Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (22 page)

But Fellowes told the inquest—which ran from October 2007 to April 2008 at London’s Royal Courts of Justice, at a cost to the taxpayer of $4.5 million—that the Queen routinely ordered Buckingham Palace to be swept for bugs and revealed that the tapes had triggered “discussions” with the security services. The aim, he said, was “obviously if there had been anything nefarious done, that it should be discovered and punished. But the main strand of thinking in Buckingham Palace, if I can put it broadly, was that this had happened and what action should be taken to ensure that it did not happen again.”
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Fellowes’s dry confirmation of palace fears of bugging, sensational in another context, sank in a welter of wilder claims and intimate details as 268 witnesses gave statements or took the stand. They ranged from people who happened to be on the scene of Diana’s death to key figures from her life. Paul Burrell told the court on the first day of his three-day testimony that he knew his employer’s “every waking thought.” By day three, he rowed back. “I’m not sure I knew her better than most, but I knew her very well.” Hasnat Khan, Diana’s lover from 1995 until she met Dodi, provided a statement full of pathos. The Princess, like her ex-husband, observed normal life from an enforced distance. “Diana was also not used to doing everyday things that the rest of us take for granted,” Khan’s statement revealed. “For example, we once went to the pub together and Diana asked if she could order the drinks because she had never done so before. She really enjoyed the experience and chatted away happily to the barman.”

Some familiar faces stayed absent from this parade. Neither Charles nor any blood members of his family were called to give evidence, sparing short-term embarrassment but reinforcing the sense of royal exceptionalism and an establishment quick to close the shutters. To conspiracy theorists, this appeared more significant, a sign of guilt. When Dodi Fayed died alongside the Princess, his father, Mohamed Fayed, the owner of the department store Harrods, expected to be embraced by the Windsors in shared grief. The embrace never came. The royals recoiled from Fayed, believing he had flaunted his links with Diana in life and now would turn her death into a promotional opportunity. As she traveled to Paris with the Prince to retrieve the Princess’s body, Diana’s sister Sarah McCorquodale asked Charles about the arrangements for transporting the coffin on arrival back in the UK. “One thing’s for sure,” he replied. “She’s not going into London in a green carriage drawn by horses.”
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The Harrods carriage, painted in the store’s green and gold livery, was often deployed to ferry celebrities to the launch of its seasonal sales.

Fayed at first blamed the paparazzi pursuing Diana and Dodi for provoking the fatal collision in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. He came instead to imagine “that Dracula family,” as he called the Windsors, had orchestrated the crash to prevent the Princess from marrying his Muslim son. At the inquest, he anatomized an elaborate plot, alleging the knowledge or active participation of the senior royals, Tony Blair, the security services, Fellowes, some of Diana’s friends, former London police chiefs, the British ambassador to France, French toxicologists and medics, three of his former employees, and Henri Paul, who lost his own life in the crash.
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Conspiracy theories are hardy plants that flourish in the most arid of soils. The rich compost of this tragedy continues to nourish all sorts of exotic blooms. The inquest reached the same central conclusion as earlier investigations in France and Britain: that the car hit the wall of the tunnel not by design but accident, caused by Paul, driving at excessive speeds after drinking, with paparazzi in pursuit. Yet anyone entering “Diana death” in online search engines falls down a rabbit hole into a universe in which Fayed’s version of events seems positively tame. In some tales the murderers hijack the Princess, forcing her into a vehicle concealed as an ambulance before doing the deed; another hypothesis sees the Mercedes, and its occupants, compacted in a crusher. A persistent meme depicts the Windsors as giant shape-shifting extraterrestrial lizards who snuffed out the Princess and continue to pose an existential threat to all surviving humanity.

