Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (8 page)

The Prince has no hesitation in exporting his ideas and obsessions abroad, to Commonwealth countries or places like Romania for which he simply feels an affinity. At home, he also sees it as his job to “promote and protect the country’s enduring traditions, virtues and excellence,” whether through interfaith work or patronages or a focus on rural Britain that he feels is otherwise lacking. Cig Mynydd Cymru (the name translates as “Welsh mountain meat”), the little butcher’s shop in Perrott Street, is the kind of enterprise he wants to see thrive, a cooperative formed in 2006 when local farming families came together to figure out if they could market quality meats at affordable prices. Only John and Celia Thomas from Penrhiw have followed the Prince’s lead to take their herds organic—and risk the price premium that entails in a low-income region—but all of the meat on sale is traceable and distances are short between pastures, slaughterhouses, and customers.

Waiting for the Prince’s arrival amid the hum of chiller cabinets full of beef, chicken, duck, lamb, pork, and, of course, mutton, and a tempting display of crusty pies and Welsh Scotch eggs, John Thomas expresses gratitude for the Prince’s advocacy on behalf of small-scale and traditional farming. “He has promoted mutton, which has been a neglected meat for many years. He has done a great deal for farming, and recently for wool, which is a neglected byproduct of the farming industry,” says Thomas. The Prince in his estimation is doing a good job, whatever the job might be. “Rather than struggling to find a role, he’s found a very practical role and he’s to be admired for it.”

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Finally the royal visitor arrives, pushing into the butcher’s shop through a pandemonium of cheers. He’s wearing a suit with a patched pocket and one of his ancient pairs of shoes. He still affects the severe parting of his hair, low above his left ear, he’s maintained since childhood. “I’ve fought him tooth and nail for years. I just want him to move it, up or bloody down, somewhere, because it’s always been in the same place,” says Emma Thompson.
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The bald patch that had already started to show by the time of his first marriage has now expanded to a tonsure. He looks more monk than the figure he has become: the knight errant of the Realms. Camilla calls her husband a “workaholic” and not just because of the hours he keeps. At this moment, using his position to do something he believes in—something he believes is doing good—he is giving in to an apparently benign addiction. Although he quickly buckles down to business, such as it is, he will overrun the time allotted in his schedule for this stop because he is fascinated.

He can talk to anyone but feels most at home with country people such as his hosts at the shop and with the teenagers he met earlier at the Prince’s Trust in Cardiff. He quizzes Thomas and other members of the collective about marketing and pricing, and tells them about a training scheme for butchers at Dumfries House, teaching them how to cook the products they sell. Graduates of the course are reporting a 20 percent sales increase, says the Prince, because they are able to suggest recipes to their customers and tempt them into trying different meats and cuts. “You need to know exactly what the constellation of the animal should be.” Then he’s off on another tack, about whether there’s any demand for the flesh of old ewes and talking about his “mutton renaissance” again. “I’m trying to tell everyone just how marvelous mutton really is.”

The Prince plays the old ham at the butcher’s, entertaining his audience and mugging for the camera produced to immortalize the occasion. “If the photographers weren’t interested, that would be the time to start worrying,” the Prince said in 1982.
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This was a brave declaration from someone who had always disliked media attention, even before that attention soured. Aged fourteen, he walked into a bar and ordered a cherry brandy. It was the sort of escapade that for other teenagers would have brought few if any consequences, and he only did so to take shelter from crowds who had recognized him. Unfortunately for Charles, a journalist inside the bar recognized him, too, and filed a story. The incident made headlines, the licensee and the barmaid who served him faced charges, later dropped, the Prince had privileges at school revoked, and, worst of all, he saw his royal protection officer sacked from the squad for allowing the princely misdemeanor.

But the Prince endures, and even encourages, press coverage about his official and charity work because he understands its utility. “One must grimace and bear it,” he says.
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When the Welsh butchers offer him a plate of faggots, tasty meat patties formed from chopped pork and offal, he adopts an expression of comical alarm: “Which bit of the animal is this? Don’t tell me it’s the bits nobody else wanted.” Asked to bite into a beef burger by the photographer, he declines, laughing. “Forgive me, I’m not going to do my wide-mouthed frog for you.”

