Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (24 page)

Nicholas Soames issues a stout defense of his friend’s dealings with the body politic. “When I became a minister, Prince Charles did get in touch with me on official matters. He came back through Hong Kong when we still had a big military presence there and he said ‘I think you ought to know…’ and told me something and I was very, very, very grateful to be told.” Soames leans back in his chair and the skulls on his braces grin a little more widely. “It’s easier to see from his point of view almost than anyone else’s. Because people have absolute trust and confidence in him and they talk to him. And from time to time he thinks ministers ought to know about it. Well good for him, I say. I don’t know a single minister who minded.”
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The Prince, says Emma Thompson drily, “has friends from all political persuasions.” She recalls an evening spent with the Prince and Duchess during Augusto Pinochet’s involuntarily extended London sojourn. (The former Chilean head of state had been arrested on an indictment issued in Spain citing multiple human rights violations under his military dictatorship.) “We were sitting at dinner, just [Charles] and Camilla and [Thompson’s actor husband] Greg [Wise] and me and she was saying ‘I do think you ought to lend Pinochet your plane’ and there was a loud snort from HRH who looked over at me and said ‘I don’t think Em would approve,’ knowing me to be a raving lefty.”
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“There are two very different issues,” says the former Cabinet minister, mulling the question of princely interventions. “One is a constitutional propriety issue and another is the content of his views. What I think is happening is that those who don’t like the contents of his views are alleging constitutional impropriety as a way of undermining the views he holds. Secondly, those who don’t like his views present them as wacky. Both the charge of impropriety and the charge of wackiness seem to me to be completely unfounded. I took him seriously and he took me seriously.” The speaker rejects an idea that is central to concerns about the Prince: that he wields disproportionate behind-the-scenes influence because of his royal status. “There’s the issue: does his passion overreach the boundaries of his constitutionally limited role? Well not if you’re a serious minister because if you’re a serious minister you decide whether you agree with him or not. There’s no injunction to agree with him.”

Tony Blair frequently disagreed with Charles. Over two volumes of edited diary extracts, Blair’s former communications chief Alastair Campbell detailed the tensions that flared between Prime Minister and Prince over a range of issues. The Prince opposed Labour’s proposed ban on foxhunting and gave Blair “a long paper on hunting and why it was good for the environment.” The Prince’s fears that the creation of a European defense force, backed by Blair, would undermine NATO and Britain’s special relationship with the United States leaked to the
Daily Mail
. The Prince expressed reservations to Blair about Britain’s rapprochement with China, saying he felt “very strongly” about China’s actions in Tibet; he failed to attend a state banquet for Jiang Zemin. The Prince’s aides publicly denied an intended snub toward the Chinese leader but Campbell claims they surreptitiously briefed that the gesture had indeed been intended to signal Charles’s disapproval, and one of the aides—Mark Bolland—backed up that allegation in the court case about the
Mail
’s publication of the Prince’s Hong Kong travel journal.

For supporters, this history speaks in Charles’s favor. “I think people generally feel that we’re not getting leadership from politicians because we all feel they’re doing deals and saying what we want them to say because then they’ll get into power,” says one of the Prince’s informal advisers. “Whether you agree with [Charles] or not, this is a person who’s got views, who’s full of conviction, you know where you stand with him.”

*   *   *

Clarence House’s website asserts that “when issues become a matter for party political debate or the subject of Government policy, the Prince stops raising them publicly.”
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In practice Charles has snagged his foot in that fox trap more than once. Charles’s views, like the brimming emotions Nicholas Soames admires him for restraining, threaten to come spilling out at any moment, in spidery memos, in meetings, and in speeches. Often he prompts debate. Sometimes he simply overpowers.

