The advanced age of Queen Elizabeth II of England – she is 92, though in good health – has naturally and unavoidably focussed attention on what kind of king her son and heir Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, will make when he inevitably accedes to the Throne.
As he approaches his 70 birthday on 14 November, it is a far calmer and more serene Prince Charles who contemplates his future than the one who turned fifty two decades ago. Back then the tragic circumstances of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in Paris on 31 August 1997 were still viscerally raw, and the world seemed an unforgiving and hostile place both for him and his then mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall. Back in those days the prospect loomed of that most dangerous concept for any constitutional monarchy: a personally unpopular King.
Now, however, the view from the prince’s two houses of Highgrove and Birkhall could hardly be more different. As the dwindling amounts of cellophane-wrapped flowers attached to the railings of Princess Diana’s home at Kensington Palace each 31 August plaintively attest, her memory has faded fast. Today her story has almost merged in the popular imagination with those of earlier tragic princesses of ancient British history, such as Lady Jane Grey or Anne of a Thousand Days. She has passed wholly into history, with her sole remaining legacy being the blue eyes and broad smiles of her two now-married sons Princes William and Harry.
The thorough-going Inquest and the 20th anniversary concert and memorial service – organized by the Princes - drew a line under the story for all but a handful of conspiracy theorists, deranged Lady Di fanatics and circulation-hungry Fleet Street editors (not groups that are mutually exclusive, by the way). Those bad old days are now far behind the House of Windsor. The marriage in May this year of the beautiful American actress, Meghan Markle, to Prince Harry has turned a new page in the story of the monarchy, one that no longer features Princess Diana.
Those close to Prince Charles say that the sudden furious rages that would sometimes overcome him – reminiscent of his grandfather King George VI s famous 'gnashes' or'veiners' – are rarely seen nowadays, an unmistakeable sign of his new-found calm. With his grandfather it was always the Queen Mother who would be able to douse the flames of the King-Emperor's fury, and with Prince Charles it is the Duchess of Cornwall who exercises precisely the same relaxed but engaged, loving but rational influence. Prince Charles has been in love with Camilla since the late autumn of 1972, now forty-six years ago, an important fact that the story of his first marriage slightly obscures, and it is generally recognised that without Camilla these last two decades might have been a severely disorientating time him.
There was a time that Prince Charles sat enthusiastically at the feet of every false prophet and guru going – for example the dodgy businessman Armand Hammer and the writer-philosopher-fraud Laurens van der Post – but thankfully today he takes primary advice from his eminently commonsensical wife instead. If she had been around earlier, it is highly unlikely that the Prince of Wales would have made the appalling (albeit of course unwitting) error of giving free accommodation for fourteen years on his Duchy of Cornwall estate to Bishop Peter Ball, who later turned out to have been a serial paedophile. The letters from the Prince to the Bishop were cringe-making in their naivety.
Adopting the traditional royal consort's role of staying a dutiful two steps behind her husband, never giving interviews, and not trying to create a separate power-presence, the Duchess of Cornwall has completely dumbfounded those critics who thought she would be a gaffe-prone liability. In fact, as well as bringing humour and a sense of fun to the London residence where they entertain, Clarence House, she has been a hugely stabilising influence on the Prince, as the Queen and her husband Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, have recognised implicitly in public and explicitly in private. Her easy and mutually affectionate step-motherhood of Princes William and Harry and friendship with their wives has also confounded critics and sceptics.
Prince Charles utterly forbids his staff to undertake any kind of private polling or focus grouping to see how popular he is nowadays, but the postbag has been steadily telling its own story for decades now. What the Duchess of Cornwall – a ridiculous and unconstitutional title in a country where a wife takes their husband’s rank upon marriage – had done for Charles is to help him come to terms with the central irony of his existence. For although he has long passed the age at which everyone else retires, it may still be several more years before he takes up the role for which he has been in constant training all his life.
As it looks like the Queen has inherited her mother's rather than her father's longevity – she died at 101, he at 56 – she could still be on the throne in 2027, when Prince Charles will be nearly eighty years old. Denied through this simple actuarial reason from being able to enjoy a long reign himself, Prince Charles is instead determined to be the most influential Prince of Wales since Edward, the Black Prince, in the Middle Ages. Recognizing that his historic legacy has to be built in his present job rather than the next one, Prince Charles has upgraded the post of Prince of Wales from merely being an heir apparent to being a key rain-maker for crucial social, cultural (but because of the British Constitution necessarily non-political) issues.
The Prince sometimes cites the examples of his role-model ancestors Prince Albert, who chaired the committee that ran the immensely successful Great Exhibition of 1851, and the future Edward VII, who was chaired the powerful Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes – what today would be called affordable housing. Like them, Prince Charles is interested in setting national agendas; he is proud of the campaigns he has started, and he almost never changes his mind about anything. Prince Charles has initiated debates earlier and with a higher profile than any comparable public figure inside or outside politics.
