Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (5 page)

In Britain, that prospect looks more distant still. In 1969, when pollsters first began to ask treasonous questions about whether the country might be better off without the Windsors, about 20 percent of respondents answered yes. That number for years held remarkably steady, apart from a few small surges in republicanism fueled by royal missteps and mishaps and skirmishes in the Wars of the Waleses, the bitter conflict that consumed Charles and Diana. In the immediate aftershock of Diana’s death, anti-monarchy feelings, which might have been expected to swell, instead plunged sharply. If republicanism failed to flourish, the monarchy lost active support, too. The British Social Attitudes survey (BSA) tracked these developments from 1983, when 86 percent of Britons said it was important to retain the monarchy, through royal doldrums in 2006, when that figure declined to 59 percent. Yet by 2012 the picture had changed again, and dramatically. An Ipsos-MORI poll ahead of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee registered another precipitous fall in republican sentiment, but this time against a corresponding and protracted resurgence in royal popularity.
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By 2013, a full 75 percent of respondents to the BSA survey believed the monarchy indispensable.
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That recovery is remarkable if you consider its context. Politics is in bad odor. Banking and journalism smell worse. Faith in the police and in that most benign of fireside companions, the BBC, is dented. Churches have struggled to adjust to social change, mired in scandal, their pews sparsely populated. And it’s the same everywhere you look. Across the globe, trust in big institutions is eroding. Strong government has become an oxymoron in most democratic nations. In the messy aftermath of the Arab Spring and amid the globalization of antiglobalization movements, anger rather than pride more reliably brings people onto the streets.

In Spain that rage burned bright against a monarch who had been revered for his role in returning the country to democracy after the death of dictator Francisco Franco. After King Juan Carlos took an ill-timed holiday in the maul of the Eurozone crisis and saw his daughter Princess Cristina embroiled as a witness in a corruption investigation into her husband’s business dealings, support for the crown declined and Juan Carlos abdicated in favor of his son Felipe. (Cristina was subsequently charged with tax fraud; through lawyers both she and her husband, Inaki Urdangarín, denied wrongdoing.) The institution of monarchy is no more proof against the spirit of the age than any other.

Yet crowds still turn out to cheer the Windsors. A million pressed into central London for the 2011 wedding of William and Kate. Tens of thousands squeezed into Wellington’s Civic Square and tens of thousands more gathered at Sydney Opera House to glimpse the pair during their 2014 tour of New Zealand and Australia. “I’m a royalist from way back,’’ said an onlooker called Caroline Mumford, waiting outside the opera house. “It’s really in my blood, it’s about actually seeing Kate, her beauty and her radiance—she’s a breath of fresh air. And William, we mustn’t forget him.”
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So often did Kate’s photograph grace front pages during the trip that a reader felt moved to write to the editor of the London
Times
on the day his newspaper failed to carry her image. “Sir, Wednesday’s paper did not have a photo of the Duchess of Cambridge. I do hope she is all right.”
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Like the mother-in-law she never met, Kate contributes a glamour the Windsor genes never matched, and that means that, like Diana, she sometimes seems to absorb the light rather than refracting it.

The Queen, however, is rarely occluded, whether by shining youth or rain clouds. Sodden throngs huddled along the Thames for her Diamond Jubilee pageant to witness the monarch, then eighty-six, brave a two-hour sail standing and waving from the prow of a barge, in a numbing downpour that sent six people aboard the accompanying flotilla to hospital with hypothermia. “I have to be seen to be believed,” she has said.
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In that spirit, the Windsors range widely, touring factories and stores, schools and hospitals; attending events, cutting ribbons, unveiling plaques, working rope lines and rooms full of people, being seen and fostering belief. As the Queen and her consort wind down with age, opting for shorter-haul trips and taking on a lighter palette of public duties, the two generations below them are stepping up to the mark. In October 2013, after tutelage from his father in the intricacies of conducting investitures, including a practice session with a sword specially transported to Birkhall for the lesson, Prince William for the first time stood in for the Queen at a Buckingham Palace ceremony to confer honors. The following month, Prince Charles made his debut presiding in place of his mother at the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