For most working royals, there are two main aims to such visits, at home or abroad: to provide a boost to their hosts, in terms of positive reinforcement and publicity; and to promote the monarchy, by being seen and believed. Like most things the Windsors do, there’s little hard information available to measure impacts scientifically by balancing business or funding generated against the disruption and costs incurred. The Prince’s Duchy of Cornwall income covers his and Camilla’s official activities and those of his sons and daughter-in-law, but not the bill for the upkeep of Clarence House or for official travel, which amounted in total to $2.55 million in the year to April 2014, drawn from public funds. Wales Week in 2012 incurred two transport bills of over $16,000 each. In 2013 none of the individual journeys breached this threshold so were not itemized. They included a variety of different transport methods including a helicopter journey for Camilla to Porthcawl. There’s an additional cost to taxpayers for security. A request to the local Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council about the expense of policing the Prince’s visit to Treharris produces only the figure for the road closures ($24) and the installation of the crash barriers ($240).

Without a complete rundown, it’s tough to judge value for money, and even then many of the benefits are intangibles. Celia Thomas of Cig Mynydd Cymru e-mailed: “We all thoroughly enjoyed the visit and meeting the Prince of Wales, and everyone is still talking about it. We have made a poster with some of the lovely photographs taken on the day, which is proudly displayed on the wall of the shop. We found the Prince so easy to chat to and he showed a genuine interest in what we are doing. He even asked about our shop refurbishment when he was talking to Dai Havard, our MP, the other day. There certainly was a huge benefit to the shop and a huge boost to morale.”

At the time, the wider populace of Treharris also appears delighted. Ben and Ryan, who get to meet the Prince when he goes on a short walkabout, pronounce him “a-mazin’,” and he departs with spoils: a Styrofoam box of choice cuts, a raft of fresh information about farming in Wales, and a set of questions and follow-up actions arising from the conversation, all immediately entrusted to an aide. But the publicity will disappoint. Only local newspapers pick up the story.

By contrast, William and Kate’s trip to Australia and New Zealand the following year will generate worldwide saturation coverage, including daily transmissions of images of beauty spots. The bill for the nine-day New Zealand leg tots up to some $781,500 and is met by taxpayers at the destination, like most official travel by royals to the Realms. Tourism chiefs in Australia and New Zealand proclaim the publicity beyond price. For the monarchy it certainly is. “I’m officially no longer a republican,” tweeted Patrick Gower, the political editor of the Wellington-based TV station 3 News. The journalist may not have been entirely serious, but his compatriots, like their Australian counterparts, succumbed to the charm offensive in droves.

The Prince cannot hope to match the poster children of the monarchy, and not just because of his greater age. Charles knew what it was to be overshadowed from the moment he married Diana. On the couple’s 1983 perambulations around Australia, he ran his wife a poor second. “So infatuated was the crowd at every walkabout that as [the royal couple] got out to work the crowd, an involuntary moan would rise from that part of the crowd which turned out to be nearest to the Prince and furthest from the Princess,” recounts Jonathan Dimbleby.
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It is an experience already familiar to his son William, cast in the shade by Kate’s dazzle, but there the similarity ends. William is proud of Kate as Charles never was of Diana, and the Cambridges work as a team in a way the Waleses never managed. William is more easily photogenic than his dad, too. “Never forget that William is a Spencer,” says a Buckingham Palace official. “William and Harry are rock stars around the world,” says former British Prime Minister John Major, who became the boys’ financial guardian after Diana’s death.
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The Princess lives on in her sons.

