Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (23 page)

It will never be as easy to raise money for the benefit of the Trust’s spiky clientele as for children or, in the UK, animals. Nevertheless, potential donors have become more alert to the problems of social exclusion and youth unemployment, not least since these blights manifested in noisy movements such as Occupy, pitching tents in Zuccotti Park on Wall Street or by the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and in less choate protests such as the riots that ignited in Tottenham, North London, in 2011. Thirty years earlier, similar alarm calls sounded among the comfortable classes as violence spread from one English inner city to another. Then, as with the more recent riots, politicians disagreed over the causes of the unrest, but nobody could assume the problem would go away of its own accord or keep to itself in the rougher parts of town, visiting misery only on those who already had little to lose.

For the nascent Trust, the trouble carried a silver lining: easier access to funds, not only from private donors but the state sector, which now accounts for about a third of the Prince’s Trust income. Margaret Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Employment, Lord Young, agreed to match any funding the Trust raised for its newest program, providing seed funding to young entrepreneurs. In 1988 Young’s pledge delivered a delicious windfall to the Trust, when a fund-raising drive to mark the Prince’s fortieth birthday succeeded in hitting its $64.5 million target and the government had to match that figure.

As the Trust grew, Charles dedicated ballooning hours to helping the charity grow further still and to building additional charities and initiatives, some conceptually related, such as the Prince’s Youth Business Trust (later folded back into the Prince’s Trust) and Business in the Community; others representing different strands of interest, such as the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture, which then went through several name changes to become his Foundation for Building Community. His Gordonstounian impulses also kept trying to find expression in programs designed to reintroduce to Britain a form of national service that would inculcate in the young the sense that by helping their communities they could also help themselves. The Prince of Wales Community Venture, tested in Sunderland, Llanelli, and Birmingham from 1986 to 1989, was its first incarnation. The Prince’s Trust Volunteers, launched in 1990, eventually developed into the Team Program. Another version of this vision emerged in 2013 with the launch of the Prince’s Step Up to Serve campaign to bolster youth volunteering, backed by all three of Britain’s main political parties.

Always on the move, a habit he has never since broken, Charles shuttled from one meeting to another, schmoozing donations, discussing strategies, ever more focused in his desire to make a difference. His increased activity reflected a growing sense of purpose and his own power to make things happen, but also coincided with the final disintegration of a home life that had never been homely. This was no coincidence, says Julia Cleverdon. “As the marriage became more separate—like many in that situation—he became more and more of an entrepreneurial workaholic and the charitable initiatives began to multiply.”
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Money enables, but without conviction and credibility the Trust would not have survived. The best advertisements for the Trust are its alumni. Idris Elba, who at sixteen joined the National Youth Music Theatre with a grant from the Trust, went on to star in TV shows such as
The Wire
and
Luther
and in the film
Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
. Steven Frayne, better known as the magician Dynamo, got money for the laptop and video equipment that he needed to make a DVD of his stunts,
Underground Magic
, which launched his career. He has his own television series and, as he revealed to an interviewer, “I’ve peed in the same toilet as the Queen.” A regular at the Prince’s receptions at St. James’s Palace on behalf of the Trust, he baffles fellow guests with sleight-of-hand illusions. “P. Diddy ain’t got nothing on Prince Charles when it comes to putting on a party,” he once enthused. “Charles throws the best parties.”
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James Sommerville, since 2013 Vice President, Global Design at Coca-Cola, is another Trust success story. He cofounded the design company Attik in 1986 with a $3,200 loan, eventually selling the business to advertising giant Dentsu. “If [the Prince] was in industry he would be a [Richard] Branson or the late Steve Jobs; he’d be one of those entrepreneurs of the world who’ve got that great vision,” says Sommerville.

The comparisons are apt. Apple’s Jobs accumulated a track record as a brilliant innovator but sometimes teetered on the edge of failure when his ambitions outstripped his abilities to deliver. A similar pattern defines Virgin Group founder Branson’s long career of serial entrepreneurship.

