NOTE TO CHARLES FROM A FELLOW 70-YEAR-OLD
ICOULD say I am writing to wish you happy 70th birthday for November 14 but that would be silly. Wishing someone a happy birthday is often meaningless. For some people significant birthdays feel like death knells – 30 is the end of youth, 40 definitely means middle age, 50 is the new 60 and as for 70, it’s entering God’s waiting room. If that’s how you feel, a piffling greeting isn’t going to lift the gloom.
How much truer that must be if your significant birthday really does come at a bad time. I can’t believe that a “happy birthday” would have been enough to cheer you up on your 50th. It must have been your year zero – AD and BC: After Diana, who had died the previous year, and Before Camilla, or before Camilla had got into her stride. She had always been around of course but her name was mud (and that’s to put it mildly).
It must have been terrible. Your own approval rating among the public stood at 10 per cent. Had you been a politician or managing director you would have had to resign but for you, of course, that was not an option.
No, I am writing to celebrate and acknowledge a birthday that must be very happy indeed. You are successfully married to the right wife, who is increasingly appreciated (as she should be), your sons long ago passed through their awkward age and have become fine men, you have three lovely grandchildren and you are planting trees that will (as long as you talk to them) grow up with them. And you have a mother who is throwing an enormous birthday party for you. How many 70-year-olds can say that?
There is a message in this – not just for heirs to the throne but for all of us – and it will appeal to your philosophical side, your sense of continuity and harmony. It is this: you cannot know when happiness will come, you can help it but you can’t force it.
Schooldays – the happiest days of your life? Not for you. Your father sent you to Gordonstoun, a tough place that had been good for him but was hell for you.
Fairytale wedding in Wren’s cathedral with the whole nation in foolish ecstasy? Hardly.
FOR you happiness comes in the seventh or even eighth decade. How lovely that life can reach its peak quite late. For you there is plenty more to come and perhaps eventually you will fulfil the role you were born to play. Most people at your age have completed their careers but you, of course, are still on work experience. Your mother seems in splendid health. If/when you do become king and Camilla becomes queen (and only fools and haters are against that) you may well need a stairlift to ascend to the throne.
You would do so with the recognition that nobody in the Royal Family since Queen Victoria’s consort Prince Albert has made such a thoughtful, hardworking and commendable contribution to national life as you have.
The Prince’s Trust has been going more than 40 years and has helped and supported hundreds of thousands of young people, giving them opportunities that have changed their lives. This has been an obsession of yours.
On the face of it you don’t seem a likely candidate for connecting with tough or troubled youths in the way your alpha male father or (relatively) cool sons, especially Harry, might. But the fact is that you do. Your commitment outweighs a millionfold the fact that you aren’t God’s gift to impromptu wit or photo opportunities. You were magic as a little boy in grey flannels, quite dashing as a young man on a beach in Australia or on skis at Klosters or astride a polo pony. But your formal, rather oldfashioned manner means you aren’t quite a style icon or eye-candy though even there, age has its consolations – self-deprecation is creepy in the young but becomes more palatable with age.
Earlier this year GQ magazine gave you its Man Of The Year award for philanthropy and you turned up at the black tie dinner in your lounge suit (double-breasted of course). You made a charming speech: “I thought there must have been some mistake and it was some sort of fashion award, particularly as in fashion terms I’m like a stopped clock. I’m fashionable once every 25 years.”
You don’t often come up with the smart one-liner (why should you?) but you were on the case about the threat of plastic waste decades ahead of the curve; your commitment to wholesome food is good (as well as good for your Duchy business); your respect for the multiplicity of religions is important for the nation and world.
You were brave to say you want to be the defender of “faith” not “the Faith”. It was wise and important, even if it did cause some fits of the vapours.
ON other things your views may be a bit batty and, of course, there are those who are appalled you should express views at all. There is concern when you write to government ministers attempting to influence their thinking. Actually you are perfectly entitled to do so and they should be able to look after themselves.
A few years ago there was a play, King Charles III – successful on stage and television – which had you precipitating a constitutional crisis by interfering in politics and having to give way to William. But you know very well what a king can and cannot do and I am confident when the time comes you will be kinglike, though whether you could ever be as sphinx-like as your mama must be open to question.
Your great-great grandfather Edward VII, son of the long-lived Victoria, came to the throne age 59. By then his waist was 48 inches and he had had so many affairs he was known as Edward The Undresser, but to everyone’s surprise he was rather good at being a king.
Your “notoriety” began age 14 when you were spotted drinking a cherry brandy in a bar on the Isle of Lewis. It was 1963. The story appeared on front pages alongside revelations about Christine Keeler.
Clearly you can be tricky to deal with, somewhat prone to depression, at times indecisive, sometimes high handed. You have spent plenty of time agonising but more time thinking (a rarity in your family). Another of your heir-tothe-throne predecessors, notorious for womanising and a definite candidate for GQ fashion awards, became George IV, a great and civilising patron of the arts. In his play The Madness Of George III, Alan Bennett gives him the line: “To be heir to the throne is not a position, it’s a predicament.”
For you too it has clearly been both, and you have said as much. But in the end, after some rough passages, you have handled the predicament. As for the position, you have used it wonderfully.
Critics say you are extravagant, in other words you live like a prince. Well so what, you are one.