Such views remain on the fringes but cloud wider opinions of Charles. There isn’t an obvious way to confront this problem other than to find ways to let the public get better acquainted with the real Prince. The press operations at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House have expanded and professionalized, and stocked their ranks with talented people who have worked in mainstream news organizations, wrangled celebrity clients, or survived the white heat of government media management. There are dedicated teams assigned to the main royal brands; the Queen personally approved a slick royal website and separate feeds on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr that seem to dovetail nicely with her mantra of being seen to be believed. Her children and their children may appear more open than she is, but apart from her eldest, they rarely talk about anything of substance. Their private lives, for the most part, remain private. Camilla, styled HRH Duchess of Cornwall on marriage to Charles, has made a smooth transition from public enemy to royal asset. Everything appears calm. Yet the royals are no closer to solving the old dilemma of how much daylight to let in or confronting the new reality: that they may not have a choice in the matter.

It’s not just that confidentiality agreements have failed to deter serial former employees from “doing a Crawfie,” publishing memoirs of royal service that tend to be far less gentle than Marion Crawford’s sunshine-infused original. During the War of the Waleses, media organizations that played by the existing book floundered in a brash new free-for-all, read-all-about-it scrum in which not only Murdoch’s
Sunday Times
but its red-top stablemates the
Sun
and the
News of the World
turned out to be the newspapers of record. Now all mainstream news organizations are trying to navigate still bigger changes. Their representatives know the rules, even if they sometimes transgress them. New media and citizen journalists—and that’s everyone on Twitter—may not know that there are any rules and are as likely to take cues from Edward Snowden and Julian Assange as from dusty jurisdictions mumbling about privileged communications and the right to privacy.

Outside the palace gates, the pressure for transparency is growing. Within palace walls sits a future king whose irrepressible desire to communicate should logically herald fresh moves toward greater openness. That isn’t happening. His court has grown more clenched. Yet Charles has many things to be proud of, not least his first and biggest charity.

CHAPTER 6

Helping and Hindering

“You need to listen to each other. It’s respect,” says team leader David Tovey. A girl raises her head from the table and stares at him with kohl-rimmed eyes. “I wasn’t talking,” she says. “I was sleeping. You lot are waking me up.”

That’s the central purpose of the twelve-week Team Program, the seventy-fourth run at this location, in Merton, South London, and of every program and project run by the Prince’s Trust: to wake people up, then to provide them with the tools to realize their potential. Seventeen-year-old Tanya Djemal knows that, even as she puts on her small show of defiance. She is beginning to think she might harbor ambitions in the longer term to go to college, she says in a voice so small that the whirr of an overheated computer threatens to drown her out. Her acting up in front of the group masks a crippling timidity that complicates one of the tasks the Trust has set participants: to secure a three-week work placement. The Team Program is aimed at sixteen- to twenty-five-year-old NEETs—the reductive acronym denotes young people Not in Education, Employment or Training; by the end of the course, they will hopefully be moving toward college, apprenticeship, or a job. Djemal recoils from the idea of interaction with children. Her work experience must involve “food or animals,” she says.

For her and the thousands of others who pass through the Prince’s Trust programs in Britain every year—58,804 in 2013–2014—the placement will provide a glimpse into a world that seemed beyond reach, in which life isn’t just about survival but holds the possibility of love and friendship and personal development and professional achievement. “I came to the Prince’s Trust to get a brighter future and to change my past,” says twenty-year-old Matt Jelinek, who spent the first half of his life in Poland and the second being bounced around the English education system and excluded from three schools. Everyone has different stories about how he or she arrived at the Prince’s Trust, but all the narratives describe alienation and exclusion.

Jelinek and Djemal and their fellow participants, encouraged by Tovey to function not as competing individuals but a cooperative unit, are beginning to taste the unfamiliar sweetness of belonging. Tovey has already helped them to bond during a week at an adventure center in the Peak District. For several of their number, it was the first time they ever ventured beyond city limits. Tovey, a former advertising executive who retrained as a teacher and Prince’s Trust Team Leader, laughs remembering the fascination sheep held for these children of grubby suburbia, then grows serious as he talks about a hike up the famous moorland plateau Kinder Scout and a tranquil moment with Jelinek as they stopped to admire the view. “Matt was telling me how amazing it was to get away from everything to center himself. If he gets nothing else from these 12 weeks, he’s got that.”