Quite a few of the people working for the Prince “can’t add up,” says one insider. The Prince’s Trust for a long time lacked rigor. The statistics produced didn’t always stand up to scrutiny; the effectiveness of programs wasn’t always closely enough monitored. Tom Shebbeare was the Trust’s first full-time director. Until then, the organization had been stocked by people on secondment and enthusiastic co-optees and volunteers. “He’s a fantastic bloke, the Prince, absolutely fantastic bloke in a most impossible position and for me—not a mad monarchist—I found him absolutely fantastic to work for,” says Tom Shebbeare, who now works for Branson, as the Chairman of Virgin Money Giving and Virgin StartUp, the Virgin Group’s two nonprofit arms. “He’s sometimes tremendously inspiring and lateral thinking and says ‘yes’ to things most people would say ‘no’ to. He was a great boss, great company. But,” says Shebbeare, “possibly too nice.”
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When the Team Program in Merton comes to an end, participants who have completed the course take part in a final ceremony, witnessed by friends and family. One by one they describe to the audience what they’ve got out of their experiences and what they plan to do in the future. That may not sound like a big deal, but two months earlier not one of them had much of a life plan beyond getting through another day.

Matt Jelinek, who put on a boisterous front from the early days, now seems more quietly assured, less the class clown. “Something you learn on the course is you get back what you give,” he says. “The entire program was amazing.”

Everybody looks different, calmer, confident, more upright, more open. Tanya Djemal has undergone what may be the greatest transformation. She has found her voice. As her mother and grandmother watch with pride and astonishment, she stands up in front of a room full of people and begins to speak, fluently and clearly. She got a work placement in a hair salon, and thrived. She’s heading back to college to retake her English and Math exams and she thinks she knows what she might want to do further down the road. She’s fascinated by bats and would like to join an organization dedicated to protecting creatures that are often misrepresented and misunderstood. It’s an ambition the founder of the Prince’s Trust would surely applaud.

The model and methods that proved so effective for her and Jelinek and thousands of other Trust alumni in Britain are being exported to other countries and cultures. As youth unemployment has risen since the global financial crisis, twenty governments or government-affiliated organizations outside the UK have contacted the Trust for advice and with a view to launching Trust programs or their own schemes. Despite the burgeoning calls on his time, Charles insists on retaining his role in the overarching strategy of the Trust as well as its fund-raising side. Martina Milburn—approachable, unforced, and un-posh, like many of the Prince’s preferred people—says she’s used to him “holding my feet to the fire. He will regularly say he doesn’t mind how many people we help as long as the help we give those young people is the best it can be.”
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She has noticed—it is impossible not to—that Charles is most at ease where he should be least at home, far from Planet Windsor and surrounded not by courtiers or sycophants but young people, finding a welcome and a sense of kinship that eluded him in his own youth. “He has an amazing ability to talk to teenagers,” says Milburn. “I’ve sat with him in colleges, in classrooms, in prisons, sink estates, youth clubs, you name it, he just has a connection.… He is genuinely interested in their lives and somehow they sense that, with that human connection. I’ve seen other people do it, notably politicians, and get it badly wrong because they’re not really that interested, and they come to tell young people their view or the latest government policy change. The Prince does it completely the opposite way round. The Prince always asks them first. Somehow they sense he’s genuine.”
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It is more than that. The Prince sees himself in every Prince’s Trust client. “My great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is,” he told an audience at Cambridge University when he was twenty-nine. “At the moment I do not have one, but somehow I must find one.”
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The Prince’s Trust helped him, as it has continued to assist many others, to find a purpose in life.

