Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (20 page)

Organizational weaknesses in that kitchen sometimes impel Charles’s charities and initiatives to retrench or embark on more thoroughgoing reinventions including name changes and mergers. So prolific is his brand of philanthropy that nobody at Clarence House can say how many charities he has founded over the years, though the count certainly stands at well over twenty-five.

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Charles’s ideas-first, feasibility-second approach has never been checked by the realities that impact ordinary start-ups. As soon as he is seized by a notion, he asks several different people to begin work on realizing his vision. His position and resources mean that his brainchildren have a better chance of entering the world than if they were conceived by a commoner, and have sometimes been kept alive when other operations would falter and die.

Yet the glaring systemic weaknesses of the court also make the achievements of the Prince and his courtiers all the more astonishing. The court has become the headquarters of an umbrella organization fostering established charities and start-ups, initiatives and events, and that’s in addition to the daily grind of more traditional royal work. One reason it is able to do this is because its de facto chief executive is passionate and driven and instills these impulses in his staff. Courtiers may not always wish the best for each other, but they are dedicated to the Prince.

He is largely unaware of the machinations of internal politics and when complaints are brought to his attention, he is sometimes apt to penalize the complainant. Suspicious of the world at large, he values individuals who seem to him to have proved their loyalty and takes criticism of those individuals not as a sign that he should reassess that faith but as a reason to redouble it.

Michael Fawcett is a conspicuous beneficiary of this tendency. He ascended through the ranks from being a Buckingham Palace footman to serve as the Prince’s valet. He resigned amid allegations of bullying, only to be reinstated and named the Prince’s Personal Consultant in recognition of his trusted position. In November 2002, Fawcett came under a different kind of pressure in the wake of an aborted trial. Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell had been charged with stealing items of her property. Burrell pleaded not guilty, forcing the courts of Charles and his mother to divulge at least some of their secrets to a court of law, which they did, with great reluctance, until
Regina v. Burrell
came to a skidding halt. Regina—the Queen—recalled that Burrell told her he had taken some of Diana’s papers into safekeeping. Less than five weeks later, the Crown abandoned a parallel trial against another former royal butler, Harold Brown, accused of selling official gifts. (Like official residences, such gifts belong to the state, not to the royals.) Brown, too, rejected the charges.

The police investigations had taken evidence from Diana’s eldest sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, about a missing microtape, allegedly recorded by Diana and containing a rape claim by a valet called George Smith against another member of Charles’s household. Smith—a Falklands veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome—had left the Prince’s employ with a $48,000 settlement and assistance with medical bills including residential treatment for alcoholism. He would die, aged just forty-four, in 2005. Journalists looking for further signs of dysfunction in Charles’s court focused on the disposal of his gifts, quickly discovering that the aide they dubbed “Fawcett the Fence” oversaw much of the process.

At the request of the Prince, his then Principal Private Secretary, Michael Peat, and Edmund Lawson, a Queen’s Counsel, launched an internal inquiry into these reports. The inquiry did not weigh the rape claim. They found that Fawcett and other staff had sold official gifts in the absence of explicit guidance not to do so, and that Fawcett had “infringed internal rules relating to gifts from suppliers,” accepting “as a mark of gratitude” from “professional friends” both low- and high-value gifts, from Champagne and chocolates to a Tiffany watch, a Cartier alarm clock, and a Pasha pen.

But, they added, “opprobrium cannot attach to this [the selling of items or accepting of gifts] because the rules were not enforced and he [Fawcett] made no secret of such gifts. Press suspicions were understandably aroused by his involvement in the sale of gifts (which, unknown to the media, were all authorized by the Prince of Wales) and by it being widely known that he received valuable benefits from third parties.” They went on to identify at least some of the reasons that resentment against Fawcett had bubbled. “His robust approach to dealing with some people combined, perhaps, with his having been promoted from a relatively junior position within the household, undoubtedly caused jealously and friction in some quarters.”
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Though cleared and backed by the Prince, Fawcett resigned again, only to reappear in a new guise, as an independent events organizer. His first client was Charles, who promptly hired his erstwhile aide to oversee Prince William’s twenty-first-birthday celebrations in June 2003. By that November, Fawcett featured at the center of less festive coverage after the
Guardian
successfully appealed an injunction originally lodged to stop the
Mail on Sunday
from running a story naming him as the royal servant about whom another royal servant—presumed to be George Smith—had made unspecified allegations (unrelated to the rape allegations) concerning an anonymous senior royal.