This was a particularly delicate assignment, part of the extended choreography designed to accustom Commonwealth members to acceptance of Charles as the next head of the organization—an outcome that is not automatic, but will be decided by Commonwealth leaders when his mother dies. The voluntary association of independent countries faces its own challenges if it is to endure much beyond the second Elizabethan age. A reworking of vestiges of Empire as a vehicle for empowerment rather than subjugation, its members are bound by a charter committing them to democracy, open government, and the rule of law. Yet as palace officials watched from behind spread fingers, the Prince found himself conducting the ceremonial opening of a leaders’ summit hosted by Sri Lanka, amid international protests against the country’s bloody human rights abuses and a state crackdown on the media trying to cover the meeting. It was, says a Clarence House insider drily, “one of the friskier CHOGMs of recent years.”

This book will give new insight into Charles’s foreign missions and the deployment of royal soft power not just to promote British interests and maintain the Commonwealth, but to tread where government does not dare. To the Dalai Lama and his supporters, the Prince is a champion. He is venerated in Armenia. Romanians embrace him as their own, and not just because Charles claims descent from Vlad the Impaler, the fifteenth-century ruler on whom Bram Stoker purportedly based his fanged fictional character Dracula. “I do have a bit of a stake in the country,” jokes the Prince, not infrequently. He owns two properties in Transylvania and lobbies for the preservation of the region’s traditional villages.

Middle Eastern royals, unimpressed by the usual ranks of diplomats, open to Charles as an equal: “He’s there doing something nobody else can do,” said a source during the Prince’s February 2014 trip to Saudi Arabia. Charles has been widely pictured stepping his way through a sword dance—“He loves dressing up and dancing,” says a friend—but this is not what the source meant. The Prince has been a great supporter of the UK intelligence services. He volunteered to be their first royal patron and came up with the idea of their internal awards scheme, offering a way to recognize good work among professionals whose job means they must hide their lights. Britain’s domestic and international intelligence agencies—the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the electronic intelligence agency GCHQ, provided a statement for this biography: “His Royal Highness’s engagement with the intelligence services is hugely appreciated by the members of the three agencies and warmly welcome.” Later in this book I will give exclusive insights into the nature and scope of that engagement. “He’s incredible; he’s a huge asset,” says an official from Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Given such rave reviews and his family’s buoyant fortunes, you might think that the Prince would sit high in public affections, and he is gaining in approval as he performs more head-of-state duties. Yet polls still show him as a weak link, squeezed between his unassailable mother and the younger generation’s allure. He may not be hated, but he’s not much loved either, except in republican circles, where he is hailed as a walking, talking argument for an elected head of state. So is Charles really a liability to the monarchy, to democracy, to himself?

Over the following pages, I aim to answer those questions and to look forward to a future more likely than not to see him enthroned. To do so means revealing the Prince in all his complexity, the humanitarian urges that drive him, and the caprices and compulsions that imperil his record. I’ll highlight his extraordinary achievements and sometimes equally extraordinary mistakes, explain the culture and influences that produced someone capable of such extremes, and try to delineate the scale of ambitions that mean he will never be content to be just a figurehead. And to answer one question immediately: one reason the mature meat of this story, like the mutton he champions, remains undervalued is that he can be, and not infrequently is, his own worst enemy.

