Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (2 page)

The distortions seem harmless, but combine to create a reputation for dissipation that is hard to dispel. Most people believe at least some of the falsehoods in circulation about the royals, not least because some fictions slide into fact. For nineteen months after her wedding, the Duchess of Cambridge—Kate—found herself declared pregnant on a weekly basis. Then reality caught up with invention (though the twins, heralded on the cover of at least three separate magazines, failed to materialize). She gave birth to her son in July 2013; by the spring of 2014, the pregnancy rumors, again involving twins, had been dusted off to be replayed during her official visit to New Zealand. A wine tasting and a white-water boat ride provided Kate with the opportunity mutely to scotch the story, if only temporarily. No sooner had her second pregnancy been announced in September 2014—and although the statement clearly said she was expecting a child—than sources declared the royal womb to be accommodating twin girls.

In the absence of news, editors try to change the narrative to retain interest. For Kate, most often depicted as a blissed-out madonna, a paragon of young motherhood, that meant her March 2014 trip to the Maldives with William—and the couple’s decision to travel without George, then seven months old—provided Britain’s mass-market
Daily Mail
with an opportunity to test out an alternative story line. “ROYALS JET OFF—INTO A STORM OF PROTEST,” declared its print and online editions; “the [couple’s] decision sparked a storm on social networking sites Mumsnet, Netmums and Twitter.”
10

It was a manufactured tempest in a child’s teacup. Netmums posted an item inviting comment on the royal jolly only at the request of the
Mail
. There had been no discussion before that, and the thread generated little reaction among the website’s 1.2 million members. Of forty-two comments in total, only two could be construed as negative. After Netmums protested that the story was inaccurate, the
Mail
deleted the reference to the site from the online article. Had there been outrage on Mumsnet? Not according to Kate O’Donovan, Mumsnet’s head of communications, who e-mailed that there were “just over 300 responses, which isn’t really a ‘storm’ by Mumsnet’s standards. Not at all unanimous in criticism of the couple, and it’s worth noting that about one third of the thread comes after (and so in response to) the
Mail
piece being published.”
11
The swell of Twitter reaction also appears to have been triggered by the
Mail
piece that purported to describe it.

This isn’t just a function of cynical journalism. The problem for and with the monarchy is that much of what it does, when things are going right, has little news value. Yet the royals need to publicize their work, such as it is, for fear of being accused of laziness and also because much of that work involves drawing publicity to worthy causes or flying the flag for the nations they represent. As a result, there is a constant low-level struggle between the palace press teams, which vainly hope to satisfy reporters with a thin gruel of visits and speeches and photo opportunities, and the media organizations, which have to find something newsworthy in the soup.

In 1985, the
Guardian
dispatched a young reporter to Australia to cover a visit to the country by the Prince and Princess of Wales. Now the editor of the left-leaning
Guardian
newspaper and website, Alan Rusbridger remembers the assignment as “the most awful job I’ve ever done.… It was just sort of humiliating as a journalist. You were bussed from place to place and stood behind a table and something would happen, there would be a ribbon and a pair of scissors and then you would be bussed back and then there would be thirty of you on the bus and your job was to try and concoct something at the end of the day that was not as banal as I’ve just described it. And it was everything you hated about them and our fascination with them so I just ended up writing four pieces from Australia which were all about what it was like to cover them.”
12

Before Diana came on the scene, most serious journalists were spared such ignominy; their editors abandoned royal coverage to the tabloids, whose intrusions were minor by later standards. “Did you get a picture of my left earhole?” Prince Philip, sailing in Scotland, shouted at a dogged photographer in 1962.
13
Some of the popular press chose to publish a photograph of Philip’s left ear with his commentary.

