Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (26 page)

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In November 1948, General Jan Smuts sent a cable to King George: “We pray that the Prince will be a blessing to our Commonwealth and to the world.”
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Smuts had resigned as premier of South Africa a few months before Charles’s birth and would live just two more years, but his influence has permeated the Prince’s life just as it continues to flow through significant streams of the conservation and environmental movement. Smuts was not only a politician and military strategist; he was also a keen amateur botanist, ecologist, and the founder of holism—or “whole-ism,” as Charles prefers to spell it. Smuts set out his philosophy in his 1926 book
Holism and Evolution
. Nature tended to form wholes, he wrote. “The whole is not a mere mechanical system … It is more than the sum of its parts.” This idea neatly served the fraying idea of Empire, and was also pressed into service to attempt to justify some dangerous ideas about race, linking into the romantic notion of the noble savage.

That is an idea Charles on occasion comes perilously close to echoing. He is convinced that man in his natural state, Adam before the apple, is essentially good. It is the post-Enlightenment world that has interposed itself between man and his better nature. In these beliefs it’s easy to detect the influence of Laurens van der Post, who had absorbed Smuts’s holism at its source in his native South Africa and blended it with other strains of thought, in particular the teachings of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Van der Post advocated Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious that binds human beings whether they are Kalahari bushmen or princes in palaces. The trove of shared memory and experience is sometimes accessed through dreams.

Van der Post exaggerated his achievements and dramatized and embellished his adventures. But his brilliant storytelling in books and television programs secured him a wide fan base. To a Prince condemned to the forced innocence of that chilly Eden, Planet Windsor, the warm, supportive friendship of this older man who sought to teach but not to criticize was also immensely attractive. Moreover in reworking the idea of the collective unconscious, van der Post provided Charles with the thing he most lacked, assurance of an automatic connection to people—and not only to the ermine ranks but simple, good, unspoiled people.

Thanks to Smuts and van der Post, Charles’s philosophy will always carry difficult resonances. At times it can sound like a posh version of creationism, Intelligent Design but with better spelling and a wider vocabulary. When he talks or writes about the wisdoms of British hill farmers or remote tribes living in harmony with nature, he is aiming to preserve those wisdoms, but risks appearing to support a status quo that confines those farmers and tribes to the grinding poverty of subsistence. Since some of his examples are nonwhite, and because of the roots of holism, he could be mistaken for a racist, but he’s no more racist (or indeed sexist) than many educated, affluent white British men, which is to say, of course, that he is by no means fully exempt from either charge. However, unlike many educated, affluent white British men, he has regular contact with people from different backgrounds, ethnic and cultural heritages. His belief system fortifies his determination to create employment opportunities for former offenders and help disadvantaged young people reach their full potential. He understands, and tries to change, some of the drivers of twenty-first-century segregation that mean that joblessness among black British men remains stubbornly double that of their white male counterparts.

But his belief system also makes it impossible for him to accept “mechanistic” approaches to life that in his view squeeze out the spiritual. Just as the sight of brutalist tower blocks crystallized his distaste for modernist architecture, so some of the uglier outcrops of technology and medicine have for him become totemic of the failure of science to admit a spiritual dimension. He wants to make room not so much for the god particle as for god.

There are many people who shy away from this approach yet share his distaste for aspects of the industrialized world. Technology once promised space-age dreams in which everyone lived in cities, in sleek skyscrapers fitted out with all manner of clever white goods, their talkative Frigidaires fully stocked with mysterious foods. These happy future folk would commute to work in flying machines, if, in these utopias, they worked at all.

A significant portion of that vision has come horribly true as the superrich overfly the sprawl of the Brazilian megalopolis Sâo Paulo in their helicopters. In nations including not only Brazil but Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the United States, 80 percent or more of the populations are concentrated in urban areas. In China, Russia, and even in Charles’s second home, Romania, more than half of the populations live in cities.
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Yet many conurbations serve only their richest inhabitants well. A transnational apartheid has seen the affluent living longer and healthier lives than their poorer counterparts. That gap is now narrowing again but only because affluence is wreaking its own toll, with the longer life spans gifted by clean water supplies and improved medical technologies eroding as a result of what Kurt Hahn called “spectatoritis,” unhealthily sedentary lifestyles, combined with smoking, excessive drinking, and calorie-rich, content-poor diets. Obesity, until recently a signifier of urban poverty, is swelling among the better off. Big Food and Big Pharma are flourishing. In July 2014, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that half of all Americans have at least one chronic disease, representing the main causes of poor health, disability, and death, and accounting for most health care expenditures.

The Prince has been trying to address these problems from a number of different angles over many years. His charities run programs designed to reconnect urban children with the natural environment, to encourage physical activity, and also to raise awareness of food sources. In promoting sustainable farming, he is simultaneously seeking to encourage better diets and to attack the vicious cycles of industrialized agriculture—an example he cites in
Harmony
is the US beef industry, forced to spend money on ammonia to cleanse meat of E. coli that continues to infect cattle reared not on grass but corn in feed lots. When he first entered the debate on health care provision more than three decades ago, he hoped to break another malign cycle, by encouraging policy makers to do more toward tackling the causes of chronic diseases before these diseases take hold and must be treated, incurring costs that no system can continue to sustain as more technologies and treatments become available. He has continued to warn of the folly of medicalizing every complaint and throwing pills at patients when patients and taxpayers would benefit if these problems were averted upstream.

Charles keeps making these important points and, in confronting the sway of global corporations, has been doing what few governments risk and few individuals have the access or influence to do meaningfully. Yet the manner in which he intervenes means some people find it hard to hear him. They may agree on numerous issues—as this author does—but, like this author, they may also struggle with the routes he takes to reach some of his views, in particular with the more mystical aspects of holism.