Peter Ahrends lives in a lovely Georgian town house in London. That’s how, in conversation at Birkhall, Charles has said that he imagines modernist architects live, in nice eighteenth-century houses.
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Yet Ahrends is hardly the heartless ideologue the Prince’s supposition entails, surrounded by beauty and comfort while foisting soulless rat runs of plate glass and concrete on the masses. The architect and the cat that shares his home conduct themselves with the caution of the elderly to whom life has not always been kind. When Ahrends arrived in Britain as an eighteen-year-old, he had already experienced Nazi Germany as the son of a Jewish father and, after emigrating to South Africa, the first dismal clench of apartheid. Yet it would be a run-in with the establishment of his adopted homeland—and especially with the heir to its throne—that left the most obvious bruises.

After qualifying as an architect, Ahrends founded ABK, a practice with two friends, Richard Burton and Paul Koralek, tapping into the optimism of the postwar period. To idealistic architects, modernism’s break from the past represented the possibility of a better future. The Prince saw only ugliness in the transformation of British landscapes in the name of progress. “I couldn’t bear the physical aspect of destroying town centers and historical places, digging up all the hedgerows, cutting down trees, making terrifying prairies covered in chemicals. All that stuff. I thought this was insanity,” he says.
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ABK won a public competition to design the extension to the National Gallery, a grand nineteenth-century building with a soaring portico entrance on the north side of London’s Trafalgar Square, subject to alterations and final approvals. The design went through several iterations as the architects took on board the wishes of the client, but eventually the gallery approved the plans, submitting a planning proposal and opening the scheme to public inquiry, both routine procedures in such circumstances.

The lead architect of the extension didn’t go to the 150th anniversary dinner of the Royal Institute of British Architects, RIBA, on May 17, 1984, nor did he expect a speech made at the dinner to be the first item on the
News at Ten
. Ahrends switched on his TV to discover that the Prince had used his keynote address to launch an aerial bombardment on ABK’s work. Charles began by tearing into architects and planners who failed to consult sufficiently before imposing buildings on communities or neglected to pay sufficient heed to disabled access; he bemoaned the tendency to tear down old buildings rather than rehabilitating them. From there, it was but a short hop to the key note of his keynote: the damage inflicted on London in his view by modern—and in particular modernist—buildings pitched next to old ones.

“It is hard to imagine that London before the last war must have had one of the most beautiful skylines of any great city, if those who recall it are to be believed. Those who do, say that the affinity between buildings and the earth, in spite of the city’s immense size, was so close and organic that the houses looked almost as though they had grown out of the earth.”

The Prince was working himself up to a pitch. “What, then, are we doing to our capital city now? What have we done to it since the bombing during the war? What are we shortly to do to one of its most famous areas—Trafalgar Square? Instead of designing an extension to the elegant facade of the National Gallery which complements it and continues the concept of columns and domes, it looks as if we may be presented with a kind of municipal fire station, complete with the sort of tower that contains the siren. I would understand better this type of high-tech approach if you demolished the whole of Trafalgar Square and started again with a single architect responsible for the entire layout, but what is proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.”

When Ahrends attended a scheduled breakfast the next morning with developers Trafalgar House, he believed the extension could be saved. He was still too much of a foreigner, he says, to understand the power of monarchy. The developers put him right. They knew the scheme was effectively dead, even though the planning application continued to grind on until then Secretary of State for the Environment, Patrick Jenkin, delivered a final coup de gr
â
ce some months later. “The practice suffered enormously,” Ahrends says quietly. “It was a battle to survive.”
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Other practices felt the chill too. The Prince had helped to speed a climate change that meant planners could be expected to favor safe options over statement buildings. When the National Gallery finally got its extension—the Sainsbury Wing opened in 1991—it was an undistinguished postmodern lump by architects Venturi, Scott Brown, selected over more interesting contenders during a second competition. “I am rather pleased, I must say, with the result,” said Charles, by this stage a trustee of the Gallery (he served as trustee from 1986 to 1993). “It hasn’t produced a rather raucous young person standing beside [the old] saying, ‘Look how old and wrinkled you are,’ so to speak.”
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He had not only stimulated discussion around important issues, but polarized the debate so sharply that some of these issues submerged in rancor, especially as he continued to make inflammatory speeches. “You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe,” he told a Mansion House dinner in 1987. “When it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.”
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The specific target of that speech, a scheme by Richard Rogers for the redevelopment of Paternoster Square, next to St. Paul’s, bit the dust. The architect John Simpson came up with an alternative classicist master plan, a lively pastiche with multiple shop frontages to leaven the dead weight of office buildings, supported by the Prince and the public but without developer backing. After the site changed hands, the new owners opted for a third design, influenced by Simpson but without the positives of Simpson’s vision, the humdrum product of too many compromises.