The
Guardian
did not identify the senior royal as Charles; Peat did that, in an interview that raised more questions than it answered. “I just want to make it entirely clear,” Peat said, “even though I can’t refer to the specifics of the allegation, that it is totally untrue and without a shred of substance.… Firstly, the Prince of Wales has told me it is untrue and I believe him implicitly. Secondly, anyone who knows the Prince of Wales at all would appreciate that the allegation is totally ludicrous and, indeed, risible. And thirdly, the person who has made the allegation unfortunately has suffered from health problems and has made other, unrelated allegations which have been investigated by the police and found to be unsubstantiated.”
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Someone of a different temperament than the Prince might have cut Fawcett adrift at this point. His refusal to do so did little to quash the fanciful speculation about the nature of the bond between the married Fawcett and the uxorious Prince. A front-page story in the
News of the World
claimed that Peat had asked Mark Bolland, the Prince’s former Deputy Private Secretary, whether Charles might be bisexual. Bolland, by this stage writing a gossip column for the
News of the World
, reported that he told Peat “emphatically that the Prince was not gay or bisexual.”
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In such a context, any denials are as likely to stoke skepticism as to quell rumors, though Bolland, himself gay, later made clear that he had meant what he said. The Prince “pays a lot of attention to his appearance, but a lot of straight men are like that,” Bolland told the
British Journalism Review
in 2004. “I always remember him leaving a Versace show and talking to his bodyguard about the models, and Naomi Campbell in particular. It was very much a boys’ conversation. I said I felt excluded, and he said, ‘but Mark, there was plenty for you to look at as well.’ He’s very liberal, and there isn’t an ounce of homophobia in him, but there’s no way he’s got any tendencies in that direction.”
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There has long been smoke without fire billowing around the Prince’s sexuality. There is also a thriving gay subculture at the Windsor courts that fuels gossip and trades in it. The Queen Mother is reputed to have reprimanded two retainers holding forth outside her door: “When you two old queens have stopped nattering, this old Queen is dying for a gin.” The high camp of royal life holds an allure that attracts gay men to all the royal households and in the Prince has also found an employer who identifies with people who feel themselves to be outsiders. That’s not much use to anyone who is made to feel an outsider once in his employ.

In 2004, Elaine Day, a former personal assistant to Mark Bolland, alleged sex discrimination and unfair dismissal from her St. James’s Palace job, producing an annotated memo to support the allegations which the tribunal later rejected. “What is wrong with everyone nowadays?” the Prince had scrawled on the margin. “Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their technical capabilities? People think they can all be pop stars, high court judges, brilliant TV personalities or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having natural ability.” He questioned “the learning culture in schools” and a “child-centered system which admits no failure.”
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His rant drew wide coverage, not least because it mirrored charges frequently leveled at the Prince himself: that he imagines himself qualified to pronounce on issues that should properly be left to experts or elected government. His critics challenge his right to intervene and his abilities to do so meaningfully. The invective also seemed to confirm that Charles believed, as Day told the tribunal, that “people can’t rise above their station.” The reality is more complex. A closer examination of his book
Harmony
and Charles’s philosophical underpinnings reveals a belief in a natural order that is inherently conservative, but as he pointed out in a blast against Day’s charge at a private Lambeth Palace seminar, he created the Prince’s Trust to promote social mobility. “The idea that I think that people should not try to rise above their station is a travesty of the truth, nor indeed have I ever used any such words or anything like them,” he told an audience of bishops. “For the last thirty years, I have done all I can to give young people who have limited opportunities, usually through no fault of their own, a chance to succeed.”
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Fawcett’s rise stands in mute support of this point, but his history also demonstrates a weakness in the Clarence House human resources framework that failed to smooth the edges off his management style or shield him from resentment.

