Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (21 page)

Bolland burned bridges, but those who make it into Charles’s circle of trust rarely find themselves fully exiled. More often working for the Prince is like a stay at the Hotel California: you can check out any time you like, but you can never quite leave. Elizabeth Buchanan resigned as the Prince’s Private Secretary in 2008. The
Daily Mail
marked her departure with an article headlined “CAMILLA AND THE BLONDE PRIVATE SECRETARY WHO’S PAID THE PRICE FOR BEING TOO CLOSE TO PRINCE CHARLES.” “Those who observed the icy atmosphere between the tall and imperious ‘Miss Nannypenny’—as the unmarried Ms. Buchanan was known around the Prince’s office—and the Duchess, always believed the private secretary would go sooner, rather than later,” reported the
Mail
’s Richard Kay and Geoffrey Levy.
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But Buchanan had not been banished. After the death of her father she faced either selling her family farm or running it herself. She chose the second option. The Prince had asked her to stay but accepted her decision and called her on the first day of her new life to check that she was in good spirits.

“I’m covered in cow dung normally,” she says, sitting in the lounge of a plush London hotel near the Clarence House and St. James’s Palace complex, her hair—blond as advertised—well brushed and not a trace of the farmyard about her person, her manner far from imperious. She remains deeply engaged in the Prince’s work, advising on his many schemes and initiatives aimed at rural communities.
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He has always opened up in the company of vibrant women who refuse to recognize the cold boundaries of royal formality, even if they all dutifully call him “Sir.” Kristina Kyriacou, the Prince’s communications secretary and one of his closest confidants, built a successful career in music management and working for Comic Relief before joining the Prince’s staff. Charles recruited Kyriacou personally, politely asking her then client Gary Barlow if he would mind sharing her time.

The effervescent Julia Cleverdon held key positions in the Prince’s household across three decades. For seventeen years she built up Business in the Community (BITC) as its Chief Executive, working to instill a commitment to corporate social responsibility in British companies and turning the Prince’s ideas into workable programs. Cleverdon was most recently employed as the Prince’s chief adviser coordinating his charities in Clarence House. That post disappeared in the restructuring, and sources suggested she had fumbled the launch of a campaign called Step Up to Serve, but she retains a role at court, still billed as Vice President of BITC and Special Adviser to the Prince’s Charities on responsible business practice. The Prince doesn’t like to let anyone go if he can help it.

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At the beginning of his married life, even as he began to perceive the obstacles to building any kind of stability with Diana, Charles tried not to let her go. He was hampered in his efforts by his inadequate understanding of her distress or her difficulties in adjusting to life at court. It is all he has ever known, whereas immigrants to the planet are rarely prepared for the lack of privacy or by the chill of its climate. The palaces are literally cold, and then there’s the bracing culture that expects inhabitants to grit their teeth and do their duty.

In the depths of misery, the Prince could tap reservoirs of Windsor spirit in his public work. “From when he was little, he’s always looked anguished, as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders,” observes Emma Thompson. “He’s the eldest son of the queen. It’s a heavy burden and there’s no question about the fact that it’s deeply isolating and can be very lonely.… Like stardom of any kind, you are required—he is required on a daily basis and at all times—to be incredibly nice and open and warm to lots and lots of people who cannot feel themselves to be on a level with him, so he has to be even nicer so that they don’t feel he’s being superior. Compensating for the position is terrifically hard.”
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In private, as his marriage festered, he could be querulous or almost catatonic with gloom. Equipped with only two entwined responses to problems—the Windsor way and the Gordonstoun way—and realizing that neither of these worked for Diana, he let himself be persuaded to seek sustenance in equally unpromising places. His mentor Laurens van der Post recommended the services of his own wife, Ingaret, “a gifted interpreter of dreams,” though not a trained analyst.
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Charles consulted her. For Diana, van der Post recommended the services of Dr. Alan McGlashan, an aged Jungian psychiatrist. After several sessions with the Princess, McGlashan concluded that she was unhappy but not unstable.