Higher-minded media disdained such trivia. When Anthony Holden, a journalist for the British broadsheet
Sunday Times
, decided the Prince’s 1977 trip to Canada might make good fodder for a piece, the startled subject of his interest asked, “What on earth are
you
doing here?”
14
As the only writer trailing Charles, Holden enjoyed near-unfettered access. It was the same story later the same year on a sweep through South America. Holden went on to write three biographies of Charles, at ten-year intervals, each chronicling his increasing disenchantment with the Prince and his media handlers. The feelings were mutual; Holden’s second biography revealed strains in the royal marriage that remained largely concealed until the convulsive events of 1992: the publication of Andrew Morton’s book
Diana: Her True Story
and the subsequent separation of Charles and Diana. But Holden’s biographies also charted the changing challenges of royal media management. No longer might a journalist hope for the ad hoc dinners and head-to-heads with Charles that Holden enjoyed on the 1977 trip. Instead, after Charles’s marriage to Diana made royal coverage a commercial imperative for most organizations, the author found himself “in Australia for the bicentennial celebrations of 1988 … one of 200 writers and photographers, as many as 70 of whom had flown out from Britain, permitted only to observe the couple from behind ropes, at a safe distance.”
15
More than 450 journalists were accredited for William and Kate’s 2014 tour of the Antipodes.

Distance has bred distance, of the wrong kind. Monarchy matters but only the republican press consistently acknowledges that fact. Much royal coverage is lobotomized fluff that understands the Windsors only as the cast of a long-running reality TV show—showbiz but not necessarily even showbiz royalty—or conceals an edge of resentment common to all celebrity reporting. Stories are spun from the thinnest of materials.

Relations between royals and reporters haven’t always been fraught. For a period in the 1990s, the Prince opened up to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, whose book and film have remained key resources for researchers as a result but have never been updated. Now Charles is a born-again virgin—hence his concerns about giving “interviews.” It took a sustained campaign to persuade Clarence House, and the Prince himself, that allowing me access to profile him for
Time
might, from their perspective, do more good than harm. I wasn’t promising puffery but substance and balance—and that inevitably meant there would be elements in the story they didn’t like. My counterargument was that puff pieces don’t move the dial on public opinion.

That opinion still owes a good deal to Diana. She understood the power of imagery and the wounds that a well-placed leak could inflict. She, too, cultivated special relationships among the ranks of the media. Her friends, old and new, spread the word about her husband’s derelictions. His camp fought back, but without the same skills and hampered by a principal who could never match Diana’s luster or her bloodlust. A substantial minority of Britons still supports an idea she boosted in her magnificently dissident 1995 interview for the BBC’s
Panorama
: that the succession should skip Charles and pass directly to their son William.
16
Her estranged husband may not actually want to be king, she suggested: “Being Prince of Wales produces more freedom now, and being king would be a little bit more suffocating.” “Would it be your wish that when Prince William comes of age that he were to succeed the Queen rather than the current Prince of Wales?” asked interviewer Martin Bashir. “My wish is that my husband finds peace of mind, and from that follows other things, yes,” answered the Princess, permitting herself a small smile as she delivered a line that would haunt her husband forevermore.
17

Eighteen years later, I forgot that smile as I attempted to skewer another widespread myth: that Charles is frustrated by his mother’s refusal to die or stand down and let him take what Diana called “the top job.”
18
Multiple conversations with insiders—his friends, householders, people working for his charities—had led me to the understanding that the opposite was true. For one thing, the Prince doesn’t deal well with death. Despite the comfort his religious and philosophical beliefs should presumably provide, he still mourns, with a startlingly raw grief, his grandmother, his great-uncle Louis Mountbatten, and mentors such as Laurens van der Post—a man of many self-descriptions including explorer and anthropologist and too loose a relationship with the truth to trust his self-descriptions—and Kathleen Raine, a poet. Charles dreads the deaths of his parents.

The Queen’s grand age is not only a source of anxiety for the Prince but, before the start of my research for the
Time
piece, had set in train a difficult process behind the scenes at Clarence House, to make space for Charles to shoulder more of the traditional duties of kingship. He was looking at rationalizing his existing commitments and reining in his impulse to intervene. Instead of extending his hand to fresh beneficiaries and new causes, he was under pressure to cut some existing liege men adrift. This ran counter to his usual instincts and also generated considerable bad blood as courtiers turned on each other in the fight for survival. In all of this, Charles put duty before passion. That was why a member of his household compared the Prince to the growing boy in William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” for whom “shades of the prison-house begin to close” as adulthood nears.