Modernist versus human-scale architecture; GM crops versus organic farming; complementary therapies versus normal medicine; defending all faiths rather than just the Protestant one; the new liturgy versus the old prayer book; narrative versus ‘modular’and ‘thematic’ history teaching in schools; human rights; the issues surrounding global-warming: in all these and many more Prince Charles holds passionate, controversial, even dogmatic views about which he is not averse to bombarding business leaders and the relevant ministers with handwritten letters that run on for many pages. Yet when some Labour ministers years ago leaked the fact that the Prince avalanches them with correspondence, the expected backlash against him never materialised. We expect him to follow his passions.
The former prime minister Gordon Brown went to stay at Birkhall, and the Prince meets another prime minister, David Cameron, regularly both socially and more formally. When asked recently whether he was'the meddling Prince' Charles answered that he preferred to see himself as ‘the mobilizing Prince’. In fact he is something of both, knowing that when he accedes to the throne he simply will not be able to continue to pontificate on many of those areas which teeter near party politics. The concept of'responsible business', for example, which Prince Charles has been promoting for decades, has today become a principal battleground between the Conservatives and the Labour Party. As monarch, he will have to steer clear of such issues, and he is conscious of wanting to lay down his markers before that day dawns. It is a day that is looked forward to as his chance of putting his lifelong training into effect, whilst also utterly dreaded as any loving son must because it cannot dawn in his mother's lifetime.
Because Prince Charles lives in elegant, well-appointed luxury it is often forgotten that Prince Charles is also the most hard-working member of all the Royal Family, working harder and longer than any of the others. His staff have trouble keeping up with him, and at Buckingham Palace some courtiers consider Clarence House to be a hardship posting. He enjoys his gruelling work-pace, at an age that most people have retired.
Although the Prince has been taking over a number of Investitures from the Queen and he receives several red boxes of official papers, there are no plans for a Prince Regent-style role, any more than for an abdication. Instead, Prince Charles has been quietly developing relationships with world leaders. Foreign Office insiders say that he has acquired diplomatic skills and a body of knowledge about foreign affairs that is beginning to rival even his mother's, which are formidable and have caught out many a permanent under-secretary and ambassador.
One of the reasons for retaining something as seemingly illogical as a monarchy in the 21st century is to have an institution of state that is not subject to the need for re-election, and so can indulge in longer-term thinking without reference to immediate popularity. Many of the arguments Prince Charles has been making about the environment, fossil fuels so on, were considered somewhat eccentric when he began thirty years ago, but are now mainstream. Few politicians would have had the courage or ignored the potential votes lost while taking up the positions Charles has championed, and which have now become orthodox. His long campaign for Muslim teenagers to have positive role-models in their communities, for example, looks highly prescient.
There are those who sneer at the Prince's well-meaning philanthropy, but the fact remains that the 130 charities that are given pound sign 3.3m by the Prince's Charities Foundation each year do indeed do genuine good. The Prince's Trust works with those who struggled at school, or have been in care, were long-term unemployed or have fallen foul of the law, and it has changed lives in precisely the way that both Labour and the Tories say that non-state initiatives should. For all that he will one day be King of England, Prince Charles is something of an anti-Establishment figure, taking on the Left-dominated teaching establishment over the way it teaches History and English, for example, and lambasting modern architects for their steel and concrete Mies van der Rohe monstrosities.
Prince Charles has made it clear that he doesn't expect Prince William necessarily to follow his example when he becomes Prince of Wales himself. It is not even certain that Prince William will take over the Prince's Trust in due course, rather than establish something of his own with a different emphasis. William is developing his own style and approach to Royal life.
It is sometimes forgotten that Prince Charles was a single-parent for most of the years when Princes William and Harry were going through their teens. That he has made a conspicuous success of fatherhood - for all Harry's occasional hell-raising as a bachelor, his sons have both turned out very well – is an achievement few attribute to him, but which he deserves. Were Princess Diana alive today, she would approve of the young men they have become, which was largely down to her ex-husband. She might not have approved of the next surprise in store, however, which of course might not be sprung for many years, which will be the overdue dumping of the Duchess of Cornwall title at the time of the next Coronation, and the crowning – in accordance with ancient English custom – of King Charles III and Queen Camilla.
On the morning of King Edward VII's coronation in 1902, the 61-year-old monarch visited the nursery at the top of Buckingham Palace, to show the children there his robes and crown. 'Aren't I a funny old gentleman?’ he asked them. Ninety years later one of those present said: 'We all agreed he was at the time, but when you come to think of it, he wasn't funny, or particularly old, and he certainly wasn't a gentleman.'Similarly, nobody today should mistake Prince Charles at 70 as a sweet but ineffective eccentric. He's not always right, but after banging on and being ridiculed for twenty years or so on an issue, he then makes the political weather. It's leadership, and one day he will make a fine king.
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