*   *   *

The rain started over the United Kingdom in December 2013 and for two months rarely let up. By this drear beginning of February, roads had turned into rivers, fields were lakes. Island villages, ringed by citadels of sandbags, wondered when outside help might come. Politicians, safe and warm in Westminster, appeared not to notice or care. More than five hundred miles to the north, at Birkhall, Charles watched the news reports, as he often does, and worried, as he always does, how he might help. That same evening he wrote letters to key parties and spoke to aides. On February 4, clad like the countryman he is in hunting jacket and Wellington boots, he arrived in Somerset and waded into the muddy waters of political controversy.

The Prince gave generously of his time to hear the stories of people directly impacted by the flooding. “One of the most important things is listening,” he says. “You don’t just have to bang on at people.”
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He brought comfort, not only of a pastoral nature but a chunk of aid, $80,500, from the Prince’s Countryside Fund matched by a donation from the Duke of Westminster, one of Britain’s largest landowners. So far, so stately: but then a microphone picked up a comment to a local farmer during the sort of conversation that by palace convention is deemed private. “There’s nothing like a jolly good disaster to get people to start doing something,” said the Prince. “The tragedy is that nothing happened for so long.”
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A Downing Street spokesman responded swiftly: “The Prime Minister has repeatedly said that the situation that a number of communities in the Somerset area find themselves in is unacceptable.” By February 7, David Cameron had pulled on his own Wellingtons to survey the “heartbreaking” damage, promising the government would “do everything that can be done” and attributing the disaster to cuts made during an earlier administration. By February 11, so many politicians had togged up in waterproofs to tour scenes of devastation that the appropriately named Jim Waterson of the website BuzzFeedUK was able to compile a photo feature entitled “21 Pictures of Politicians in Wellies Staring at Floods.”
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Along with the deluge of fresh publicity, benefits to flood victims flowed, not only an extra $226 million for flood defenses allocated in the government’s March budget, but immediate help from major banks in the form of repayment holidays, extensions to loans, and reductions or waivers of fees, a commitment that totted up to $1.2 billion.

The day after his Somerset trip, suited and de-booted, the Prince returned to the ground zero of another political debate. He originally came to Tottenham in North London in August 2011 as glass still crunched underfoot and buildings still smoldered. Five people died over six nights in the riots that enveloped the borough after police shot and killed a Tottenham resident called Mark Duggan spread across the capital and to other English cities; businesses, homes, and cars were torched. In the aftermath, policy makers tussled over possible reasons for the unrest with all the determination of looters competing for a crate of designer trainers. Charles believed that the riots were a cry for help from people without hope or opportunity. He set six of his charities to work in Tottenham and continues to return to assess progress. This was his fourth visit. “He has come back,” says David Lammy, the local Member of Parliament. “No other major national figure has been back as often as he has, and bringing all of his charities. That is commitment and it’s an unsung commitment because it’s not done with fanfare.”

Lammy describes himself as a “big, big fan” of the Prince but among Westminster politicians, opinions of Charles, like attitudes to the monarchy, are divided and often deliberately obscure. There are almost certainly more republican MPs than the 15 of the Commons’ 650 members who are openly signed up to the campaign group Republic, but even before approval ratings rose for the Windsors and plummeted for the political classes, republicanism looked like a potential vote loser.

The assumption among Westminster republicans echoes the wider view: the Queen is inviolable; her son and heir is not. “Some of [the Prince’s] ideas are fine, some foolish, and some eccentric. But he cannot keep a lid on them. He suffers from a compulsive urge to influence government,” complained Paul Flynn, one of the avowed republicans in the House of Commons.
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John Major demurs. “He [the Prince] never in my experience overstepped the marks of propriety at all.”
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Ministers and former ministers from various eras, the recipients of the Prince’s famous black spider memos, paint a more complicated picture. Charles has supporters and critics on the right and the left. In their descriptions he often emerges as political, but rarely party-political. The Prince “avoids a simplistic left-or-right characterization. He doesn’t go venturing views about tax rates,” says a former Cabinet minister. “The issues he’s chosen—environment, conservation, inner-city renewal, youth—they’re not left or right issues.”