London: After six decades of waiting, the man of strong opinions and contradictions may have to change his behaviour as he increasingly takes on his mother’s role.
He is the heir to the grandest and most glittering monarchy on the planet, the recipient of a personal income of £19million (Dh69.79 million) last year from the Duchy of Cornwall, but on November 22, Prince Charles will find himself even better off, if briefly.
Thirty-seven years after retiring from the Royal Navy, the prince will at last see the benefit of national insurance contributions made during his short military career(along with voluntary contributions paid subsequently), when he claims his state pension.
Having decided several weeks ago to exercise his rights like any ordinary pensioner, the first weekly payment of up to £110.15 will drop into the princely bank account at the end of his first full week as a 65 year old. (It will then be donated to a charity for the elderly.)
Charles becomes a pensioner on Thursday, attaining retirement age after six and a half decades performing one deeply strange job that of full-time heir apparent and with no immediate prospect of promotion to the role for which he has spent his life preparing.
It has been a role without job description, peers or any real predecessors. Edward VII, who waited a similar period to inherit the crown from Queen Victoria, passed much of his time as Prince of Wales as a glutton, gambler and playboy. His well-aired indiscretions aside, by contrast, Charles at 65 can look back on a lifetime of dogged dedication to the many charities he has founded, the deeply held opinions he has voiced without pause, and the relentless round of ribbon-cuttings and ward-openings that are the curse of the modern royal, and which see him undertake as many as five official engagements every day.
This week, on the very day he becomes eligible for his bus pass (something a man who does not use public transport has no intention of claiming, according to aides), the prince will take a small but highly significant step towards becoming a new kind of heir. On Thursday, Charles and Camilla will travel to Sri Lanka, where the prince will chair the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting on behalf of the Queen.
Though he has stood in for her at lower profile events, this will be the first time the prince has deputised for the monarch in an official state capacity. It will not be the last. The 87-year-old Queen remains in good health, but there is now an open acknowledgement in royal circles that the Prince of Wales will increasingly take on more of her duties, in what some constitutional experts can even foresee becoming an unofficial co-regency. On the day another man would retire to his greenhouse, Charles, who has spent decades with his plants, may finally be beginning the job of his life.
It may come as a relief to a prince who has frequently seemed uncomfortable in his position; in part thanks to the paradox of his role, in part the contradictions of the man. As Prince of Wales, Charles occupies a position both immensely influential and broadly irrelevant, and commands deference and scathing criticism, even ridicule. He has a well-aired love of luxury and a personal staff of more than 120, but also a lifetime ambition, he told a recent interviewer, to “heal” the problems of the country.
He is a passionate environmentalist who chartered a private jet to tour South America warning of the threat to the rainforest. He sits at the heart of the establishment but according to an aide considers himself a “dissident” challenging the consensus.
And in the absence of a defined job to perform while he waits for the throne, he has been obliged to carve out one for himself. Many of those who have worked with the prince or observed him at close quarters remark on his energy, a relentless and often impatient determination to get things done, that if anything has increased with age.
Since founding the Prince’s Trust in 1976, Charles has established a network of more than 25 of his own charities in addition to more than 400 of which he is patron which together amount to the largest multi-cause charitable enterprise in the country. From architecture to youth unemployment, business responsibility to traditional arts, the charities reflect the prince’s genuine passions, though they may also be seen as benign expressions of his compulsion to intervene.
Alastair Clegg is CEO of the Prince’s Initiative for Mature Enterprise (Prime), which helps the over-50s set up in business. He describes a recent event the prince hosted at St James’s Palace for the charity: “Watching him going round the room, the energy and enthusiasm that was coming off him was pretty spectacular. For the causes that he is interested in, there is absolutely no question of slowing down.”
“He’s got more energy than all the people around him,” says Ingrid Seward, who as editor of Majesty magazine has been studying Charles at close quarters for many years. “He’s like his father they run in corridors, they don’t walk. Corridors are a waste of time, they are just to be negotiated as quickly as possible. And the only thing that irritates him about the people around him is that they can’t keep up with him.”
His staff become accustomed to the blizzard of memos, written in longhand (unlike the Queen and Prince Philip, Charles does not use a computer) and composed from the post-it notes on which he scribbles night and day when seized by thoughts. Like his father, Charles has a scorching temper, which has been blamed for the exit of at least one senior aide.
“He admits he is pretty impatient with his staff,” says one royal observer who prefers not to be named. “He probably likes people who run after him with a pen and paper saying, ‘Right Sir, what’s next Sir, while you’re having your breakfast Sir’.”
It is not only his staff with whom Charles feels compelled to share his views. For decades, the prince been an enthusiastic lobbyist of politicians on issues ranging from architecture to alternative medicine, provoking accusations that he is meddling in the democratic process. This week’s target, in a piece for Country Life magazine are the supermarkets, who he accuses of putting a squeeze on struggling farmers.
One former cabinet minister recalls going to Highgrove to meet a group of business people about one of the prince’s pet projects. “The funny thing is that he is, by virtue of his position, incredibly well-connected. The one thing that most chief executives of large companies will not do is turn down an invitation to Highgrove. So you get a fairly good senior level representation.”
