Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (10 page)

If the Queen conceals her political instincts like a hand of cards, her personal likes and dislikes, played almost as close to her chest, are ecumenical. Her favorite Prime Ministers both rose from the lower middle classes: Labour’s Harold Wilson and Major, a Tory. There was no love lost between her and Thatcher or real connection between her and Blair. These views have filtered through the accounts of palace observers and Prime Ministers. The Queen has never again been forced to make her preferences public. The Conservative party adopted a mechanism for choosing its leaders without the need for royal intervention, and Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system until 2010 reliably produced emphatic outcomes that the monarch simply affirmed when the preselected leader of whichever party emerged with the largest number of parliamentary seats made his—or, in 1979, 1983, and 1987, her—way to Buckingham Palace.

Ahead of the May 2010 general election, with polls predicting electoral stalemate, there was speculation that the Queen might be forced once more to intervene in the selection of a Prime Minister. “We’re told the monarchy is ‘value for money,’” wrote Graham Smith, director of the antimonarchist group Republic. “Well now’s the time for the monarch to earn her crust. If she ducks the responsibility she confirms once and for all that she is constitutionally pointless, a political eunuch stranded by the tide of modern democratic principles our leaders try to apply to a feudal system.” He added: “If the Queen has written herself out of the script for fear of making the wrong decision what we’re left with are shadowy deals and secret memos that will shape the way in which our next prime minister is chosen without the benefit of public scrutiny. Whatever the outcome of this election, we need the appointment of the prime minister to be conducted in the open.”
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The Queen did not, in Smith’s terms, earn her crust. For five days the incumbent Prime Minister Gordon Brown hung on in the hopes of forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrats until they opted to enter government with David Cameron’s Conservatives. The Queen remained aloof from all the negotiations. A palace source suggests this represented not the abdication of her constitutional role but its practice, steadying nerves through the fact of her existence during the transition from one political reality to another that occurred without unrest on the streets or major jitters in the financial markets.

Graham Smith did see one wish partially fulfilled. Within months, the new coalition had published a draft of the Cabinet Manual, a document setting out the guidelines that had been used in formation of the government. In his introduction to the finalized text, Cameron cited a “desire for a political system that is looked at with admiration around the world and is more transparent and accountable.… For the first time the conventions determining how the Government operates are transparently set out in one place. Codifying and publishing these sheds welcome light on how the Government interacts with the other parts of our democratic system.”
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Downing Street officials warned that the manual should not be mistaken for the beginnings of a written constitution, but it remains the only official publication of the modern era to attempt to define in writing the role of the monarch.

It does so in one pithy sentence that doesn’t so much prescribe what a monarch should do as describe what the Queen has done: “The Sovereign is the head of state of the UK, providing stability, continuity and a national focus,” the document declares. That is the job the Prince expects to inherit. Supporters of a republic would prefer to replace the hereditary system with elected heads of state, each poll pitting different visions of Britain against each other. That might prove bracing. It would not be comforting. “You don’t have an election and a dispute as to who the next monarch is, with half the country thinking the wrong person has been elected, as you do with a republic,” says John Major.
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In remaining on show, apparently immutable, as everything changed around her, the Queen may have provided a guidepost in unfamiliar landscapes and a nucleus of unity at a time when most impulses favor disintegration. The European project is fracturing. The concept of Britishness has stretched thin. Both ideas are coming under increasing strain as nationalist and populist movements gain strength in befuddled response to globalization. While Scotland contemplated a rupture with the rest of the United Kingdom, leaders of the campaign for independence assured voters that shuffling off the yoke of Westminster need not mean losing the Queen or the reassurance of stability the Crown provides. Though the monarch devoutly hoped Scots would opt to stay in the union, and despite the urgings of a close member of her family to intervene, she kept her views guarded, going no further than to express the wish that Scots would “think very carefully about the future.” Her aides went to “great lengths to communicate the Queen’s own unimpeachable position,” says a palace insider. After the September 2014 referendum, in which 55 percent of voters opted to retain Scotland’s place within the sovereign’s still-United Kingdom, Buckingham Palace released a statement by the Queen. “As we move forward, we should remember that despite the range of views that have been expressed, we have in common an enduring love of Scotland, which is one of the things that helps to unite us all,” she said.

Such gestures of reconciliation come naturally. Sources say she found it harder to accept the apologies of the Prime Minister who was caught by film crews during a trip to the UN General Assembly in New York later the same month boasting about calling the Queen to convey the referendum result. “The definition of relief is being the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and ringing the Queen and saying, ‘It’s all right, it’s OK,’” Cameron told former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ahead of a business meeting. “That was something. She purred down the line.” While nobody in the palace rejected the idea that the result secretly pleased the Queen, officials were irritated by the breach of protocol that revealed her private thoughts. John Major cannot recall a similar lapse, he says. “However far back you go, Prime Ministers will talk generically but they will not talk specifically. If they did, then you lose the value of the private audiences with the monarch.”
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Cameron’s description of the Queen purring drew snorts of incredulity. Around Prince Philip she is sometimes, disconcertingly, kittenish, but to most people—and certainly Cameron—she remains unyielding and literally and figuratively unstrokeable. To touch the Queen is an act of l
è
se-majest
é
.