After a journalist spotted the Prince emerging from McGlashan’s consulting rooms in 1995, Charles was widely reported to be in analysis. In an interview after McGlashan’s death, his widow, Sasha, denied that his relationship with the Prince was professional. It had been, she said, “a supportive friendship.”
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Whatever its basis, the relationship mattered enough to Charles that he visited McGlashan regularly, and later added a bronze bust of the psychiatrist to a kind of informal shrine he has erected in the gardens at Highgrove to people he admires. (His friend Patrick Holden is also represented in the lineup; so is environmental activist Vandana Shiva.)

The Princess had long stopped seeing McGlashan but continued with therapy, formal and informal, seeking out mainstream practitioners and a fringe of alternative and complementary options, from clairvoyants to colonic irrigation. Unconvincing as some of these choices appear, none now seems so jaw-dropping as the guidance provided by Jimmy Savile, DJ, broadcaster, and now known sex offender.

Charles and Diana were by no means the only people Savile duped. He met royalty through charity work for the Royal Marines, which brought him into contact with Mountbatten. Mountbatten introduced Savile to Prince Philip and other royals. Savile described himself to his biographer, Dan Davies, as a kind of “court jester.” “Royalty are surrounded by people who don’t know how to deal with it.… I have a freshness of approach which they obviously find to their liking.”
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Janet Cope, Savile’s personal assistant for three decades, told Davies of a thick file of correspondence between Diana and Savile. That accords with Diana’s casual mention of a conversation with Savile in the Squidgygate tape. “Jimmy Savile rang me up yesterday, and he said: ‘I’m just ringing up, my girl, to tell you that His Nibs [Charles] has asked me to come and help out the redhead [the Duchess of York], and I’m just letting you know, so that you don’t find out through her or him; and I hope it’s all right by you.’”
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Savile’s behavior during his visits to St. James’s Palace had rung alarms, but nobody seems to have told Charles. In her account of palace life, Sarah Goodall, a former Lady Clerk to the Prince, describes him licking her hand. She also claims Savile provided marital advice to the Waleses. That claim was repeated in a 2014 edition of
Panorama
, the investigative TV series that had given Diana a platform for her bombshell interview nineteen years earlier. “It is ridiculous to suggest that His Royal Highness sought marital advice from Jimmy Savile,” said a Clarence House statement, broadcast as part of the film. “On the few occasions Jimmy Savile visited St. James’s Palace, it was as a guest of a member of the household and as such he would have been accompanied.”

The statement also responded to a claim in the film that health officials were “gobsmacked” to find Savile at a Highgrove meeting convened by the Prince to protest the threatened closure of emergency services at a nearby hospital. After the meeting finished and the Prince departed, Savile allegedly warned one of the officials present that making the Prince unhappy could cost the official a knighthood. “It is possible that such a meeting took place,” the Clarence House statement continued. “However, we cannot comment on any alleged threats after the Prince left the room. It is certainly not the case that he knew, sanctioned or encouraged this form of behavior by anyone.”
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That sounds all too likely. Courtiers and advisers not infrequently do things in Charles’s name that he would be unlikely to sanction or encourage. Yet the detail of the meeting also rings true. People working for the Prince are used to finding their projects disrupted by unwanted input from unlikely quarters. The Prince “is basically as distrustful as ministers are of advice from one source,” says an insider. “So you have a tendency to get some pretty surprising people reading things, checking things, coming up with an alternative view, some of whom are really quite difficult.”

Savile had persuaded top politicians to give him the run of several hospitals, trusting him to make policy and personnel decisions and move unchaperoned among patients. To the Prince this made Savile an obvious person to tap for advice on navigating Britain’s health authorities.

But Charles also consulted Savile on other matters. One source tells of an occasion when the Prince asked his famous occasional adviser to read over a speech he was due to give on a topic unrelated to health care or any field in which Savile had expertise. Savile made no amendments on that occasion.

