Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (30 page)

In 2012 the Prince took on a formal role with the services at their request, becoming their first royal patron. He and Camilla also attended the premiere of the James Bond movie
Skyfall
, asking that monies raised should benefit charities helping former and serving members of the intelligence services. He held the first annual Prince of Wales Intelligence Community Awards a year earlier. It had been his idea to find a way to celebrate achievements by members of the intelligence services; the three agencies then got together to agree to the criteria. The lunchtime ceremony is held every year in the St. James’s Palace State Apartments. “His Royal Highness has often commented that due to the secret nature of the three agencies’ work, their successes often remain unrecognized and unreported,” says the statement from the intelligence services. “The awards complement the public honors and recognize staff for their outstanding efforts to keep the country safe.”

Many royal engagements are announced in advance. These awards are only reported a day after the event, to maintain confidentiality. The attendees, numbering around two hundred, include friends and family, the services heads and the ministers with oversight of the services. Citations are given to whole teams, and are directed not just to field agents but also for excellence in administration, management, and what in a corporate setting might be termed information technology. Charles conducts the ceremony with the same high formality as he doles out public honors. “The Prince’s appreciation of the work of the intelligence agencies came across very strongly and it was great to hear how much he values what we do.… We were really proud to receive the award,” says one 2014 recipient. “It was fantastic to see the Prince appreciate the work that goes into joint operations,” says another. “His questions showed just how interested he is in our work.”

Most people employed in intelligence are unable to tell any but those closest to them how they spend their days and then only in circumscribed form. To outsiders, spies often describe themselves as “consultants,” deflecting curiosity by pretending to specialize in areas so boring or abstruse as to discourage further inquiries. The awards offer a rare chance to operate in daylight. “I was delighted my parents could glimpse into my world.” “Our work being recognized by the Prince of Wales in front of our colleagues and family made me very proud, and my mum more so.” “There are not many occasions where you can speak so openly about our work; this is one.” “Being in the shadows, it was extraordinary to be at St. James’s Palace talking to the Prince about our work.”

That positive reinforcement is all the more welcome in the changed and rugged landscape spies refer to as “Snowdonia.” In 2013, former CIA systems administrator Edward Snowden leaked thousands of classified documents obtained during his work as an outside contractor to the US National Security Agency (NSA), a conjoined sibling of Britain’s GCHQ. The documents revealed that the United States and UK in concert with other countries were scooping up huge amounts of data from electronic communications of all kinds, snooping on allies in their efforts to contain terrorism, and circumventing restrictions against spying on their own citizens by sharing data between them. A core group of five countries—Five Eyes—jointly operating many of the surveillance programs originally came together during World War II when Britain reunited with its former Anglophone colonies, the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, to plan for the postwar world and continued their cooperation into the Cold War era and beyond.

Snowden’s leaks disrupted relations with friendly countries that found they had been targeted and damaged the reputations of the intelligence agencies involved—and, according to those agencies, compromised active operations and operatives as well as future capacities. They also raised questions almost as bottomless as the NSA archives, about privacy versus security and accountability versus secrecy.

The backwash is engulfing public and corporate life, urging new safeguards for individual privacy and greater institutional transparency. The arguments don’t hinge simply on ethics but also on the practical difficulties of blocking the spread of information in a porous world. It is a struggle neither Charles nor the palace apparatus yet grasps, even though they often find themselves directly impacted.

Four of the Five Eyes are countries for which Charles is likely to serve as head of state. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand still bend the knee to the Crown, but it is the Crown, eager to retain their loyalty, that pays court to them, with regular visits. Charles’s May 2014 visit to Canada wasn’t an unalloyed success.

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Camilla smiles on the podium. She’s wearing a blue that’s more cobalt than royal, designed to tone with her Nova Scotia tartan collar and scarf, and beginning to accessorize with her fingers on this unseasonably frigid morning. The Duchess of Cornwall has adjusted smoothly to many of the oddities of being a royal, but she wasn’t born with the Windsor metabolism. She feels the cold, unlike her poikilothermic husband and in-laws, and finds foreign trips grueling. It doesn’t help that the Prince demands jam-packed schedules that allocate no slots to lunches or quiet lie-downs, irrespective of the time zones overflown. Then there are the endless ceremonials. She’s often required to spend more time being welcomed and waved off than actually looking at a place.