Another planned development by Rogers—Lord Rogers since 1996—for Chelsea Barracks caught the Prince’s attention and, as Charles wrote in a letter to Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al-Thani, the head of the Qatar Investment Authority and its property arm Qatari Diar, made his heart sink. The letter emerged in 2010 during a bustup between developers Christian and Nick Candy and the management of Qatari Diar, in partnership to build high-density accommodation on former Ministry of Defence land along the Thames embankment in Chelsea. After the Qataris withdrew the planning application for the Rogers scheme, the Candy brothers sued for breach of contract, blaming the Prince’s intervention for the Qataris’ change of heart.

Lawyers revealed the full content of the Prince’s letter in court. He urged the Sheik to consider alternative plans drawn up by one of his favorite classicist architects, Quinlan Terry, and urged a collaboration with his own architecture foundation to achieve a “timeless approach” that “
enhances
all those qualities of neighborliness, community, human-scale, proportion, and, dare I say it, ‘old-fashioned’
beauty
.”
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The author of these rococo phrases remains unrepentant. “It just seemed to me that you have to start drawing lines in the sand about how much London is going to be mucked about with,” he said. “I’d seen some of the plans and I thought, this seems insane. I just wrote a letter—a confidential letter to somebody I happen to know. I didn’t do anything in public. It only came into play when they, for some reason or other, leaked my letter. Frequently, I’ve written letters to people that they pay no attention to at all.”
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The Prince’s communications channels with Middle Eastern royals, so keenly appreciated by the Foreign Office, had again proved their efficacy. Dominic Richards, Executive Director of the Prince’s Foundation for Building Communities, reckons his boss was more catalyst than sledgehammer: “I think it was a confluence of the Prince saying what most people thought and the Qataris not wanting to do something so brutal in the heart of London that would have been a ghetto for rich people.” Lord Rogers continues to seethe. “The prince always goes round the back to wield his influence, using phone calls or in the case of the Chelsea Barracks, a private letter. It is an abuse of power because he is not willing to debate,” he said.
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That’s not quite accurate—Charles often convenes architects for discussions. What he doesn’t do is debate publicly, maintaining traditions of palace media management that make better sense for some models of royalty than others. The result has been a form of asymmetrical warfare between some strands of architecture and the royal knight errant. As for the wider impact on British cities, that has been mixed: on the debit side, less daring and more mediocrity of new build, but some positives too.

Good ideas promoted by the Prince have gone on to become mainstream: sustainability in design, better attention to the public health impacts of town planning. Planning authorities give preference to schemes that mingle income groups, “pepper-potting” social tenants and others on lower incomes with the wealthy, a practice Charles has long championed. He has also argued for more interactive planning processes. In 2011, the coalition signed off on the Localism Act and new planning guidelines, both incorporating key ideas and practice promoted by his Foundation, especially through the concept of neighborhood planning under which planning authorities must support neighborhoods that wish to pursue their own development plans. More than eight hundred such plans are in process around Britain. “My experience is if you sit down with people, local people who don’t normally get sat down with, you get a remarkable consensus outlook, which frequently revolves around reintroducing local identity and tradition and human scale,” says the Prince.
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