Supporters of the Prince’s wider vision may also regret that his methods of delivery have a tendency to undercut his messages, whether about architecture or health. The Prince has spoken up so loudly in favor of integrated medicine—the blending of conventional and alternative approaches—that a section of his audience is permanently deafened.

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Homeopathy was the brainchild of a German physician, Samuel Hahnemann, who postulated that “we should imitate Nature, which sometimes cures a chronic affliction with another supervening disease, and prescribe for the illness we wish to cure, especially if chronic, a drug with power to provoke another, artificial disease, as similar as possible, and the former disease will be cured: fight like with like.”
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Britain’s royals have been attempting to fight like with like ever since Queen Adelaide, German consort of King William IV, sought the services of a homeopath, a German practitioner called Johann Ernst Stapf, in the 1830s. The Queen Mother encouraged her grandson to take homeopathy seriously. The Queen still sees a homeopath.

The Prince not only trusts to homeopathy but a wider range of therapies. “He’s always telling us to consult Dr. Ali,” says a member of his inner circle. That’s Mosaraf Ali, a doctor thanked for his contribution to
Harmony
, who according to his website is an “expert in Ayurvedic medicine and naturopathy with a holistic vision.” Mosaraf’s website also carries a testimonial from Charles (“Dr. Ali has done us a great favor in pointing out the way forward during the coming centuries”) and includes the Prince on a list of “endorsements from famous people” that also names Morgan Freeman, Sylvester Stallone, Samuel L. Jackson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Kate Moss. The general practitioners who serve the royal court and accompany members of the family on their travels are not only qualified in conventional medicine but have taken time to learn about alternative therapies and to offer an integrated approach to treatment.

In December 1982, Charles delivered an incendiary address to the British Medical Association, chiding mainstream medicine for an “objective, statistical, computerized approach to the healing of the sick. If disease is regarded as an objective problem isolated from all personal factors, then surgery plus more and more powerful drugs must be the answer.” He highlighted very real dilemmas involved in mass health care provision and raised very important questions about the growing muscle of the pharmaceuticals industry in determining health care policies, prescribing a more encompassing—holistic—approach to the assembled doctors: “Wonderful as many of them are it should still be more widely stressed by doctors that the health of human beings is so often determined by their behavior, their food and the nature of their environment.”
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This was not only sensible stuff; it needed—and still needs—to be said. But Charles framed his speech in polarizing terms, opening with a complaint. “I have often thought that one of the least attractive traits of various professional bodies and institutions is the deeply ingrained suspicion and outright hostility which they can exhibit towards anything unorthodox or unconventional,” he said. He added: “Perhaps we just have to accept it is god’s will that the unorthodox individual is doomed to years of frustration, ridicule and failure in order to act out his role in the scheme of things, until his day arrives and mankind is ready to receive his message.”
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Although the Prince went on to identify the “unorthodox individual” of his speech as the renowned sixteenth-century healer, Paracelsus, he clearly reflected—and anticipated—his own experience. He has endured years of frustration, ridicule, and failure, as his interventions, far from sowing harmony, open him to attack, redoubling his conviction that something needs to be done and his impulse to use his position to override criticism, encouraging him to do things that strengthen his critics. This is Charles’s repeating pattern—not a virtuous circle but a vicious cycle—and Edzard Ernst, for a while, became snared in its vortex.

In 2005, Ernst, Britain’s first Professor of Complementary Medicine, based at the University of Exeter, raised alarms over
Complementary Health Care
, a patient guide published by the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health. It was, Ernst told journalists, “over-optimistically misleading.” Later the same year Ernst read a draft of the
Smallwood Report
, a study conducted under Charles’s aegis “to investigate the contribution which certain complementary therapies could potentially make to the delivery of healthcare in the UK.”
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Ernst had provided information to the researchers of the report, and says he offered them his own findings on twenty-seven economic evaluations of popular forms of alternative therapy that proved inconclusive. His own primary research into alternative therapies, the basis for a 2008 book he coauthored,
Trick or Treatment
, dismissed most such therapies as having, at best, a placebo effect. The draft of the
Smallwood Report
did not reflect Ernst’s input, and he felt it included potentially dangerous recommendations—such as the use of homeopathy to treat asthma—so he asked for his name to be removed.

Ernst maintains that shortly before publication of the final report, he received a call from an old contact at the
Times
of London who had received a leaked copy of the report. “He said, ‘I don’t want you to disclose any contents of the report, but tell me a bit about it, about the methodology, why you pulled out.’ And then I didn’t mince my words and the next day it was on the title page of the
Times
,”
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says Ernst. The piece quoted Ernst not only tearing into the report but suggesting that the Prince had overstepped his constitutional role. Michael Peat, then both the Prince’s Private Secretary and Chairman of the Foundation for Integrated Health, wrote to the University of Exeter accusing the professor of breach of confidentiality. The university launched a thirteen-month investigation, eventually deciding not to issue Ernst with a formal disciplinary notice but warned him, Ernst says, that he risked sanctions if he did anything similar in future.

This did not deter him from participating in a television documentary,
Charles: The Meddling Prince
, that aired in 2007, eliciting a seventeen-page rebuttal from Clarence House. Two years later, Ernst attacked Duchy Originals—and its founder—for selling a so-called Detox Tincture. “Prince Charles contributes to the ill-health of the nation by pretending we can all over-indulge, then take his tincture and be fine again. Under the banner of holistic and integrative healthcare he thus promotes a quick fix and outright quackery,” Ernst told the
Guardian
.
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Meanwhile, funds for Ernst’s research unit at Exeter dried up. He claims he offered to retire to save the unit, but that the university instead shut it down in 2011.