the Queen, effectively constitutionally banned from appearing to be at odds with government policy. In fact, as heir to the throne he is perfectly entitled to have an opinion and also to make it public. So the prince’s decision to speak so powerfully on the issues of the moment – while consistent with his view for years – is significant not only in this debate but for the future. When he feels these issues are too serious to ignore, such as human rights or religious affairs, he makes his stand.

  A flaky report in the Sunday Times claiming that the prince and his son William deliberately snubbed President Trump when he made that July visit was wide of the mark. The newspaper reported that the pair were ‘unwilling’ to meet the pre
sident, leaving the Queen to greet him and First Lady Melania Trump at Windsor Castle alone. The story was a flyer. The Trumps’ tour was not, as we’ve seen, a state visit and the only plan drawn up for him to meet members of the Royal Family involved the Queen in greeting the president and his wife Melania alone.

  The prince has pontificated in books and articles on everything from the natural world to spirituality to the built environment. His private missives to ministers, some felt, were a different matter entirely, crossing over into party-political themes in what they say are specifically designed to try to achieve his ‘political’ aims and objectives. Vocal critics of the monarchal system that our unwritten constitution embraces believe such intervention is of real significance. In reality, he is just doing his job. He holds regular audiences for and corresponds with politicians, high commissioners and ambassadors as an integral part of his role. In doing so he is fulfilling his duty, supporting the Queen and indeed her government. It enables him to prepare for his future role and at the same time to be the most well-prepared and well-informed heir to the throne in our history.

  Of course, he doesn’t always see eye to eye with politicians in such meetings, sometimes finding them dreary or ill-informed. As for paying lip service to them, why would he? He once confided that he finds mixing with politicians ‘excessively demoralising’, which he fears gives him an increasingly jaundiced opinion of those politicians who, in his view, ‘seem to lose touch with their souls’. The so-called ‘black spider memos’ I referred to in my article, which he had read, received plenty of the prince’s red ink in his handwritten notes. First, the prince made it clear that he does not write and has never written what the press have dubbed ‘black spider memos’. The phrase clearly irks him. This term, used as a handle for every missive the prince had written to government ministers, is an inaccurate media invention. It was first gifted to the headline writers by his former adviser, Dame Julia Cleverdon, a British charity worker who served for sixteen years as chief executive of Business in the Community. In a documentary she said on camera that Charles was always busy penning handwritten letters and referred to his chirography, usually in black ink, as ‘spidery’. The press had their headline and a convenient handle to use every time Charles penned a note deemed ‘inappropriate meddling and lobbying’ of ministers.