This “convening power” was spelt out by his one-time principal aide Michael Peat in a diplomatic cable, disclosed to the Guardian under the US freedom of information act outlining a meeting with American diplomats in 2008 about the risk to rainforests. “Enter the prince,” Peat is recorded as saying. “With no axe to grind, no government policy to represent and no business interests to protect, the prince can be a neutral player and gather the diverse interests around a solution.”
“What he says in public is only the tip of the iceberg,” agrees one well-placed observer, describing a recent case where the prince used his influence with the president of an Asian country to lobby successfully for a change to a law he considered repressive.
But it is the perception that the Prince of Wales has compromised the neutrality of the monarchy by bombarding ministers with his notorious “black spider memos” that has brought most criticism. The memos are so-called because his scrawled handwriting, peppered with exclamation marks and underlinings.
In 1987 alone, he sent more than 1,000 letters to recipients including cabinet ministers about policy ranging from disability rights to South Africa. During the current parliament, it emerged in August, the prince has had more than 36 meetings with cabinet ministers. These interventions remain closely guarded secrets within the establishment. For eight years this newspaper, through the Freedom of Information Act, has been seeking access to correspondence between the prince and seven government departments between 2004 and 2005.
In February the Guardian will seek to overturn a decision by the attorney-general, Dominic Grieve, to veto publication of the letters. As for their contents, we know only that in the government’s own assessment, publishing them would “seriously damage” the prince’s future position as king by revealing his pointed opinions. Some former ministers deny his so-called meddling has damaged his standing.
“I welcome the fact that he is so engaged in matters of culture and public policy more broadly,” says Tessa Jowell, a minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, “and he, and I am sure any other minister he dealt with, were absolutely clear about the status of his approach which was not in any way intended to undermine or over-ride the normal process of policy determination.”
Nick Brown received letters from the heir to the throne while he was a Labour minister in the departments of agriculture and work. “His views were always constructive, always measured and always well thought through. I genuinely enjoyed the correspondence and the conversations.”
But other prominent former ministers are defensive on the subject, and according to the diaries of Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former director of communications, the then prime minister was exasperated and at times enraged by what he saw as the prince’s attempt to “play politics” with him.
The architect Lord Rogers has said that so determined are the prince’s interventions in construction projects in the capital, he in effect enjoys a veto over major planning decisions.
Margaret Hodge, the chair of the Commons public accounts committee, has described the arrangement that allows the prince to pay no corporation tax on his Duchy of Cornwall income as “shockingly wrong”.
Yet if he will remain controversial to many, and has not been widely loved since the fairytale early days of his first marriage, a fairytale long since revealed to have been illusory, the prince is slowly winning back public affection. After terrible approval ratings for a decade after Diana’s death, recent polls have at last placed him above Prince William as the nation’s favoured choice to succeed the Queen.
Age has softened the prince’s image, and he has also become a grandfather, which doesn’t hurt. “I think Prince Charles’s clear success as a father and the affection of his sons towards him has done an enormous amount to redeem people’s affection for him,” says the royal biographer Robert Lacey.
“It seems extraordinary now that when Lord Spencer got up in [Westminster] Abbey [at Diana’s funeral], he was effectively denouncing Charles as a parent.”
A greatly happier second marriage has brought some peace to a man made miserable by his first, and who could be prone to peevishness and self-pity when comprehensively outshone by Diana. Camilla and Charles do not, according to intimates, spend quite as much time together in private as they do in public — she is said to find his earnestness trying, and spends a lot of time with girlfriends at her own country estate but their bond is unforced and real.
In a speech during his Indian tour this week, Charles jokingly referred to the Duchess, with evident affection, as his Mehbooba or “beloved”.
Having endured a lonely and isolated childhood, a destructive first marriage and a complicated relationship with the public, the question is whether Charles can find contentment at last as he draws closer to the throne. Some fear not. There was controversy when the author of a recent authorised profile in Time magazine revealed that a member of the royal household had told her Charles feared the “prison shades” closing on him when he becomes king. Clarence House insisted this was not the prince’s view.
A changing role performing more of the Queen’s duties will certainly demand “a different species of political judgment”, according to Dr Bob Morris, a constitutional expert based at University College London. “The more he becomes prominent as the heir, the more that kind of behaviour comes under question. There is some evidence that he has been stubborn about these matters, but I am sure he takes the point.”
But while it may be restrictive, the role of king is hardly powerless, says Lacey. “Let us not underestimate the causes for which the Queen has campaigned, like the Commonwealth, the Church of England and Christianity.”
Satisfaction may also come with time, says Seward. “I think one of his great mantras is that in time, people will understand. And really this man was talking about organic food 40 years ago, and the ozone layer. He was a man ahead of his time, and I think he still is. His worry for the planet was absolutely justified, and I think in 20 years people will say, ‘My God, Prince Charles was right’.” Except by then, he is highly likely to be King Charles.
