Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (7 page)

Until recently, he accepted that encroaching kingship must necessarily curtail his activism. His charities and causes would take a backseat once and if he ascended the throne or in the case of regency, if his mother grew too infirm to continue as acting head of state. One of his former Principal Private Secretaries, Michael Peat, set out the nature of that change as part of a response issued in March 2007 to the makers of a hostile documentary about the Prince: “It hardly needs saying that the Prince of Wales, of all people, knows that the role and duties of the heir to the throne are different to those of the sovereign and that his role and the way he contributes to national life will change when he becomes King. In other words it is misconceived and entirely hypothetical to suggest that problems will result if the Prince of Wales fulfills his role in the same way when King. He will not.”
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Charles has already started to cut back commitments in order to take on more of his mother’s work. That process also involves an attempt at closer integration with Buckingham Palace, inserting some of his staff into its structures in anticipation of that transition. None of this has been easy for Charles. His independence is hard-won. The mounting pressures emanating from Buckingham Palace have therefore helped to spur him to a reappraisal: perhaps becoming King might in some respects enhance his role as a change-maker rather than bringing it to a close. This is not only because the convening power of a king is surely greater than the convening power of a prince. The most thoughtful member of the royal family, Charles has been pondering long and hard about how the monarchy can best serve its subjects.

This royal train of thought has deposited him in uncharted terrain. Throughout his adult life, people (and most woundingly his father) have dismissed the things he has chosen to do—whether trying to help the socially excluded or save rain forests or preserve dying skills—as time fillers, eccentricities, indulgences. He has come to believe that such activities are not only compatible with his status, but could be integral to royal duty, to reasserting the relevance of the Crown.

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All royal visits within the UK are planned by palace aides in conjunction with local officials. In the Commonwealth Realms, each government takes the lead. On foreign soil, British diplomats negotiate itineraries with the national authorities. But no matter how the details have been finessed, each schedule for Charles is designed in his distinctive image.

So in a single day, Wales will get to see how multifaceted its Prince is, from the joker-royal, game for a laugh on the
Doctor Who
set, through more serious—and controversial—incarnations as the day progresses until evening when he transforms again, this time into a generous host. All of these Princes are more confident and comfortable than the troubled spirit that first visited these parts after being made Prince of Wales at the age of nine and returned here as a lonely student and later as a lonelier husband and later still as a widower. This is the Charles of Charles-and-Camilla, finally settled with the woman he calls “my dearest wife”—and that epithet is clearly true in both senses. When they are together, they are solicitous of each other, exchanging secret smiles, fleeting touches of the arm and waist. When they are apart, her influence is still tangible to those who knew him before. He has close relationships with his sons and has grown fond of his daughter-in-law and she of him. His grandson delights him. The royal barometer is more often set to fair than rain.

At the end of the Cardiff studio tour, he and the Duchess part company, better to distribute the largesse of their time. He heads to the nearby Prince’s Trust Cymru headquarters, newly opened with the aim of helping at least some of the growing ranks of young unemployed—in Wales standing at more than one in four—into training or work. Camilla, who has been developing her own spread of campaigning interests, departs for Porthcawl in Bridgend, to meet a group of activists working to establish an outpost of the homelessness charity Emmaus in the seaside resort hit by sagging visitor numbers and the impact of the economic downturn on an area that never recovered from the closure of the South Wales coalfield in the 1980s.

Such destinations impart a flavor that some palates define as dangerously political. To ask teenagers about their experience of seeking employment in a jobs drought or men and women sleeping rough about how they came to live on the streets is to discuss policy failures as well as personal turbulence. A 1986 documentary followed Charles on a visit to a Prince’s Trust project at a holiday camp in Great Yarmouth. As the camera watches him watching a group of kids perform a version of the Pink Floyd track “Another Brick in the Wall,” they unexpectedly insert a lyric aimed at the Thatcherite credo of the time: “We don’t need no jobs creation / We don’t want a fascist nation.” The voice-over is deadpan: “Where a politician might have decided this was an appropriate moment to move on, the Prince chose to stay and talk to them.”
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In visiting the butcher’s shop in Treharris, the Prince pursues another of his agendas. All the Windsors are more “country” than “town,” brought up to enjoy rural pursuits such as stalking and shooting, to take a hand in estate management, and most at ease when the glow of sodium lamps recedes into the distance. “I’m a countryman—I can’t stand cities,” Charles once said.
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In a commentary the Queen provided for the 1992 documentary
Elizabeth R
—the closest she has ever come to giving an interview—she talked about her involvement with the Sandringham estate and stud farm: “I like farming. I like animals. I wouldn’t be happy if I just had arable farming. I think that’s very boring.”
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She lives and breathes—and breeds—horses, as her mother did before her and her daughter now does.

Charles used to take an interest in horseflesh (though never as keen as his fascination with sheep). He gave up polo, the sport he described as his “one great extravagance,” aged fifty-seven, only after almost as many injuries. He stopped riding out with his local hunt in Gloucestershire after foxhunting with dogs was banned in 2004. But there is much else that binds him into rural life on a daily basis, not least the Duchy of Cornwall, which under his stewardship has diversified and expanded, buying more than twelve thousand hectares of agricultural land from the Prudential insurance company in 2000 to take its total footprint to around fifty-three thousand hectares in twenty-three counties and increasing its capital account from $742.5 million in 2004 to $1.4 billion in the financial year ending April 2014.

The Duchy is Charles’s golden goose—and an albatross. Any male who is first in line to the throne automatically becomes Duke of Cornwall. The Duchy operates to generate profits for such heirs, and though it now does so in a thoroughly modern way, as a property developer and landlord, it retains original period features. It is exempt from capital gains tax and it is not subject to corporation tax because it is not legally a corporation. The income enables the Prince to maintain a laboratory for his ideas; the anomalous status of the Duchy fosters resentment against antique privilege.

