Prince Charles remains a royal embarrassment
I met Prince Charles once. It was at a posh black-tie dinner in Goldsmiths Hall, a grand old building in central London.
It was 1985 and I was in Britain on a Commonwealth journalism fellowship. I can’t remember what the dinner was for, but the 10 journalists on the fellowship were invited to attend and we duly lined up to meet Prince Charles and the Princess of Wales, who were the guests of honour.
Charles was pleasant enough in our brief exchange. I think I complained about the weather – it had been very wet – and asked whether he could use his influence to do something about it. How bloody original.
I can’t say the encounter thrilled me. One good thing about being a journalist is that you’re not awed by meeting famous people, because it goes with the job.
Besides, the royals have never floated my boat. While I take the pragmatic view that the constitutional monarchy is a form of government that works well for New Zealand, I’ve never understood the sentimental adulation for royalty.
In any case, given a choice, I would probably rather have met Diana, who was moving along the line of guests behind Charles, but before she got to me the call came to go into dinner. No disrespect, but she would have gone to her grave bitterly disappointed had she realised what she’d missed.
This was before the world learned of the strains in the royal marriage. I felt indifferent to Charles then. Not so now.
Nothing about this king-inwaiting impresses me. He married the young and naive Diana while he was having an affair with another woman – now his wife – who was then married to another man.
He was, in other words, a cad. He was also weak, reportedly allowing himself to be bullied into marrying Diana on the urging of his father, the Duke of Edinburgh.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Diana was selected as a royal brood mare. The marriage was a charade, staged for public display.
All this has been rehashed recently with the approaching 20th anniversary of Diana’s death and the announcement that previously secret tapes, recorded during voice coaching sessions, are to be broadcast in a TV documentary.
In those tapes, Diana spoke candidly about her courtship and marriage. They give us still more reason to be unimpressed with Charles. And while I find it distasteful that Diana’s intimate thoughts are to be aired publicly, in yet another posthumous invasion of her privacy, there’s a counter-argument that the British public – in fact all people who come under the umbrella of the British monarchy, which means us too – are entitled to know about the true character of the man who stands to inherit the throne.
Diana reportedly revealed that she and Charles met only 13 times before they married. During their ‘‘courtship’’, he would go for weeks without phoning her. She paints a picture of a man who was emotionally stunted. Sex happened once every three weeks.
At one point, when she suspected Charles was still seeing Camilla, she went to the Queen for advice on what to do. The Queen reportedly replied: ‘‘I don’t know what to do – Charles is hopeless’’.
This may explain why the Queen, now 91, hasn’t handed over to Charles. She may not have a very high opinion of him even now, and who can blame her?
Not only does only he come across as pompous and stiffly selfconscious in public, but there are real doubts about whether he’d be able to keep his nose out of politics, as his mother has scrupulously avoided doing.
Charles has a history of writing letters to British politicians pushing his pet causes. If he were to try pulling rank as king, he would risk disturbing the delicate balance of powers on which the monarchy depends for its constitutional legitimacy.
His sons William and Harry are cut from an entirely different cloth. They seem grounded and sensible – almost miraculously so, considering their background. They have helped rebuild the image of the Windsors in the public eye and made the family look human. Charles could learn from them.
He could also learn something from his father, who seems comfortable in his own skin and has the admirable quality of appearing not to care too much what the media and public think.
As someone who considers himself immune to royalty fever, I was strangely moved by TV coverage of the 96-year-old Duke’s performance of his last solo public duty in London last week.
For all his peccadillos, Prince Philip has been a paragon of duty and loyalty during 65 years as royal consort. Standing upright and erect in the rain outside Buckingham Palace, eschewing offers of an umbrella, he was staunch to the end. When he jauntily waved his bowler hat in farewell to the crowds, you got the unmistakeable sense that he was signalling the end of an epoch.