As you swish up the drive to Highgrove towards the Cotswold stone barns and
the stables that conceal the main house, you are confronted by a sign which
declares, “You are now entering an old-fashioned place”. It is a
tongue-in-cheek but defiant riposte to the former cabinet minister Charles
Clarke, who once breached ministerial convention to complain publicly that
the heir to the throne was “old-fashioned and out of time”.
Perhaps unwittingly, that phrase neatly encapsulates the attitudes of the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Britain from the Prince of Wales - the
“meddling” monarch-in-wait-ing who inhabits another planet and who misuses
his privileged place in the constitutional hierarchy to burden us with his
prejudices on any issue that flits into his mind.
This caricature is not the prince I have known for the past 15 years and it
does not begin to appreciate the complex, driven man whose mother has just
presided over his 60th birthday party in Buckingham Palace.
Nor is this Prince of Wales just any 60-year-old facing a baleful reminder of
his own mortality. Notwithstanding the excellent health of the Queen, before
too long he may be required to become the next king. Inevitably, therefore,
the question “will he be a good king?” is bound to become ever more
insistent.
As it happens, there are those in his circle who are already wrestling with
precisely that question by reformulating it in a way that has the potential
to be constitutionally and politically explosive. Not “will he be a good
king?” but “what kind of king does Britain need for the 21st century?” The
question itself is not controversial. But the answer to it is bound to put
the constitutional cats among the pigeons.
Although it is not yet a subject for open, let alone formal, discussion, there
are discreet moves afoot to redefine the future role of the sovereign so
that it would allow King Charles III to speak out on matters of national and
international importance in ways that at the moment would be unthinkable.
For the time being, this is just a murmuring between Clarence House and
Buckingham Palace that has also reached the corridors of Westminster and
Whitehall. But it whispers a heretical thought: that tomorrow’s monarchy may
need to be more “active”, more engaged, more intimately in touch with the
concerns of the British people as we move into ever more testing times.
This is not an issue that the prince likes to discuss in such terms even with
his most trusted intimates. From his perspective, it would not only
constitute an act of lese-majesty but would oblige him to ponder the death
of his mother. However, he has latterly intimated to one or two of his
confidants that he would like his present role to evolve so that, once he
inherits the crown, his knowledge and experience, his contacts and his
unique ability to “convene” others in the national interest could be put to
good use rather than go to waste.
IN the old days, the Prince of Wales was widely portrayed as a mildly
eccentric character with a dotty urge to hug trees and talk to plants. Then
came the “fairytale” marriage which failed, his adultery with Camilla Parker
Bowles and the gruesomely documented divorce. Persecuted by moralisers,
hypocrites and cynics, he was frequently consumed by misery and rage as he
struggled to prove his worth. This occasionally brought him close to despair.
The years leading up to the tragic death of the “people’s princess” fuelled an
impression that he was not only “out of time” but cold-hearted and
self-pitying as well. This is deeply unfair, though the prince certainly can
be self-indul-gent. He also expects a great deal from his long-suffering but
exceptionally devoted retainers. Any failure to live up to his exacting
standards risks a show of testiness. More pertinently, he can be querulous
when crossed. He has accumulated a number of certainties about the state of
the world and does not relish contradiction. His friends and staff tend to
avoid confrontation with him over issues of substance - education,
architecture or GM crops, for example - for fear he will explode with fury.
“Who wants to be yelled at by the Prince of Wales?” as one put it.
These downsides form one small part of his character. He is charming, generous
and thoughtful. As someone who has had to struggle to keep pessimism at bay,
he empathises with troubled souls; and those who have been on the receiving
end of his solicitude do not easily forget it as many hundreds of people up
and down the land, beyond his circle of friends, can testify.
He combines this generosity of spirit with an intense seriousness of purpose.
When I first spent time in his company, some 15 years ago, he seemed defiant
but insecure (his nails were almost as finely pared as Gordon Brown’s) as
though casting around for a defining theme to give shape to his beliefs and
provide a purpose to a life that was otherwise stricken by the agonies of
his failed marriage. His fierce conviction that the human species was
accelerating towards hell in a handcart was either ridiculed or ignored.