On the first day of the Canada trip, that’s probably a good thing. She has been spared the freezing run-through of Nova Scotia’s welcoming ceremony on Halifax’s Grand Parade. A choir of schoolchildren shivered in harmony as their adult overlords wrapped up against the cold. No matter: everyone was excited. The authorities had deployed a guard of honor and a platform full of movers and shakers including Justice Minister Peter MacKay, sent to Canada’s federal parliament by the voters of a Nova Scotian constituency. A military band, perplexingly, played “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?” until MacKay moved to the microphone to check sound levels, announcing his pleasure in welcoming “the Princess of Wales” to his country—the title by which Diana was known. By the time he delivers his speech, MacKay has corrected his mistake, but it’s a foretaste of a trip during which avidity for the spectacle of royalty masks a deeper confusion about who the visitors are and what they’re doing in Canada.

Some of that confusion is stirred by the ghost who already hovered above the proceedings before MacKay inadvertently named her. Charles and Diana routinely drew crowds in the tens of thousands on their first trip to Canada in 1983. Charles and Camilla’s whistle-stop tour to Halifax, Pictou County, Charlottetown, and Winnipeg never commands big attendances, but everywhere they go, the couple is greeted by small numbers of well-wishers propelled onto the streets by the impulse to breathe the same air as royalty. “Just look at the smiles,” says Shelly Glover, federal Minister for Canadian Heritage. “They just love the Prince and the Duchess.… The media here and in the UK are very different in outlook. I see media here covering the royal visit with smiles. The Canadian media are just as excited as the rest of us.”
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That isn’t much of an exaggeration. The state broadcaster CBC streams every event live. Other channels confect royal specials and dust down archival footage from the Prince’s previous sixteen trips to his future kingdom. Local newspapers splash the visit on their front pages and shower the royals with praise. When Charles feeds sandwiches to a polar bear called Hudson at a Manitoba zoo, Canadian journalists clap like seals offered particularly tasty mackerel.

Britain’s fourth estate couldn’t have cared less. At first only one story from Canada makes it into the British newspapers and then barely scraping onto two or three inside pages. After the welcome ceremony in Halifax, Charles and Camilla visit a local resource center for military families where the couple chats with a trio of volunteers costumed as a carrot, a bunch of grapes, and a banana as part of a drive to promote healthy eating. In the UK, the image inspires a gag as inevitable as some of the Prince’s own punch lines: that he has moved on from talking to plants to holding conversations with fruit.

But an encounter later the same day will create a volume of coverage back in Britain that surpasses even Diana’s high-water mark or the Cambridges’ overseas missions. At a tea for World War II veterans and war brides at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, Charles and Camilla meet eighty-seven-year-old Marianne Ferguson. A volunteer at the museum, Ferguson, n
é
e Echt, first arrived at Pier 21 aboard a ship called the
Andania
in February 1939, three months before King George and Queen Elizabeth landed on Canadian shores. She was a Jewish refugee from Danzig, who had witnessed the brutality of Nazism.