In commanding respect, she has also gained public affection. She may be owed a debt of gratitude, too. Far-right parties have been making significant gains in some countries, as voters lash out at mainstream politicians they don’t trust and immigrant populations they find convenient to scapegoat for economic hardships. The French National Front won almost a quarter of the vote, more than any other party, in May 2014 European elections. Its close equivalent in the UK, the British National Party, lost the one seat it held in the European Parliament, as another anti-immigration, Euroskeptic party, the United Kingdom Independence Party—UKIP—surged to claim twenty-four seats. UKIP shares many hallmarks of far-right parties and gives succor to the central mythology that foreigners and outsiders threaten national cultures and prosperity. Its leader, Nigel Farage, drew fire—and, presumably, hard right votes—by suggesting Britons would be right to be concerned if Romanians moved in next door to them.
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But his party has also made a show of expelling or disciplining representatives for expressing “unacceptable” views, such as the Henley-on-Thames councillor David Silvester, who perceived in severe flooding in England God’s response to the same-sex marriage bill. Such views may play well with a narrow band of the electorate, but are seen by the UKIP leadership and less partial observers to mitigate against the party’s chances of continuing to capture a wider vote and solidifying its position as a serious electoral force.

There are many reasons why Britons may be less susceptible than some other Europeans to an unvarnished far right, not least its lucky habit of producing incompetent far-right leaders. Richard Chartres, Bishop of London and close to the Prince since they attended Cambridge University together, believes that Britain’s constitutional monarchy and its staunch Queen have also helped to immunize the population against far-right populism. “One of the things that the monarchy has done in this country very much is keep the right wing respectable,” he says. “If you look at all those countries where the monarchies collapsed after the First World War, one of the consequences was a visceral street rightism, which has flourished in a vacuum of iconic figures who could sum up national pride. One of the things that the Queen has done is she’s occupied that space. She’s also offered a kind of reassurance and continuity at a time when our place in the world is dramatically reduced.”
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A nagging question for those who see the Queen as a bulwark against extremism and disintegration is this: will her son be able to fulfill that role?

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If the man of God’s argument for saving the Queen is unprovable, the fact of her steady presence in public life is undeniable. “Apart from my sister, she is the only other person who has been a total constant in my life ever since I came to consciousness. The Queen was there, and that’s an incredible rock I think to have in your life,” says the actor Helen Mirren.
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After a career spanning four decades, Mirren accepted the role that would snag her an Oscar in 2007 and lodge her almost as indelibly in the public imagination as the character she played. The movie
The Queen
dramatized and sought to explain in human terms Elizabeth II’s greatest misstep: her failure to read the national—and global—mood in the wake of Princess Diana’s death. As the sovereign grieved in private, anger against the Windsors built like suppressed sobs. Finally the Queen let herself be persuaded to display her sorrow on television. “We have all been trying in our different ways to cope. It is not easy to express a sense of loss, since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings: disbelief, incomprehension, anger—and concern for those who remain. We have all felt those emotions in these last few days,” she said.

It was enough but only just. Such mistakes have been few and far between, and they have always been similar to each other in nature. The Queen appeared austere and uncaring in 1966 when she waited six days before visiting Aberfan in South Wales after a landslide of coal waste buried its school, killing 116 children and 28 adults. She missed the funeral in Lockerbie of a ten-year-old victim of the terror attack on Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town. “At a time of national mourning, we rightly and naturally turn to the Queen for our lead,” wrote columnist Jean Rook in the
Daily Express
. “Broken-hearted Britain watching TV needed to see their equally grieving monarch.” Buckingham Palace provided a frigid explanation: the Queen does not attend memorial services or funerals.
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The Queen scrapped that convention and has adjusted as far as she is temperamentally able to a world that needs to see her grief to believe it. She also relaxed into motherhood, enveloping her second batch of children, Andrew and Edward, with a warmth denied to Charles and Anne. She loved her first- and second-born, but in the early years of her reign focused on her duty as sovereign to the exclusion of much else.

Charles in particular learned early in life to equate duty with denial and denial with destiny. That he was born to assume the crown, the Prince said, “dawned on me with a ghastly inexorability.”
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When he was just one year old, his mother spent six weeks away, and on her return took four days to catch up with administrative affairs—slipping in a quick trip to the races—before rejoining her son. After she acceded to the throne, such separations became more protracted. In 1953, she toured the Commonwealth with Philip for six months. When Charles boarded the royal yacht, excited finally to see his parents after their long absence, he tried to join the dignitaries lined up to greet them. “No, not you, dear,” said the Queen.
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This book explores a character shaped by nature and nurture and perhaps just as much by the absence of nurture. Charles was born into a unique set of circumstances and an odd environment. He was also the product of an age that warned against showing children too much tenderness for fear of spoiling them. His mother may appear changeless, but she has always reflected the times—and moved with them.

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The Windsors would like you to believe that the things they do are things that have always been done, but that is just a case of smoke and gilded mirrors. The dynasty rebrands and refreshes itself constantly and carefully, and sometimes weathers more radical reinventions, too. The premier symbols of Britishness refer to themselves as “European mongrels,” says Prince Andrew, and that’s about right, though the most concentrated element of the Windsor line is German, with a leavening of Danish blood.
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In 1917, as European powers slid toward war and British antipathies to all things German deepened, King George V quietly exchanged his family name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha for Windsor, the reassuringly English-sounding name of their castle in Berkshire. He urged Prince Louis of Battenberg, his cousin and married to one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters, to anglicize his surname, too. Battenberg, who had carved out a high-flying career in the Royal Navy, rising to First Sea Lord by the time war with Germany appeared inevitable, complied. It wasn’t enough to save his job, but it spared royal embarrassment, not least when in 1947 his grandson Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark took British citizenship and adopted the clunky new family name, Mountbatten, just before marrying the future Elizabeth II and gaining a new title, Duke of Edinburgh.