“Will they listen? Will they listen?” he would ask in angry frustration. “Oh
no. Oh no.”
Today he is fundamentally the
same man but he has reached a very different place. The coroner’s verdict that
Princess Diana died in a car accident finally released the prince from the
“horrors”, as he once put it to me, of that agonising episode in his
family’s life. Embraced by a happy marriage to the great love of his life,
he is more secure than he has ever been. The Duchess of Cornwall is a
support and a shield but very capable of bringing him down to earth.
Likewise, the prince has always been a loving father but he is now a proud one
who chortles at the discovery that Harry has so impressed his army peers
that he is known affectionately as “the dog’s bollocks”.
You might think such serenity in his private life would tempt him to ease off
in his self-appointed public role. It doesn’t. He still asks “will they
listen?” and he is still inclined to answer “no” - despite knowing that
“they” do listen.
He knows it is widely acknowledged that he has been proved right - or at least
constructively stimulating - on a host of important issues for which he was
once mocked. He finds himself sought after for the expertise, judgment and
wisdom he has accumulated “minding” about the world. But if this gives him a
frisson of “I told you so” satisfaction, he doesn’t show it. On the
contrary, it has galvanised him even more. He is more impatient and more
demanding: his catchphrase is not that of the former Prince of Wales -
“something must be done” - but “we must do something and quickly”. As he has
said to me: “I simply can’t see what I see and do nothing about it. I could
not live with myself.”
It is this sense of duty - along with what used to be an aching need to win
the approval of his parents, and particularly his mother - that has driven
him along the path he has pursued so relentlessly for the past 30 years.
If “minding” is in his DNA, so is “meddling”. Today, this finds its clearest
expression through the portfolio of philanthropic enterprises known as the
Prince’s Charities. “My” charities, as he calls them without a blush,
embrace his beliefs about almost every aspect of life: social deprivation,
community cohesion, urban planning and design, architecture and the arts,
religion and culture, agriculture, the environment and - with almost
desperate urgency - the threat of global warming.
Ask anyone who works professionally in these fields and you will discover that
all these charities are pioneering ventures that punch far above their
weight. They will also concede, even when they disagree with him, that he
has become a pivotal figure in all these areas.
Those who run this empire belong to a generation for whom the age of deference
is long past. The chief executives of almost every one of his charities -
the largest “multi-cause” charitable endeavour in Britain - are not closet
courtiers, nor do they fawn on “the boss”. By common consent, he is very
hands-on - forever on the phone, writing memos and letters, urging them to
do this or that - and they sigh that he has little understanding of the
bureaucratic impediments that stand between him and his purposes.
In the same breath, however, they compete to deliver superlatives about his
vision, ideas and energy - which, reluctant to be thought flatterers, they
would never say to his face. One, a former senior adviser to Bill Clinton,
says: “The prince has an entirely coherent and c o n n e c t e d world view.
He’s always a step ahead of me. I am astonished by his reach.”
I t h a s n ’ t always been like that. Fifteen years ago, when I tried to
detect a connecting thread that would give coherence to his charitable work,
I found myself in a tangle of apparently disconnected passions. This clutter
fuelled the widespread suspicion that he was a meddler with a butterfly
mind. Today, although this web of charities is still complex, it is no
longer bamboozling.
In part this is because his private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, and his team
of seven deputy or assistant private secretaries have imposed a new order on
what had been a ramshackle structure. It is also because the buzz words that
have long been at the core of his public pronouncements - “harmony”,
“balance”, “sacred” and “timeless” - have far greater resonance in the world
outside.
Take one example. Burnley is notorious as a hotspot of inter-communal tension:
poor whites barricaded on one side confronting poor Asians on the other,
while the BNP stirs their mutual suspicion.
