Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (35 page)

Hearts are open. Harmony reigns. The question remains: Will the Prince, his eldest after him, and, after William, George? Part of the answer lies beyond royal control, in social and economic developments that may enhance the residual value of the monarchy or shred it. But a larger responsibility for their fate lies with the royals themselves and in particular with the next sovereign. The Queen has kept the throne safe, if not warm. Should her son live long enough to succeed her, he is unlikely to live long enough to secure his legacy through the kind of slow, careful change management that served his mother so well. His greatest challenge will be to stand for continuity while redefining the monarchy, remaking it in his own image while buttressing it for his heirs. He has already embarked on that project, unrolling a potential new model of kingship that melds the ceremonial aspects of the role with a much more active beneficence than the old formula of charitable patronage.

After touring the grounds of Dumfries House with his Bond villains, the Prince returns to the house for a private meeting with Fiona Lees, the Chief Executive of East Ayrshire council, also attended by Kristina Kyriacou. In a small upstairs sitting room the three hunch together, strategizing ways to deal with the most urgent problems confronting the area, stimulating a sluggish economy and dealing with the abandoned open-cast mines that litter the landscape, filling with contaminated water. “We need people to help us think about this,” says Lees. The Prince agrees. “If you get a whole lot of people in one room, they make connections. Much of the time this never happens in some extraordinary way,” he says.
15

Conclusion

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils—nor the human race, as I believe—and then only will this our state have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.

Republic
, Plato

In April 2014, A broadcaster asked me to participate in a surreal exercise, recording an interview as part of a preprepared obituary to run if the Prince should die without being so courteous as to give news organizations prior notice of the event. In an upstairs room of a London pub called the Peasant—the producers chose the location without intended irony—I answered questions posed by a journalist designed to help me sum up Charles and his impact. I found it tricky to do this in sound bites, and even at the luxury of book length, it has been a struggle to draw a balanced assessment. So much is written and said about the Prince, but so much is also distorted for one reason or another. This book should hopefully have highlighted those reasons and stripped away some of the distortions. I have no doubt its publication will also be taken as license to create fresh mischaracterizations and caricatures of its subject.

That Charles is the victim of such distortions does not exonerate him and his extended court from a share of the responsibility for them. He is always making connections—between people and ideas, the past, present, and future, the material and the spiritual, golden threads that bind. This is one of his greatest talents. What he doesn’t always spot are key connections between what he does, or is done in his name, and how this impacts perceptions.

One frequent charge against the Prince, that he does too little, is obviously untrue. Another—that if he were not doing the things he does, as activist and charitable entrepreneur, other such entrepreneurs would fill the breach—seemed increasingly dubious as I delved into the detail and scope of his activities. The Prince’s Trust and his other charities and initiatives are near-perfect reflections of the Prince. He has been misrepresented and misunderstood, in ways anatomized in this book. But not infrequently when Charles gets bad press, it’s because he deserves it or an aspect of his organization warrants it, or because people harbor legitimate disagreements that they cannot directly debate with him or easily voice except by attempting to make as much noise as he does.

Courtiers too often tell him what they think he wants to hear rather than what he needs to hear. He isn’t always given the opportunity to understand the full dynamics of a situation. He is surrounded by individuals who will try to hearten him, and sometimes to gain favor by playing princely trigger points that everybody in palace circles knows how to locate. Charles has long been a Defender of Faith—faith in Nature and perennial wisdoms as well as Christianity—and thus will never accept alternative philosophies or movements such as Modernism that to him appear as kryptonite. He doesn’t grasp that many of the people he has run up against over the years are as passionate as he is, as driven and well meaning as he is.

There is no point in arguing that he should jettison the belief system he has spent a lifetime constructing. He would no more be capable of doing that than I, an atheist, can subscribe to that belief system. I may not be fully in harmony with
Harmony
, but I have witnessed positive outcomes of the princely philosophy, the virtuous circles Charles is capable of creating. He sometimes sparks vicious cycles too, and in drawing to a conclusion, I will aim to highlight ways in which he might guard against that tendency in future, for his own benefit and the benefit of the institution he represents.

I do so not as a monarchist but as a pragmatist. I believe all humans are born equal except for the natives of Planet Windsor, who arrive in the world at a huge disadvantage to the rest of us, burdened with expectation and duty. If I were designing a country from scratch, it would be a republic. I was born into such a country, but for most of my life I have lived in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and have come over the years not only to appreciate the public service that some—not all—royals perform, and the pageantry—and comedy—they supply, but also to understand the upheaval their replacement would represent. Monarchy doesn’t make sense but the system still, mostly, works quite well. “If you chuck away too many things,” says the Prince, “you end up discovering there was value in them.”
1

Republicans are convinced that the point of transition from the Queen to her son—if and when this comes—will be the moment of maximum danger to the Crown. They are not wrong. But some British republicans also argue that the transition from Crown to elected head of state could be quick and painless, a matter of crossing out “Her Majesty the Queen” or, far more likely, “His Majesty the King” and writing in “President.” The overseas Realms already have inbuilt structures to deputize for the nonresident sovereign. Their national identities are not so intricately interwoven with the Windsor brand. Despite the William and Kate effect, it seems likely that Australia or Jamaica or New Zealand may begin to disentangle themselves from the hereditary system after the Queen has died, perhaps even before that. The Commonwealth faces questions in the longer term not only about its titular head but its purpose.