How much of her story she revealed to Charles in the few minutes they spent in each other’s company—or what, exactly, he said in response—remains unclear. Neither the Prince nor his aides would comment on the “private conversation,” but according to the
Daily Mail
a remark made by the Prince was “heard by several witnesses. Mother-of-three Mrs. Ferguson said: ‘I had finished showing him the exhibit and talked with him about my own family background and how I came to Canada. The Prince then said, “And now Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler.” I must say that I agree with him and am sure a lot of people do. I was very surprised that he made the comment as I know [members of the Royal Family] aren’t meant to say these things but it was very heartfelt and honest.’”
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British politicians tripped over themselves in the rush to slap down the Prince or to defend him. “If Prince Charles wants to make controversial statements on national or international issues he should abdicate and stand for election,” tweeted Labour MP Mike Gapes. Russia hit back too. State-funded broadcaster Russia Today reminded viewers of the Windsors’ German antecedents and historic susceptibility to Nazism: the infamous 1937 visit paid by the Duke of Windsor—as Edward VIII became on abdication—to Hitler, Prince Philip’s SS brother-in-law, and, rather more tenuously, the swastika armband Prince Harry once wore not as a political statement but to attend a costume party. Putin weighed in, riposting that Charles’s alleged comment did not live up to standards of “royal behavior”—a criticism that provoked snickering in the Foreign Office given the fate of the Romanovs—but the Russian President downplayed the seriousness of the diplomatic spat. “I think that if our partners in Great Britain, just as I am, are guided by national interests rather than some other considerations, then all this will pass quite quickly and we’ll continue to co-operate as we have done before,” he pronounced magisterially.
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The world hadn’t shifted on its axis. The fracas confirmed the Prince’s critics in their analysis that he is dangerously outspoken but endeared him to another constituency that is tired of political platitudes. Despite the churning coverage, it wasn’t really a big deal. But Charles, for all that he assumed a brave face for his last duties in Canada, flew back to Britain demoralized. He had traveled with an agenda and a higher purpose, as a representative of Canada’s head of state and as the nation’s presumed next head of state, not only to shore up support for the monarchy but also to showcase its potential future form. His program of activities made little distinction between head-of-state functions and the Prince’s promotion of various causes. In this blurring of lines, he had the support of his hosts. “The Canadian government sees his charities as being an important element in the relationship with the Crown and part of its value,” said a well-placed source.

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The Prince may be Britain’s most prolific philanthropist by many measures, but that’s not how Britons see him. His image farther afield, clouded though it is by memories of Diana, more often acknowledges the scale of his charitable work. “Coming from somewhere other than here, I saw the Prince as a leader,” says Hank Dittmar.
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“I didn’t come with a lot of other baggage British people have about the system.” Another of Charles’s American-born advisers, Dame Amelia Fawcett, lauds the Prince as an unsung hero. “In the United States he would be lionized,” she says. “The sniping, the envy, the ‘how-dare-he,’ ‘he’s-too-privileged,’ no one would think like that. They’d think, ‘Wow, look at what he’s doing; here’s a man who has got everything, who is wealthy and privileged, who doesn’t need to do anything, but he’s doing so much for so many.’”
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America might well share Britain’s conflicted attitudes to wealth, privilege, and the Crown had the nation not shaken off the colonial yoke—and the British Crown—in 1776. Australia, Canada, Jamaica, New Zealand, and the other far-flung Commonwealth Realms never made a full break and retain some of the symptoms of adolescence as a result. Australia, in particular, is often truculent toward the royals, then screams like a kid at a pop concert when they pay a visit. As Charles contemplates the relationship between the House of Windsor and the Realms, wondering how to get it onto a more mature footing, or mulls his possible future role as head of the wider Commonwealth, the lessons of history carry both comfort and warning. The monarchy may appear sturdy and adaptable, but empires, countries, the solid-looking world, and social orders have all proved friable.

The growth of the British Empire reflected the nation’s military strength, entrepreneurial spirit, and sense of destiny. It crumbled with those defining characteristics and as the ideological, commercial, and strategic logic of the British brand of colonialism failed. The brutality deployed to retain dependencies tore away the fig leaf of the Empire’s moral purpose and jarred with the very notion of Britishness. The costs of fighting global wars eventually far exceeded the revenues from distant territories. In 1947, Charles’s great-uncle Mountbatten as the last Governor-General of India declared the partition of India and Pakistan. Both nations became independent republics. Two years later, UK Prime Minister Clement Attlee agreed that India could remain a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, up to that point an association of countries ruled directly or indirectly by Britain. Over the years more countries joined, former colonies and others without historical ties, all hoping for diplomatic advantage from the association.