Late in 2005 (after the BNP had captured seven seats on the local council) the
prince went on an “away day” to Burnley. He returned saying he had been
“inspired” by the people but horrified by the cultural tinderbox in which
they lived. He sent a memo to Julia Cleverdon, then chief executive of his
Business in the Community charity, saying: “We must do something.”
Today eight of the prince’s charities are working with government agencies,
the police, churches, mosques and any other “stakeholder” wanting a voice.
Their goal is to deliver a five-year plan to transform the prospects of a
town where there lurk real fears that some alienated young Asians will turn
to terrorism for spiritual salvation.
Crucial to the project is a piece of derelict rail track, the Todmorden West
Curve. Rebuilt, it would halve the journey between Burnley and Manchester
and generate the kind of two-way traffic that would make all the difference
to the town’s hopes of prosperity. As soon as Cleverdon, the project
co-ordinator, heard that her friend Lord Adonis had been transferred from
education to transport in the recent reshuffle, she rang him: “Andrew, I
have a project for you. It is a no-brainer. The prince is really keen on it.
It’s called the Todmorden Curve . . .” Adonis interrupted drily: “Julia, I
know about it already. Robert [Devereux, the permanent secretary at
transport] has had a letter from the prince.”
THE Prince’s Trust, now 32 years old, sprang from his empathetic instinct
that no individual, however downtrodden, was beyond redemption: “There but for
the grace of God . . .” he once said to me. It focuses on the unglamorous
task of salvaging young lives from drug addiction, crime and prison,
targeting especially school dropouts. Every year more than 70% of the
trust’s 40,000 “clients” work their way back into education, training or
employment.
Once again the prince has been “meddling”. Not long ago he discovered that a
group of young offenders newly released from prison had been denied the
benefit payments to which they were entitled. “We’ve got no money,” one said
to him. “Of course we’ll go back into crime.”
To begin with, officials at the Department for Work and Pensions insisted
there wasn’t a problem. After the exasperated heir to the throne got in
touch with a government minister, the payments came through within days.
The closest the prince has come to trampling on really sensitive political
toes is in education. Even his warmest admirers would concede that his
passion for “old-fashioned values” has sometimes betrayed a narrow view of
excellence. He deplores the “all must have prizes” attitude favoured by some
“child-centred” theorists and is dismayed by a secondary school curriculum
that has turned history and Shake-speare into optional extras. But he is
also driven by a burning sense that every child has a spark of hidden
“genius” that must be nurtured if all are to reach their potential.
Otherwise, he asks, how can we have a harmonious and balanced society?
To this end, he is in the throes of setting up an academy school in one of the
most deprived areas of the London borough of Lambeth. In partnership with
the Young Foundation (whose director, Geoff Mulgan, ran the No 10 Policy
Unit for Tony Blair) and the local council, the Prince’s Charities have just
submitted a joint bid to open a vocational school teaching arts and crafts
to pupils aged between 14 and 19. Who will pay what - and how much might
come from the prince’s own charitable funds - has not yet been
decided. Nor has the name of the school, although, whether he likes it or
not, it is sure to be known as the Prince’s Academy.
As in society, so in nature. The words “harmony” and “balance” also inform
everything he feels about the survival of our species on this “sacred”
planet. For this reason, he is loathed by the conglomerates that find
themselves in his firing line.
In a recent newspaper interview he berated these agricultural behemoths for
causing an exodus of the rural poor into “unmanageable, degraded and
dysfunctional conurba-tions of unmentionable squalor”. They and their
“clever” GM scientists had put the world on course for “the biggest
environmental disaster of all time”. If that is the future, he declared
furiously, “count me out”.
His outburst inevitably hit the headlines. The next day he rang a friend,
conceding with rueful relish that he had been goaded by a skilled
interviewer and that he “had lost it”.
It is hard to imagine the circumstances in which the heir to the throne will
cease to “meddle” in such ways. But this takes us back to that big
constitutional question: assuming the world has not already come to an end
by the time he inherits the crown, what should we expect and what do we want
of King Charles III? Should he - could he - lace himself into the
constitutional straitjacket worn by his mother, or is there a better
alternative?
