Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (15 page)

In choosing to serve Queen and country, he and his older brother, William, followed a path well trodden. Their father and Windsor uncles all spent time in uniform. Only Prince Edward failed to qualify, reportedly to the implacable fury of his father, dropping out in 1987 after only a few months of his training to be a royal marine. “Edward has been put through a terrible ordeal and has no one to speak for him,” said Romy Adlington, who had apparently got to know the Queen’s youngest and most tender son during his undistinguished studies at Cambridge and has been described in press reports as a former girlfriend. “As one of his closest friends, I want the public to know he is a normal human being who has to make an important decision. He doesn’t have the same responsibility as his brothers, yet he still can’t go off and do what he wants. He has often asked me: ‘What’s it like to go for a walk alone in the park? How does it feel to be able to walk into a shop without everyone staring at you?’ That’s all he wants to be able to do.”
27

Charles’s naval career lasted longer—five years—but despite the action-man tag, defense chiefs never risked putting him in the line of danger. “I had a yearning for some sort of action—some sort of constructive,
useful
naval operation where perhaps a medal could be won,” he confided in a letter.
28
That wish would not be satisfied and though he earned pilot wings, he could not fully spread them, restricted to the safest craft and deployments. He proved a proficient pilot, an indifferent seaman, eventually promoted to captain of a minesweeper. His officers appreciated his command, less because of his naval skills than his kindness. They also marveled at his lack of confidence.

Prince Andrew has never appeared troubled by questions about his abilities, or by many questions at all, though he describes himself as insatiably curious. With no small irony, insiders say he owes his self-assurance to the mothering of the Queen, who indulged her second son as she never did her older children and continues to shield him. He took easily to the Navy and benefited from greater leeway to serve than his big brother, as the “spare” rather than the “heir.” Returning from the Falklands War, he found himself greeted less like a veteran than a pop star. “Is it his cheerful charm, his naturalness, his exploits as a helicopter pilot in the Falklands or his roguish reputation with beautiful girls? Or a combination of these that go to make Andrew the most charismatic of the young royals?” This was Andrew Morton in 1983, nine years before the journalist produced a more substantial piece of writing. “His arrival on the scene has given a new meaning to the initials HRH. With Andrew they stand for His Royal Heartthrob.”
29
The only direction for His Royal Heartthrob after such adulation was down. Consigned to a desk job in 1997 and from 2001 out of the Navy as a “full-time working member of the royal family,” as Buckingham Palace describes him, the Prince soon acquired a less flattering nickname, “Air Miles Andy,” reflecting the widespread perception that he was rather more skilled than his elder brother at frivoling—and spending taxpayers’ money to do so.

For nearly a decade after leaving the military, Andrew performed a role of sorts, as Britain’s Special Representative for Trade and Investment, dispatched on missions by the British government to foster business links abroad. On one such trip in 2004 the Duke of York—Andrew has worn the title since marriage to Sarah Ferguson—arrived in Beijing to find a banner festooned across the entrance to the hotel: “WELCOME TO THE DUCK OF YORK.” He roared with laughter. He approached everything in China with similar good cheer, putting in long hours and apparently achieving results for a number of British enterprises, not least in the “the agricultural sector where we want to be able to produce a lot of genetic semen and stock for the [Chinese] pig trade,” as he said at the time.
30
Royal life has never been as glamorous, but to be royal in the twenty-first century is to operate as a salesperson for all manner of products and concepts.

