On a wet and chilly February morning, during an official visit to Portugal, the Prince of Wales climbed the battlements of St George’s Castle overlooking the city of Lisbon and approached this reporter, and others. In tones of bewilderment bordering on despair he asked: “Have any of you the slightest idea what I’m doing here?”

He was miserable. It was 1987 and he had plumbed a new depth in his life. His marriage lay in ruins, to the extent that he and Diana, Princess of Wales, were occupying separate suites at their guest palace in the Portuguese capital. He had renewed relations with Camilla Parker Bowles, but she was unable to bestow any outward sign of joy on him. Charles likes order and certainty; he is not good in a crisis.

The Princess was still the public’s darling, drawing the crowds and baiting her estranged husband by skittishly twanging President Soares’s braces during a state banquet. She, too, had taken a lover, James Hewitt, and the liaison seemed to energise her. As they plodded dutifully around their official engagements at arm’s length, Charles might as well not have been there. Indeed, at that moment, he profoundly wished he wasn’t.

Little did he know it then, but his misery and unease would last another decade. In the battle for hearts and minds the Princess was almost invariably the winner, whether sitting pointedly alone outside the Taj Mahal or giving her gut-wrenchingly mawkish interview to Panorama, aided by copious dark eyeshadow. The Prince, who celebrates his 60th birthday tomorrow, is too indecisive to be an alpha male; he is putty in the hands of strong women, to another of whom he is now married. He dithered so much over the divorce that his mother had to write to both parties urging them to get on with it, as the endless waving of dirty linen, not least a telephone conversation in which the heir to 16 realms wished that he were a tampon, was stinking the dignity of her throne. The Princess eventually took him for £17 million, some of which he had to borrow from the Queen. The only satisfaction for the taxpayer – who hadn’t funded the settlement anyway – was that the Revenue took £8.5 million of it in inheritance tax.

Then, an unbuckled seatbelt in the back of a black Mercedes speeding through the Paris night changed things for ever, albeit in a tragic way.

When news of the Princess’s death reached Balmoral in the small hours, Prince Charles is said to have imploded into a blue funk of panic and indecision. It took Sir Robin Janvrin, then the Queen’s cool-headed deputy private secretary, to assume command and direct his principals to their due tasks. It took the recently elected Tony Blair to advise his sovereign that she had better not remain in hiding in Aberdeenshire for too long; there was a strangely menacing mood in London. The monarchy experienced a palpable wobble that week.

Yet for Charles the tragedy presented an opportunity to rebrand the Prince of Wales and to play up his undoubted virtues. His advisers mounted a campaign to portray him as the loving father of two adored sons who had lost their mother. They arranged family photocalls at Highgrove, and despatched him on official visits in the company of William and Harry. His stock soon rose, not only because he genuinely dotes on his boys, but because millions love his sons and find them more newsworthy and relevant to the present age than their father.

It was all a huge relief to Charles. During the dark days of marital corrosion he had written to a friend: “I never thought it would end up like this. How could I have got it so wrong?” The suspicion hovers that he doesn’t understand women at all. But then, who among us mere males does?

He could have married Camilla in the 1970s, when they were an item and she was up for it. He, of course, had competing interests. She tired of waiting for a proposal and married Andrew Parker Bowles instead. It would be facile to blame Charles’s indecision for a missed opportunity; he has always been deeply conscious that his unique position would place a heavy burden on a potential wife. And to speculate on how such a marriage would have fared would, in the words of a former chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, be dabbling in the stuff of other people’s souls.

In the post-Diana era, Charles introduced Camilla to the public stage gradually, conscious that she had battalions of enemies out there intent on the beatification of his first wife.

After a well-calculated tip-off from his office to all newspapers and broadcasters, this reporter joined about a million other scruffy hacks late one night outside the Ritz, where the couple had been attending a birthday party for Camilla’s sister Annabel. The explosion of flashguns resembled the successful testing of a hydrogen bomb. From that moment Camilla knew what she was in for.

She has done well, if only to give the Prince the contentment he deserves at his age. But she is no obedient lapdog; the impending departure from Clarence House of Elizabeth Buchanan, the Prince’s able and valued private secretary, is said to be Camilla’s doing after Buchanan aired her view that his wife had a lazy attitude to public engagements.

There is also the as-yet-unresolved problem of what her position will be when Charles becomes king. The legion of Di-hards and many traditionalist voices in the Church of England will still not swallow an adulteress as Queen Consort. Time, however, may soften the objections; disestablishment of the Church would certainly demolish much of the opposition.

The greatest traditionalist – in dress, religious attitude and sense of constitutional duty – is Charles himself. He is determined to reign, and is not the sort of man to take the Edward VIII path and renounce the throne in favour of the woman he loves. Much as he admires his son, he does not take kindly to the occasional clamour for the line of succession to leapfrog directly to a young and glamorous William, more able to embody the Zeitgeist of the 21st century.

The Prince has, of course, been trying hard to do that very thing himself, with his Jungian opposition to a purely materialistic age and his environmental preaching which has most recently seen him lend his considerable influence to saving rainforests.

Unfortunately, he has a tendency to shoot himself in the foot, as when he took his gas-guzzling Aston Martin to an environmental conference in Prague, or flew to the US to collect a “green” prize from Al Gore. He spends more than £1.5 million a year of taxpayers’ money on trains, planes and helicopters to take him to official engagements – and sometimes just to get home from a Scottish break. Urging his staff to use bicycles around London is a piddling gesture.

Listening and taking advice is not always his strong suit, and he sometimes seems to hear only what he wants. He has fallen out with several of the seven principal private secretaries who have served him, yet he can exhibit a loyalty some might regard as displaced. When his former valet Michael Fawcett resigned over the discovery of an Augean stable below stairs in Clarence House selling off royal gifts, Charles made sure that Fawcett still got the contract to organise his parties. He harbours a streak of petulance, as when he wrote a complaining memo to a hapless valet who had placed his toothbrush glass at the wrong end of the bathroom shelf. At the same time, he is a man of great personal kindness, sometimes sending handwritten letters of sympathy to the bereaved he barely knows or has any great reason to like.

He is determined to use his privileged position for the greater good, and largely succeeds. His views on holistic medicine, GM crops, architecture or the teaching of Shakespeare in schools have him damned as wacky and ill-informed by entrenched and self-serving professionals in those fields, but at least he stimulates debate. His efforts to build bridges with Islam are a positive contribution to British society, and his Prince’s Trust is the largest and most effective charity of its kind in the world.

Charles is the arch traditionalist who prefers the soaring poetry of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer to any prosaic modern translation of Scripture. But saving the planet is the pressing concern of the times he lives in, and he will come to the throne as our ultimate High Green. As he reaches 60, he has more than a slight idea of what he is doing here.

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