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Nobody—and certainly not Savile—would have been able to fix the Waleses’ relationship. As their camps washed dirty linen in public, the House of Windsor faced its toughest test since the abdication. Only the occasional beam of daylight had caught the sovereign and her children behind the scenes. The documentary
Royal Family
, based on footage of its titular subjects shot over an entire year as Charles prepared for his investiture as Prince of Wales, enjoyed just one outing only, in 1969, attracting audiences of 23 million in Britain and a further 350 million worldwide, before the Queen demanded the film be withdrawn. The royals are seen struggling to barbecue sausages; in another scene the Queen makes awkward small talk with President Richard Nixon, who would resign in 1974, a move precipitated by revelations of conversations he assumed would stay private. Anne, the Princess Royal, summed up the family’s distaste for their telly adventure: “I always thought it was a rotten idea. The attention that had been brought on one ever since one was a child, you just didn’t want any more. The last thing you needed was greater access.”
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She was right, but only up to a point. The reason that the monarchy continues to flourish while other pillars of the establishment totter is because it is rarely seen to chase popularity by yielding to popular opinion. Its unique selling point is consistency. Yet its success is also based on managing change, rather than standing against change. The institution develops in parallel with the people it claims to represent. As televisions took pride of place in British living rooms, the Windsors had to let cameras into their living rooms. The family learned from the mistake of the first documentary, quickly figuring out how to hide in plain sight, carefully controlling subsequent access and output. But the nature of that output had to change too. The greatest stumble of the Queen’s reign came after Diana’s death when the sovereign didn’t realize her subjects had come to believe only in emotions they could see. Old-school Windsor restraint sits uneasily with the touchier-feelier, therapized, confessional spirit that found its zenith in Diana.

Charles himself remains caught uneasily between those two impulses, schooled to royal
omertà
and the product of a culture that tells him that to express emotion is to cheapen it, yet also brimming with emotions. To Nicholas Soames, this struggle appears heroic. “The other day someone was on a television show and apparently they didn’t show enough emotion so there was a terrible row in the
Daily Mail
, ‘They haven’t shown enough empathy,’ whatever the bloody hell it is, they haven’t cried when they’ve won a competition,” he says. “Well there is no point looking to the Prince of Wales to do that. He will not play that game, because he is in my view morally honest and intellectually honest.”
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The problem for the Prince is that he did, for a while, play the game, just not enthusiastically or well. The Waleses’ conflict damaged the control mechanisms and opened Walter Bagehot’s dictum about preserving the mystery of monarchy to ridicule. Revelations continued to flow after Diana’s death thanks to a tidal wave of official reports, inquiries, acrimonious court cases, and a roaring trade in gossip and harder-edged information.

The paradox of palaces is that they are at once thoroughfares, their carpets worn thin by visitors and retinues, and nests of secrecy and intrigue. They are the least private of homes and the most resistant to oversight. They breed plots and foment mysteries.

Neither journalistic investigations nor legal inquiries have ever finally pinpointed the source of the Squidgygate and Camillagate recordings. The tabloids’ initial reticence to publish the transcripts could seem to exonerate them from involvement. The quality of the recordings, and the odds against one or more radio ham staying locked onto the signals for the duration of the calls, raised doubts that such amateurs could have picked up the transmissions unaided. Audio analysis commissioned by the
Sunday Times
found anomalies suggesting that the conversations may have been recorded and rebroadcast for Cyril Reenan and other radio enthusiasts to discover.

Meaningful motives are just as difficult to establish. Both sides in the War of the Waleses sustained damage from the release of the tapes. As for potential perpetrators, GCHQ had the capacity to tap into conversations but joined with the other intelligence services in a statement in 1993 giving “categorical assurances denying any involvement in intercepting, recording or disclosing telephone calls involving members of the Royal Family.” GCHQ’s former chief, Sir John Ayde, and Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 until 2004, repeated these denials in person at the inquest into the deaths of Diana, her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, and their driver, Henri Paul. Lord Fellowes, Diana’s brother-in-law through marriage to her sister Jane and, at the time the recordings emerged, the Queen’s Private Secretary, also testified that spies’ involvement seemed “unlikely … they have better things to do.”
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