The Duke’s royal status opened doors in the People’s Republic that might not have yielded to mere ministers. Whether his advocacy for Britain can secure deals worth more than the cost of his travel is a moot point, not least since he stood down as trade envoy in 2011. It had become difficult to deploy him as a standard-bearer for Britain after revelations about his links with Jeffrey Epstein, a US financier with whom Andrew continued to frivol after Epstein had served a jail sentence for soliciting prostitution with a minor. Their friendship came under the spotlight in the wake of a 2010 scandal that saw Sarah Ferguson fall for the wiles of Mazher Mahmood, a journalist posing as a businessman. Reportedly some $8 million in the red, the Duchess of York offered to facilitate access to her ex-husband for a fee. Further digging exposed the Yorks’ ties to Epstein, who had given the Duchess money toward clearing her debt and introduced the Duke to young women, including Virginia Roberts, who alleged that Epstein had paid her for sex when she was just fifteen. A photograph taken when Roberts was seventeen shows Andrew with his arm around her. He denied any impropriety, a denial repeated “emphatically” by Buckingham Palace in January 2015 after an anonymous litigant pursuing a civil case related to Epstein lodged papers at a Florida court alleging she had been coerced into sexual relations with the royal. An interview with Roberts in the
Mail on Sunday
alleged three encounters with Andrew.

He had long since retreated to a lower-profile role and though he still undertakes royal engagements and operates a charitable trust, palace insiders admit that the range of possible deployments for him have narrowed further. “Where he was really happy was in the Navy and he should never have left it because he was jolly good at it,” says Charles's friend Nicholas Soames.
31

Yet Andrew had probably given as much as he could to the military. He was good at the practical side of the job but no strategist; his value as a recruiting sergeant—and young royals are among the forces’ best recruiters—had expired. When he left the Navy, he once said wistfully that he would like to have learned a trade—perhaps, he mused, become a plumber—but he wasn’t allowed to do so.

*   *   *

The dream of real-world experience often crops up on Planet Windsor, but the prospect of a royal turning up to fix your leaking closet flange or rod your drains remains remote. Where there’s muck there’s brass, and where there’s brass there’s the possibility of being spattered with accusations of exploiting royal connections for profit.

When Sophie, Countess of Wessex, married into the royal family, she sought to continue her career in public relations. A 2001 expos
é
by Mazher Mahmood in the
News of the World
brought her time in the commercial world to a close. She and her business partner had been lured by the false prospect of business in the Middle East into touting the advantages of hiring a member of the royal family. “When people find we’re working for you, the chances are you’ll get people interested: Oh gosh, they’ve employed the Countess of Wessex’s PR company,” Sophie told Mahmood, whom she believed to be a prospective client.
32

Her husband, Prince Edward, the youngest of the Queen’s sons, also stumbled in the commercial world. As
People
magazine correctly anticipated when he quit the marines, “anguished as his decision was, the greatest trial for Edward lies ahead. Put simply, he doesn’t have a job anymore, and his prospects aren’t at all bright.”
33
Edward didn’t share that assessment. Since royalty is sometimes viewed as a branch of show business, he saw no reason he could not reinvent himself as showbiz royalty. By the time he stepped down as joint managing editor of Ardent Productions in 2002, the television company had certainly made an impact, turning out few programs and no critical or popular successes, but forced to apologize after apparently breaching an agreement by the rest of the British media to avoid dogging Prince William during his studies at St. Andrew’s University. “They’re a sad joke in the industry, really,” an anonymous television executive told the
Guardian
. “As time has gone on, their incompetence has become more and more obvious. There have been very small examples of vanity TV companies before, but not on this scale. Any company, in any industry, that had burned through that much share capital without making a profit would’ve been closed down by its investors years ago.”
34

The limits of Edward’s instincts for light entertainment had been laid bare mere months after he left the Marines, by the most bizarre public relations sally in the Windsors’ history. He cooked up
The Grand Knockout Tournament
, a celebrity revival of a game show called
It’s a Knockout
, held in front of a plywood castle at an English theme park, pitting four teams against each other headed by himself, the Yorks, and Princess Anne. It was, unfortunately, the only show Edward ever masterminded that drew a mass audience, eighteen million in the UK and eventually some four hundred million worldwide. Charles and Diana gave the proceedings a wise, wide berth. Stuart Hall, the presenter of the original game show and coconspirator with Edward in devising the tournament, set the contestants to slapstick challenges and periodically thrust his microphone at the team captains for sound bites. “What are we going for? Gold, gold, gold!” bellowed Edward, but his team only scraped into third place. His sister, by contrast, described her tactics as “cool, calm and collected.” “All this quasi-excitement doesn’t matter a damn to you then,” said Hall. “No, we’re the strong, silent types,” replied Anne.
35