If Britain begins to unwind its constitutional settlement, the process will surely be messier. “If you get rid of the Crown, you have to write a new constitution,” says Graham Smith of the UK campaign group Republic. “The key point of the constitution is that the people are sovereign and all power starts with them so if the constitution doesn’t assign power to the sovereign then it has to stay with the people. We could say, ‘Look, there are certain powers which were with the Crown which are now with government, certain powers which are now with parliament, some powers are now with the head of state and everything else is just not there.’ You can have it however you want it.”
2

I remain skeptical about this. Big constitutional changes are difficult and lengthy and absorb energies that may be better deployed elsewhere. They also risk unintended consequences, so must be thoroughly thought through and minutely plotted. There are, as the Prince observes, no quick fixes. The reason British politicians continue to squabble about how to reform the House of Lords—and since Scotland’s referendum, about how to devolve more powers across the UK—is not only that vested interests have impeded progress. It is that in replacing self-evidently flawed systems such as an upper chamber stocked with the beneficiaries of naked political patronage and still (ye gods) with a rump of hereditary peers, entitled by accident of birth to make, revise, and reject laws, the architects of reform instead threaten to introduce self-evidently flawed replacements.

The current House of Lords, for all its weaknesses, complements the House of Commons. Its members need not seek election and so their time horizons are extended. They are more independent of party affiliations and bring a wider range of experiences to bear than MPs. “The thing about being here for life is that you are not so bound to your party,” says Labour peer Tony Berkeley. “Because over a time of thirty years some people are here, each party changes its policies. They all do. And the older people say, ‘Hang on, you’re all doing it wrong’ and they have ways of expressing their view, they don’t vote so often. They abstain. Or they speak their minds a bit more.”
3

Fully or partly elected alternatives risk eroding these useful differences. Representative democracies are precious things, but not every one of their constituent parts must always entail direct elections for the systems to be truly democratic.

At Republic’s annual general meeting in May 2014, Graham Smith quoted from the final speech made by the famous Labour firebrand Tony Benn ahead of his retirement as a Labour MP. Benn renounced his hereditary peerage to sit in the Commons and returned to the reasons for his decision in his parliamentary valedictory, listing five questions for any governing institution: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?” Benn concluded: “If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.”
4
The current House of Lords is not directly accountable to voters but it is subject to reform and even abolition as and when MPs coalesce around a workable plan. What the debates at Republic’s AGM fail to acknowledge is that the monarchy is in a similar position, even if the sovereign is consulted on legislation and would be expected to provide the last signature on any law abolishing the throne. If that day comes, no Windsor monarch is likely to withhold his or her signature or barricade the palace gates.

Graham Smith doesn’t really hold out hope of stopping the coronation but expects King Charles to make the argument for republicans once installed on the throne. “People couldn’t imagine David Cameron being Prime Minister until he was. And I think the same will happen with Charles, and the other thing that will come is ‘Well, hang on a minute, we’ve just changed our head of state and I didn’t get a vote.’ And that’s quite a big thing as well and I think that people kind of talk in theoretical terms saying well we don’t need to vote for them but when they’ve actually seen it change in front of their eyes without ever being asked that might change the way people feel about it.”
5

The secret to galvanizing opposition against the monarchy, Smith says, is to get people angry. He thinks the presumed future King will annoy the hell out of his subjects. Here are some thoughts about how Charles could make himself more loved than loathed.

*   *   *

Niccol
ò
Machiavelli, Renaissance Italy’s most celebrated political philosopher, declared that sheep and royalty don’t mix. In his famous treatise
The Prince
, he tells the story of Emperor Maximinus, who earned the disdain of his subjects by keeping flocks. The cautionary tale is unlikely to chime with a twenty-first-century, sheep-promoting Prince, but Machiavelli also offers more apposite advice. “It makes him contemptible when he is considered fickle, frivolous, effeminate, mean-spirited, irresolute, from all of which a prince should guard himself as from a rock; and he should endeavor to show in his actions greatness, courage, gravity and fortitude; and in his private dealings with his subjects let him show that his judgments are irrevocable, and maintain himself in such reputation that no one can hope either to deceive him or get round him,” he wrote.
6
Apart from the injunction against effeminacy, this must count as timeless a piece of wisdom as any perennialist prince could hope to follow.

There’s another nugget the heir to the throne might usefully take on board: Machiavelli counsels princes to keep their servants and soldiers in check. The ranks of Charles’s servants and soldiers—his courtiers and the ground forces implementing his vision through his charities and initiatives—include some of the most talented and dedicated individuals I’ve ever met, as passionate about the Boss as he is in his activism. The more he is criticized, the more they band together in a protective ring, lowering their lances at the outside world—which in their view includes the other royal courts. This tendency has been reinforced as Buckingham Palace attempts to lead a restructuring to prepare the monarchy for the transition that actuaries looking at the Queen’s age and the longevity of her mother might predict still to be ten or twenty years away. A regency may be more imminent.

In either case, this is a time to prepare, to listen and learn with an openness that a siege mentality impedes. The Prince must ensure that everybody working for him brings him bad news as well as good and never seeks to slay perceived dragons on his behalf. The fire-breathers may just have a point the Knight of the Realms would benefit from hearing. If not, he’s skilled enough at wielding his own sword and, if anything, rather too ready to use it.

There is widespread irritation in Clarence House at some of the efforts to root around in the Prince’s affairs. Aides suspect that the declared motive of such missions—a push for more transparency and accountability—masks a desire to get rid of the monarchy, or at least its heir. The
Guardian
’s Alan Rusbridger makes no bones about his republican agenda. Investigations by other news organizations more often look to a smaller prize: a scoop. The opacity of the royal palaces means that even small details carry a journalistic value.