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“I hope this isn’t an anticlimax. I can only imagine it must be,” says the Prince as he arrives at Ebbw Fawr Learning Community to find that some of the people gathered outside the new state school have been waiting since early morning for a glimpse of royalty. It’s a refrain familiar to anyone who has heard him give speeches. “I am immensely grateful to you all for taking the time to be here this afternoon—even if it’s only out of curiosity!” he has said more than once.
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“Ladies and Gentlemen, I am enormously impressed to find so many of you here this evening prepared to consider the role of investors and, in particular, pension funds in the move to a sustainable economy. I can only take it as a compliment to four of my charities which operate in this area—unless, of course, you are all here out of curiosity as to what I might say next!” he tells another gathering.
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“Well, Ladies and Gentlemen,” he greets another group, “I’m so glad I’ve got this opportunity to join you all this afternoon. I had this dreadful thought that all I had done was to stop you doing all sorts of other things you’d much rather be doing!”
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Self-deprecation may be a good icebreaker, but the Prince’s insecurities are real. Excitement and affection greet him wherever he walks a rope line or works a room, yet for the glass-half-empty Prince, the crowds might always be bigger and the coverage better. Though he observes William and Harry with intense paternal pride, the emotion is marbled with a little jealousy and a wider vein of frustration, not because he begrudges their popularity but because of what he could do with such backing. Unlike his more charismatic sons and glistening daughter-in-law, over and above being a royal, he is a missionary with urgent messages to impart. There are bigger issues at stake than just the survival of the monarchy.

His visit to the butcher’s shop Cig Mynydd Cymru has been slotted into the schedule to flag up the dangers of industrialized farming, the imbalances created by ill-thought-out subsidies, the perception he sets out in
Harmony
that “modern high-tech agriculture” risks turning “farming into an arms race against Nature, excluding everything from the land except the highly bred crops designed to be resistant to powerful pesticides and grown using industrial production methods.” (The Prince invariably refers to nature with a capital N, and as “she” or “her,” in conscious opposition to mainstream culture. The Enlightenment “objectified” nature, he complains. “‘She,’” he writes sadly in
Harmony
, “became ‘it.’”)
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At his next stop he zeroes in on another preoccupation: inequality. He has come to Ebbw Fawr to launch the first Wales-based program run by the education charity Teach First. In partnership with the Welsh government, Teach First plans to recruit highly skilled graduates to work in schools located in impoverished areas, giving additional assistance to six thousand disadvantaged pupils each year. The Prince strolls through the school connecting easily with the dignitaries who have turned out in Sunday finery to meet him and more easily still with the pupils.

Teach First defines its mission as ending inequality in education. “How much you achieve in life should not be determined by how much your parents earn,” declares its website. “Yet in the UK, it usually is.” The Prince is the charity’s patron. He sees no contradiction between its mission and his position. Indeed the phrase resonates. He believes that who your parents are should not restrict how much you can achieve—even if you’re the Prince of Wales.

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Back at Llwynywermod, it’s not much of a stretch for Charles to imagine himself in a parallel universe, living out his days as a gentleman farmer. His residence in Carmarthenshire is large but by no means palatial, rustic rather than grand, with lime plaster walls and slate roofing. Like increasing numbers of rural landowners, he even rents out rooms—when he’s not in residence—to paying guests.

Like them, the Prince is transient, arriving for at most a few consecutive days. To simulate homeliness, he always brings with him certain essentials: framed photographs of Camilla and his children, his canvases and paints, and a cushion, more than once paraded by the British press as a symbol of indulgence but better understood as a support for the Prince’s troublesome spine if not as his version of a security blanket. As a schoolboy sent away to board from the age of eight, he poignantly wrote of missing his “homes.”
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As an adult, he has accepted a life of permanent homesickness, shuttling between houses that he inhabits but, apart from two cottages in Romania, doesn’t strictly speaking own. His regular haunts include Llwynywermod, Highgrove and Tamarisk on the Scilly Isles (all property of the Duchy of Cornwall); Dumfries House (owned by a trust); family residences such as Birkhall (which he rents from his mother) and the other mansions on the Balmoral estate as well as Sandringham; and Crown properties such as the complex on the Mall that incorporates the Prince’s London operational base, since 1988 St. James’s Palace and, from 2002 onwards, expanded to encompass neighboring Clarence House.