Her team—and Save the Children, the charity whose standard she carried as its president since 1970—emerged the winners. Of the Queen’s children, she is the only one to have tasted success on a regular basis and managed the awkward straddle between royalty and real life with anything approaching ease. Her participation in the tournament marked a rare lapse in her strong and largely silent dealings with the world that saw her cap her career as an equestrian competitor by earning a gold medal at the 1971 European Eventing Championships and two silver at the same contest in 1975 as well as competing at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. “If it doesn’t fart or eat hay, she isn’t interested,” her father quipped, but having a particular skill and an unremitting focus helped Anne to find and maintain direction where her brothers could not. She continues to work with horses, breeding them at her Gatcombe Park estate and holding several horse trials there including the annual Festival of British Eventing. She designs eventing courses, for Gatcombe Park and external clients, and runs the estate as a working farm, all the while managing her royal engagements and charitable patronages with brusque efficiency.

Her children have been spared a similar balancing act. Anne declined royal titles for them, enabling son Peter and daughter Zara to live as subjects of the Crown, rather than its representatives. Peter is a banker; Zara an equestrian who has at least equaled if not surpassed her mother’s considerable achievements. There are already signs that the royal first cousins have been handed a rougher deal. Andrew’s website states that his eldest daughter, Princess Beatrice, “works full time in business”; younger daughter, Princess Eugenie, is described as “pursuing a career in the art world.” She has moved to New York, which may give her some respite from media attention, but although both princesses are also patrons of charities, it is their social engagements that are fodder for the tabloids. Edward and Sophie’s children, Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn, born in 2003 and 2007 respectively, are likely to face similar difficulties and dilemmas.

William and Harry, meanwhile, must make choices that long ago set a previous heir and spare on widely divergent courses. William knows how limited his career options are, but is essaying a compromise, becoming an air ambulance pilot for a charity based in East Anglia. Harry is eking out his military service at a desk job as he plots his next moves. Both brothers understand that traditional royal duties—cutting ribbons, launching ships, supporting grandmum by keeping mum—may not be enough to sustain popularity or their own sanity. Today’s Royal Heartthrob is potentially tomorrow’s hapless royal headache. Their father has carved out another option, but after watching His Royal Humanitarian struggle with his critics and his own self-doubt, the boys are seeking a third way.

In this they are also guided by their mother’s example, both in terms of what they would hope to achieve and the remorseless attention they are determined to escape. They were too young when she died to grasp the true dynamics of their parents’ relationship, the dysfunction each brought to the marriage, or the ways in which its collapse played out in private and in the media. She has been dead for more than seventeen years, but her influence still pervades every corner of royal life.

CHAPTER 4

The Knave of Hearts

They are both naturals; they have rhythm, posture, neat footwork. He mastered the moves at an early age—everyone in his family learns ballroom dancing and Highland reels. On the dance floor he has discovered one of the few environments where he can express himself freely. His wife studied ballet, and harbored fleeting ambitions to continue to a professional level. She’s taller than her husband, even in her stocking feet, but the difference isn’t jarring. Once buttery, with plump cheeks and ample d
é
colletage, she has become, like him, spare. Her asymmetrical turquoise-colored evening gown exposes one fleshless shoulder and a jutting collarbone. As the band strikes up Stevie Wonder’s paean of wonder “Isn’t She Lovely?,” the pair begins to whirl. Fellow guests at the Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne stay seated, applauding the display and cheering small flourishes that see the man spin his partner like a ballerina. It’s a polished performance but also a strange, strained one. The couple wrestles around the room, the sum of two graceful presences oddly graceless. There’s no chemistry. Charles and Diana may be in step, but they are not in harmony.