These are not questions about the sovereign’s formal duties. No one doubts for
a moment that he would preside at ceremonial engagements with the same grace
that the Queen has displayed. Nor would he participate as a protagonist in
matters of public controversy. There would be no more excoriating speeches
to galvanise support for his projects - or certainly not in the provocative
way that he does now. But those who believe that Britain needs an “active”
sovereign for the 21st century claim that it would be a waste of his
experience and accumulated wisdom for it to be straitjacketed within the
confines of an annual Christmas message or his weekly audience with the
prime minister.
Prince Charles, they continue, would inherit a very different world from that
bequeathed to his mother. Because the ideological chasms of the 20th century
have been bridged, today’s politicians are driven to compete for power by
packaging together marginally different varieties of the same produce as
they scrabble for votes on the centre ground. It is thus virtually
impossible to have any horizon beyond the next election. As a result, there
is a vacuum of national leadership.
In such circumstances, they argue, it would be missing a trick for him to be
required to take a vow of monarchical silence. Believing that he has his
finger on the popular pulse, they think he would be uniquely placed to offer
reassurance and hope to the British people.
Endorsing this, a senior cabinet minister said to me last week: “He has an
amazing range of interests and none of them are superficial. It would be a
shame to lose these - within the obvious bounds of controversy, of course.”
Similarly, a recently departed cabinet minister added: “He has long had
concerns that others didn’t want to touch - maybe because there weren’t
votes in it. He reached conclusions decades before the rest of us and what
once looked eccentric now looks like foresight.”
How would the aims of the “active” monarchists be achieved? Under the terms of
our unwritten constitution, the sovereign’s formal “right to be informed, to
encourage and to warn” is confined to those prime ministerial audiences or
occasional meetings of the privy council.
To breach this convention - however cautiously - would represent a seismic
shift in the role of the sovereign. But, the “active” monarchists counter,
the prince is far more astute than his detractors have allowed. He would
choose his moment, his subject and his language with care. It is
inconceivable that he would misuse such responsibility either to “go off on
one” or to ride one of his hobbyhorses.
In a time of grave financial and economic turmoil, for example,
Charles-as-king would be in a uniquely nonpartisan position to offer
perspective and bring the nation together; to remind us that the British
people have endured great troubles in the past but that they have invariably
triumphed over adversity; that their genius is their strength and tolerance
and their ability to work together for the common good; but that, perhaps,
the international community should seize the unhappy opportunity of this
crisis to reexamine the structure of the global market with a view to
ensuring that it reemerges in a more sustainable form on a planet which,
within a few decades, will have 9 billion mouths to feed.
Or, to take another example: in the run-up to a climate change summit, he
might find a suitable platform - the Guildhall, the European parliament or
the US Congress - to reflect on the threat posed by global warming and to
urge all leaders to commit themselves to the policies and timetables
required to avert the “catastrophe” he and others foresee.
In such ways, they suggest, the sovereign would be speaking for the nation and
to the nation - and all in the national interest.
Judging by what they say about him at the Foreign Office, he is already
unusually well equipped to represent the national interest abroad. As a very
senior mandarin pointed out to me, two of his great passions have now risen
to what officials call “the front and centre” of Britain's diplomatic agenda.
While the government seeks global action to combat climate change and to
counter extremism, the prince’s international stature as an environmentalist
and his reverence for Islamic culture combine with what my mandarin
described as “his extraordinary network of contacts, built up over many
years, with monarchs, heads of state, politicians and community leaders” to
make him “invaluable to us”.
The role that the “active” monarchists appear to have in mind for King Charles
III would be akin to that performed by the presidents of Ireland or Germany.
Although these heads of state are required to be politically nonpartisan,
they are otherwise free to speak their mind in public. The two most recent
Irish incumbents, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, have made careful but
notable use of this dispensation.