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Charles looks like the ultimate insider, born with a whole canteen of silver spoons in his mouth and, since the death of his grandfather in 1952, only one rung below the very apex of the establishment. Yet that privilege—or life sentence—has doomed him to never feel part of the commonality, but always at a distance, watched and watching. His sense of alienation is palpable. “I try to put myself in other people’s position and because I drive about the country endlessly, I’ve often thought about the lives of people in the places I pass, the streets,” he told me.
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Other members of his family seem more easily to accept their lot. “People say to me, ‘Would you like to swap your life with me for 24 hours? Your life must be very strange,’” says his bluff brother Prince Andrew. “But of course I have not experienced any other life. It’s not strange to me. The same way with the Queen. She has never experienced anything else.”
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If offered a life swap for twenty-four hours, Charles would jump at the chance. Instead, he seeks out guides to the planet he can never fully inhabit. Thus it was that in 1985 he arrived at my then place of work, the
Economist
, for a lunch with “people of his age.” His request—or command—excluded me. I was too junior and, like him, alien. I wouldn’t have breathed easy in the thin air of the fourteenth-floor executive dining room. An American educated in Britain, for the most part at a grammar school and then a redbrick university, I believed in meritocracy—not just that it was a good idea but that we were living it. The scales fell from my eyes after I joined the
Economist
, working alongside men and a handful of women all but a few of whom seemed to have emerged from the same cozy nest of elite schools and Oxbridge colleges. Three decades later, class still mottles British life. The nation’s quality press, like many other key institutions, remains overwhelmingly white, male, and privileged, its workforce simultaneously exemplifying and helping to perpetuate structural and cultural impediments to social mobility. One of the most potent arguments against the monarchy is that it acts as guarantor of the dysfunctional status quo. You have only to watch the political elite groping for connection to ordinary voters and outsourcing their communications to tabloid editors, or spend time around British troops and observe the frequency with which ranks and accents tally, to understand how profound the dysfunction is.

The
Economist
has always been even posher than the rest of the quality press. Back then quite a few of the writers had country piles and owned smoking jackets, sufficiently old-money to look down on the royal family as German arrivistes. Our glass and concrete ivory tower—a piece of new brutalist architecture the Prince surely abhorred—hardly seemed the place to look for clues to the real world. Yet this was in most respects a benign and civilized environment. My colleagues were brilliant, the best of the British—and Charles urgently needed to tap their wisdom.

Four years earlier, a series of events had changed the course of his life: his marriage to Lady Diana Spencer on July 29, 1981, and before that inner-city rioting in England—in April in Brixton, South London, and, just weeks ahead of his wedding, in the Handsworth area of Birmingham, Leed’s Chapeltown district, Toxteth in Liverpool, and in Sheffield. “I remember when there were these appalling riots, I just felt ‘how can we find ways of giving these characters more opportunity because the whole thing is based on frustration and alienation,’” he said later.
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(He often refers to people as “characters,” an unfortunate phrase that reflects his own alienation.)

That impulse started the process that would transform his rudderless Prince’s Trust into an effective interventionist organization that proudly claims to help more than fifty-five thousand young people every year to set up businesses, or move into education, training, or employment. The charity has evolved into the least controversial element of his astonishingly broad and idiosyncratic portfolio of works. In the 1980s, in tandem with its founder, the Trust was figuring out its role in a highly politicized context. This wasn’t easy, not least because of the convention that the sovereign—and by extension her heirs—should remain above politics.

In one important respect, the Prince’s Trust and Margaret Thatcher’s government sang from the same hymn sheet. Both lauded the spirit of enterprise. Still, the state had clearly and comprehensively failed the young people the Trust scooped up and gave practical assistance to in order to develop that spirit. Thatcherites ascribed the failure to a welfare system that cosseted and infantilized; the left ascribed the failure to Thatcherism, which was busily dismantling parts of the welfare system and restructuring nationalized industries that were no longer fit to compete. Britain’s manufacturing base shrank while the country’s first and as yet only female Prime Minister held power, from 17.62 percent of GDP in 1979 to 15.18 percent when she left office eleven years later. In the same period, the ranks of the UK population deemed officially poor swelled from 13.4 percent to 22.2 percent.
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“I was just trying to find ways of reacting to the situation so as unemployment grew—and it was three million or something—and as these traditional industries were shut down, what on earth are we going to find to replace these forms of employment for so many people? It was all taking so long for anything else to spring up so I just thought whatever we could do in a small way would be better than nothing,” said Charles.
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What he could do for others in a small way began to solve in a big way the conundrum that had tormented him for years: how to put his non-job of apprentice monarch to good use. Yet this course was fraught with difficulty for a man literally not of the world, a fact that quickly became apparent to his hosts at the
Economist
.