More than a few people privately blame bruising experiences working for Charles—or unceremonious departures from his side—on Fawcett and others who gain the princely ear. A prominent businessman, coaxed by the Prince on the basis of a few meetings to help set up an event with his household, speaks with amazement about the glaring flaws in its organizational structure. “No company would be expected to run along these lines,” he says. His impression was that aides obstructed planning in order to be able to tell the Boss of problems that they then would solve. “There was a lot of back-stabbing,” says the businessman. “There are certain people who because they’re pretty cunning in the dark arts but loyal and able and they’re good at their timing also involve themselves in the dark arts of undermining other people,” says an insider. “I think [the Prince] hasn’t always been best served by this.”

While Charles may not run a cohesive ship, many of the individuals aboard are properly talented. One of these, for all the criticisms lobbed against him, is Fawcett. The Prince, always liable to empathize with victims, may therefore have been more determined to protect his aide than to discipline him, but he also recognized in Fawcett a rare skill set. In 2011 the Prince made Fawcett Chief Executive of a project close to his heart, Dumfries House, “not the wisest deal that’s ever been done,” says an insider, who then admits, with surprise, that Fawcett seems to be doing a good job.

The former aide has a gimlet eye for detail that he brings to bear in planning functions and latterly also in overseeing the restoration of the house and grounds and working to put the estate’s finances on a sustainable basis. He mixes easily with the Bond villains at fund-raising dinners but never imagines himself to be a guest. He is always watchful, always alert to potential disruptions in plans and schedules. He defers to Camilla and she tolerates him; she appreciates the people who help to keep her husband on an even keel. The Prince can relax around Fawcett because he trusts him to get things done. Slimmer and sleeker than in the days of his tabloid infamy, Fawcett has grown a beard that would sit nicely above a ruff and doublet. His power at court is undimmed.

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Mark Bolland didn’t fare quite so well. He had joined the Prince’s staff in 1996 and the following year earned promotion to the rank of Deputy Private Secretary. His greatest achievement in the turbulent years that followed was to start easing public acceptance of Camilla’s relationship with Charles. But complaints about Bolland flowed from Buckingham Palace and in particular from aides to Princes Andrew and Edward who accused Bolland of promoting his charges at the expense of members of their household. “In the minutely-plotted world of spin and manipulation, it seems that if the Prince’s stock is to rise, another’s must fall,” reported journalist Peter Foster in a long
Daily Telegraph
profile of Bolland that appeared to have been briefed by Bolland’s enemies within the palaces. “The Earl and Countess of Wessex are not alone in believing that they have been the victim of an aggressive campaign to blacken their names.”
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The piece revealed Prince William’s nickname for Bolland—Blackadder, after the Machiavellian Lord played by Rowan Atkinson in the eponymous TV comedy and later the name Bolland adopted to write his column for the
News of the World
.

When Bolland left in 2002, he did so with a freelance contract to advise the Prince, though without the honor that routinely rewards former aides for their services. This looser relationship ended, said Bolland, after Charles found he could not get hold of him to discuss a story that had blown up. “That went down very badly with him and made him think: ‘Well, is Mark really there for me any more?’ One had a sense that he felt a great unhappiness. I did have a peculiarly clear understanding of him at a particular moment in his life, simply because I knew Camilla so well, and I had grown to understand him through her eyes. Sometimes you end up knowing too much about people and their characters, and you lose a sense of detachment. I was starting to be used by him directly, and by him through her, as a way of second-guessing other people who worked for him. While I was there, people coped with that. When I was merely a consultant, I think it irritated them. It wasn’t fair on them, and it was proving very distracting for me.”
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Insiders suggest Bolland may well have eventually returned to the inner orbits if he had not backed the
Mail on Sunday
in its decision to publish the Prince’s China diaries. The Prince had always liked him.