Not one among this recent intake to the Prince’s Trust has linked the organization to a real live Prince. Some charities with charismatic founders resemble reverent cults, in which the founder serves as a demigod and personification of values. The Prince’s Trust, by contrast, aims to imbue its alumni with a sense of their own potency—
plus est en vous
.

If clients do encounter the Prince when he visits Trust projects or holds fund-raisers or events to honor the achievements of Trust participants, they see an older man in a double-breasted suit, surprisingly easy to talk to, ready with a joke, but apparently light-years away from their own experience. They are right, of course. Yet Charles too was young once, isolated, vulnerable, and directionless. In learning to give to others, he found his direction.

*   *   *

Like most organizations set up by the Prince, his largest and most successful charity sprang into life without a detailed plan or defined target, but from a single idea that gripped its creator. In 1972, George Pratt, the Deputy Chief Probation Officer for Inner London, defended a pilot scheme he had helped to devise under which some offenders guilty of minor crimes undertook community work instead of serving custodial sentences. The scheme proved so effective that within three years it had become a nationwide standard, but its debut attracted hostile headlines about soft options and pampered criminals.

After Charles heard Pratt interviewed on the BBC Home Service radio, he invited the probation officer to Buckingham Palace to discuss whether young people might be coaxed away from potential criminality by getting them involved in Gordonstoun-style volunteering. The Prince proposed setting up a network of community fire brigades on inner-city estates. Pratt warned him that putting fire-fighting equipment in the hands of vandals might not produce the anticipated effect. Undeterred, Charles convened a series of meetings with Pratt—who would become the Trust’s first Chairman—and with social workers and a range of experts he thought might be able to refine his idea into something practicable and constructive.

Charles left active service in the Navy in 1976—the same year the Prince’s Trust came into formal existence. He had commanded a ship, but back in the Palace he was expected not only to bow to the Queen—whom he has always revered—but accept directions from courtiers who treated him with condescension. He came close to giving up, but instead learned to push back. He sometimes did so with the combustive anger of a person unused to asserting himself, and sometimes still does, or more often slides into bleak moods that those close to him learn to negotiate. “He always reminds me of a day in April,” says an insider. “It can be bright sunshine and then the clouds suddenly appear from nowhere and then they clear and it’s bright sunshine. He’s got a million things on his mind all of the time, but when the sun comes out he can have you crying laughing with him within seconds.”

When officials cited security risks and canceled Charles’s excursions to see at first hand inner-city hardships, he insisted that alternative visits be organized. When Buckingham Palace tried to put the brakes on his activities, the Prince forged on regardless. “I just felt what we need at that young age is somebody to take an interest and to show concern but also to give you that self-confidence and self-esteem which I do believe is absolutely critical if you’re going to be able to achieve anything later,” he says.
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Skepticism about the Trust wasn’t entirely unfounded. Its first programs—including a Gordonstounian notion of training young offenders as lifeguards—were small-scale and experimental. The charity had scant resources and the Prince had not yet learned, in the words of Sir William Castell, Chairman of the Wellcome Trust since 2006 and from 1998 to 2003 of the Prince’s Trust, to “pick pockets.”
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The organization’s start-up funds were far from princely: its founder’s Navy severance pay of $11,925, his fee of $6,500 for an interview about George III given to a US television company (the first time but not the last the Prince would argue that Mad King George was cruelly underrated), and a $3,225 donation from Harry Secombe, one of a trio of performers who starred in Charles’s favorite radio comedy series, the
Goon Show
.

These days the Trust needs to raise about $1.6 million per week just to break even. About a third of its income comes from private donations, mostly at the corporate level and wealthy individual donors, many of them personally persuaded to their generosity by the Prince. As the Prince takes on additional head of state duties, the pressure on his time is increasing, and the Trust is adjusting accordingly. “It’s about using his time much more effectively and more cleverly,” says Martina Milburn, Chief Executive of the Trust since 2004.
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