So it was a fair point well made by my informant, but I had reckoned without the acute neuralgia the spirit of Diana still triggers within palace walls. Clarence House swiftly issued a denial of something my piece had not implied because it wasn’t true: that Charles was my unnamed source. “This is not the Prince of Wales’s view and should not be attributed to him as he did not say these words,” said the statement. “The Prince has dutifully supported the Queen all his life and his official duties and charitable work have always run in parallel.”

The denial inadvertently gave the story fresh legs and these days resides in the ether along with all the earlier “Charles-doesn’t-want-to-be-king” stories, inevitably to be recycled at various points in the future, shorn of context.

Charles does want to be king. He also wants to be much, much more, and that’s why he makes such a fascinating subject for a biography.

C
ATHERINE
M
AYER

London, January 2015

Introduction

If thou pretend’st to be a prince like me,

Blame not an act, which should thy pattern be.

I saw the oppressed, and thought it did belong

To a king’s office to redress the wrong:

I brought that succour, which thou ought’st to bring,

And so, in nature, am thy subjects’ king.

Almanzor and Almahide
, John Dryden

The Prince is a polished host. Years of putting strangers at ease have endowed him with a repertoire of useful tricks. His bright eyes never glaze. He listens attentively and squirrels away nuggets of information to nourish future conversations. He matches subject and tone to person with perfect pitch and repays confidences with glimpses into his own life—nothing too intimate, just amusing anecdotes or wry tales of the tribulations of parenting or latterly heartfelt paeans to the joys of grandparenting—to create a sense of connection, of shared experience.

On this particular September evening in 2013, shared experiences threaten to be in short supply. His twenty-four guests hail from France, Poland, Russia, Spain, South Africa, Taiwan, the United States, Uzbekistan, and different corners and conditions of Britain, with little in common apart from the basic fact of humanity and that around half of the people sipping aperitifs in the Tapestry Room at Dumfries House own, between them, an astonishing slice of global wealth. Mischievous members of Charles’s staff have coined a collective term for the moneyed classes that he regularly lures to such dinners: “Bond villains.”

His aides are adamant that all potential donors are subjected to careful health checks, and this contingent certainly appears more inclined to philanthropy than villainy, aiming not to dominate the world but to help it. Guests turn out to be sponsors of worthy causes, backers of foundations, patrons of music and the visual arts. One man describes himself as an art collector. “Any particular kind of art?” “Yes,” he says airily, “art that I like.”

At Dumfries House, artworks by old masters hang alongside watercolors by the oldest-ever heir to the British throne. In 2007, Charles scrambled a consortium to buy the Palladian mansion in Scotland, sparing the building a future that might have seen it sprout ungainly wings as a resort hotel and staying an auction that would have dispersed an unparalleled collection of Thomas Chippendale furniture. Under his auspices, the house has become a heritage attraction, and the estate is a seedbed for his charities and initiatives, all of which gobble up money.

So there is no such thing as a free lunch with the Prince, much less a free dinner at Dumfries House, for all that scenes of careless revelry provide the backdrop for predinner cocktails. The mansion’s original Flemish tapestries, stitched in the early eighteenth century in the Brussels workshop of Leyniers-Reydams, have been sent away for restoration; in their place hang near-perfect replicas across which Bacchus and maidens and minions cavort with the happy abandon that the previous year landed Prince Harry in the news. (“HEIR IT IS,” announced the headline in Britain’s largest red-top tabloid, the
Sun
, above a grainy image of a naked Harry cupping his “crown jewels” during a game of strip poker in a Las Vegas hotel.) A few of this evening’s guests have already opened their wallets to the Prince’s charities. They have been invited to bind them more closely into these organizations. Charles hopes to persuade the rest to follow suit over a visit that includes the dinner, a tour of the house, and, the following day, a vigorous march around the grounds that he leads himself.