Under Germany’s written constitution, the president is enjoined to interpret
and to communicate a long-term view of the national and global trends
affecting the country’s role in the world. So why should a 21st-century head
of state, albeit unelected, not have a similar role in the United Kingdom?
There is at least one formidable obstacle. It would require the informal
consent of the government and all-party support.
In addition to those republicans - closet and otherwise - who abound in the
corridors of Westminster, there are bound to be other senior politicians,
probably including a significant number of monarchists like Charles Clarke,
from all parties who would relish “a period of silence” from the Prince of
Wales. It would be a bold prime minister who thought it worth trying to
persuade parliament that the 21st century really needed a more “active” head
of state to preside over the nation.
Nonetheless, the clutch of ministers and senior civil servants to whom I have
outlined the vision seemed remarkably relaxed about it. With the caveat that
anything the king said in public would have to have cross-party support and
be beyond or above the day-to-day political fray, one cabinet minister said:
“I think there might well be a case for this so long as it were done with
delicacy and care.”
Endorsing this, a senior civil servant mused: “We might need something like
this. It could work.”
The idea is in its infancy and it is therefore too early to judge how the
British people - particularly the “quiet majority” - would respond. Would
they deplore any change to the long-established status quo so perfectly
represented by the Queen? Or, when the time comes, would they welcome a new
approach for a different age? Either way, only one man can be guaranteed to
keep his own counsel. Now that the birthday party is over, he is already
back at work minding other people’s business and meddling on their behalf.
For the time being, and possibly for many years to come, he remains the
Prince of Wales.
The backdoor threat to sever church and state
Prince Charles told me in 1994 that when he inherits the crown he wants to
become “defender of faith”. This provoked a furore. How could the supreme
governor of the Church of England defend any other than the “true” faith?
He meant precisely what he said: although he has always been a devout
Anglican, all religions and their adherents are owed respect and reverence.
This does not mean that he foresees any difficulty in swearing to become
“defender of the faith”. On the contrary, he sees no constitutional or
spiritual contradiction in being both that and a “defender of faith”.
The bigger question is whether he will have an established church to defend.
This is rapidly emerging as a deeply divisive political issue, although it
has yet to burst into the open.
The threatened conflict springs from plans now afoot at No 10 to introduce a
wide range of constitutional reforms. One of these has the potential to
sever the state from the church – disestablishment. At issue is the 1701 Act
of Settlement, a cornerstone of the British constitution. Under the act, no
Catholic may inherit the crown and any member of the royal family who
marries a Catholic is barred from the succession unless his or her spouse
agrees to renounce the Church of Rome.
According to my source at Downing Street, the government is determined to get
rid of this “bizarre” piece of discrimination. Reform is under “active
consideration” for inclusion in the next Labour manifesto and informal
discussions are under way between No 10 and Buckingham Palace.
The reformers argue that it by no means entails the demise of the established
church. The sceptics - both at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House - fear
that it would mean “disestablishment” by the back door.
This is no longer simply a matter of constitutional principle but practical
and divisive politics. One senior former cabinet minister, who has raised
the matter directly with the Prince of Wales, argues that it is not only
vital to press ahead with the reform but that the intention to do so should
be unambiguously out in the open in the next 18 months. Otherwise, he
insists, the future of the union with Scotland will come under much graver
threat.
He points out that Alex Salmond, the Scottish first minister, has proposed a
referendum on independence for 2010: “He only has to promise to remove the
antiCatholic discrimination embedded in the Act of Settlement to win over a
large section of the community which – especially in the west of Scotland –
have so far been most resistant to the Scottish independence.”
But other senior politicians adamantly oppose any attempt to reform the act.
One cabinet minister told me it would damage community cohesion in those
cities where, beneath the surface, Catholics and Protestants still have an
uneasy relationship.
No one is suggesting that any change in the law would take effect during the
Queen’s reign. At her coronation she undertook to uphold the “settlement of
the Church of England” - a direct reference to the act. Any reform of the
law would have to be written so as to apply only to her successors.