It is yet another factor that sets Charles apart from most people, yet it also created his connection to constituencies that feel themselves ill represented by metropolitan politicians: foresters, gamekeepers, hedgelayers, small farmers such as the founders of the butcher’s shop in Treharris. In securing his own rural base—the Duchy purchased Highgrove House in Gloucestershire and the nearby Duchy Home Farm in 1980—the Prince consummated his love affair with the land. At Highgrove he redesigned the gardens, telling a documentary team in 1986, “I love coming here. And I potter about and sit and read or I just come and talk to the plants.”
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It was one of his jokes but it lumbered him with the label of plant whisperer, especially after the satirical British TV show
Spitting Image
depicted his latex alter ego inviting a potted fern to his fortieth birthday party.

Duchy Home Farm under the Prince’s direction became a model of organic husbandry. Modern agriculture tends to produce repetitive vistas pocked by ugly buildings. At Duchy Home Farm improbably glossy rare-breed cattle graze certified organic fields demarcated by verdant hedgerows. Barley and wheat grow upright—the unmodified strains, unlike higher-yield varieties, strong enough to support their crowns of grain. Mixed varieties of cabbages flourish in beds laid out almost as prettily as the gardens at Highgrove, fronds of cavolo nero mimicking the three feathers of the Prince of Wales’s heraldic badge.

It’s a working farm, but also a showcase for sustainable methods that it’s hard to imagine anyone else would have found the time or resources to establish, especially more than thirty years ago. “He was in the vanguard of [environmental thinking] but he came at it from his unique perspective,” says the Sustainable Food Trust’s Patrick Holden. “Given that no person on the planet has travelled more widely, he’s been a witness to the destructive impact of humanity on the environment at first hand and feels obliged to do something about it.”
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In 1990 the Prince again moved ahead of the pack, founding one of Britain’s first organic brands, Duchy Originals, under the aegis of his charitable foundation. His farm supplied some of the oats for the brand’s first product: oaten biscuits. The line expanded to encompass more than two hundred organic brands sold by a variety of retailers, swelling the coffers of the foundation until economic downturn and strategic weakness turned the tables, making Duchy Originals dependent on financial sustenance from the foundation. But the Prince isn’t a man who easily relinquishes his initiatives. When trouble brews, his favored response has been to regroup and rebrand, sometimes sustaining enterprises that would never survive without his involvement, at other times producing stronger organizations. In 2009, an exclusive licensing and distribution deal with Waitrose effectively outsourced the management of the brand to the supermarket.

Three years after the launch of Duchy Originals, Charles took pleasure in seeing ground broken on another project: Poundbury, often described as his model village but actually an extension to the town of Dorchester, on Duchy land and, like Duchy Home Farm and Duchy Originals, both prototype and platform, in this case for community architecture, traditional crafts, and walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income, low-carbon development. Its quaint streets are explored in a later chapter.

“The difference between the Prince and an elected politician is the time horizon,” says Fiona Reynolds, the former Director-General of the National Trust—the Prince is its Patron—who also worked with him during her stints at the Council for National Parks and the Council for the Protection of Rural England. “An elected politician is always thinking about the next three to five years; tomorrow afternoon can be a long way off in politics. Whereas he is unashamedly thinking about the long term, and in fact it’s his duty as heir to the throne to think about the long term. Although what he’s often said has been controversial, he has been positioning things precisely where politicians are very unlikely to be.… He has moved the debate forward in a number of ways; he has made respectable the very notion of climate change which 20 years ago was seen as an extraordinarily distant and contentious issue.”
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Charles made his first public speech on the environment at twenty-one, warning of the need to “discipline ourselves to restrictions and regulations … for our own good.”
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In the intervening years, his ambitions, and his rhetoric, have ripened. “My greatest fear is that we’re busily wrecking the chances for future generations at a rapid rate of knots by not recognizing the damage we’re doing to the natural environment, bearing in mind that this is the only planet that we know has any life on it,” the Prince says, urgent and unblinking. “It is insanity in my humble opinion to destroy this miraculous entity floating around in space that is linked with the extraordinary harmony of the universe.”
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His profound environmental concerns twine with a determination to preserve and safeguard traditional rural life and these, in turn, connect to his other causes and activities, all of which find expression not only in patronages of existing causes—which number more than four hundred in total—but in charities and initiatives that he sets up.

Much of this activity takes place below the radar, to the frustration of the Prince and his aides. “When I was Private Secretary, people would say to me, ‘What has the Prince done for us?’ And I’d say, ‘Well there’s the Prince’s Trust.’ And they’d say, ‘Oh yes, that has helped a lot of people to get off the unemployment queue and realize their potential,’” recalls Clive Alderton. “Then they’d say, ‘He doesn’t really do very much,’ and I’d say, ‘He did hundreds of royal engagements last year,’ and it would be five hundred or more, and they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s really very good.’ And I’d see that
Monty Python
scene about ‘What have the Romans done for us?’ playing out in my mind.”
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There are many Pythonesque notes to the Prince’s existence. At times he could be one of the prophets from
Life of Brian
, addressing a slack-jawed crowd, or Brian himself, thrust into a public role he never sought. His quest and the jostling of the knights around him recall
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
. Though the Prince employs professionals of a high caliber, the underlying structure of Clarence House is of a court, with all the intrigues and rivalries that entails.

What little organizational logic there is to the Prince’s portfolio has been applied after the fact. For more than forty years, he has spotted what he sees as gaps in the voluntary sector, often on the basis of single conversations, and sought to plug them, grafting onto the creaking structures of his court the massive apparatus of Britain’s widest-ranging professional charitable empire.