WHY HE CAN MAKE A FINE KING SATURDAY
This week a biography serialised in the Mail highlighted Charles’s flaws. Now read an alternative view from a historian who says — from organic food to the Iraq War — the Prince has so often been right . . . ESSAY
FOR Prince Charles, this has probably been a trying week. According to an unauthorised biography by the veteran investigative writer Tom Bower, serialised over the past few days in the Mail, our future King has a streak of petulance, self-pity and self-indulgence.
Charles, Bower reported, changes his clothes five times a day and arrives at functions with his own pre-mixed martinis. He supposedly employs retired Indian servicemen to scour the Highgrove gardens at night, hand-picking slugs from the leaves of plants.
He insists on travelling with his own toilet seat, his own bed and two pictures of the Scottish Highlands.
To my mind, however, these are not exactly hanging offences. As the royal biographer Penny Junor pointed out a few days ago, Charles is not spending taxpayers’ money, but the income from the Duchy of Cornwall. If he wants to waste it on organic martinis and human slug detectors, good luck to him.
In any case, the national pastime of bashing Prince Charles has gone on long enough. He is clearly not perfect and I realise some people will never forgive him for his treatment of Princess Diana.
Even so, there has too often been a mean- spirited tone to some of the commentary about our future King, right from the moment that, as a shy, awkward boy, clearly in his parents’ shadow, he was sent off to boarding school at Gordonstoun.
And what all this gossip misses is the single most important fact about Charles, which is that he has been a remarkably good Prince of Wales and will probably be a perfectly good King.
I can already hear the gasps of horror, not least from the most passionate members of the Diana fan club. But the facts speak for themselves.
We often forget that Charles is not a young man. He is 69, old enough for a pension and a bus pass. But he still undertakes some 600 engagements a year, to the visible delight of the people he meets along the way.
The Prince’s Trust, which he founded in 1976, has helped at least 870,000 young people and, according to a study by HSBC, has returned an estimated £1.4 billion in benefits to society, which strikes me as very good going.
ANDyes, of course Charles hasn’t done all that himself — but would it have been half as successful without his name, his patronage and his enthusiasm?
What about all those supposedly unfashionable causes with which he has long been associated, from traditional architecture to alternative medicine?
Well, some of them don’t look quite so wacky these days. For instance, when Charles founded the Duchy Originals brand in 1990, initially to sell organic products from his Highgrove estate, the general reaction was mockery at the prospect of Britain’s first royal eco-warrior.
Yet today, when almost every reputable environmentalist urges us to eat organic food rather than airlifted produce from South America and factory-assembled ready meals, Charles looks like a pioneer.
If more of us had been prepared to listen to him, we might be a healthier, greener and slimmer nation.
As a campaigner against plastic pollution, too, Charles deserves great credit. As the Mail has argued in recent months, governments have completely failed to rise to the challenge of millions of tons of plastic contaminating our oceans and destroying our countryside. So good for Charles for lending his voice to what is surely one of the outstanding causes of our times.
And in some areas, Charles has been much more in tune with ordinary men and women than the self- styled experts who love to sneer at the values of others.
There’s no better example than his campaign for traditional buildings, which horrified modernist architects, but delighted millions who were sick of seeing their horizons despoiled by cheap, showy and shoddily made tower blocks.
When, in May 1984, Charles told the Royal Institute of British Architects that the proposed extension to the National Gallery was like ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much- loved friend’, there were howls of outrage from the highbrow establishment. But he was, of course, absolutely right on this too.
Those in the liberal intelligentsia have never forgiven him for it. But since most normal people regard them with contempt anyway, it probably did his public image far more good than harm.
Perhaps these aren’t your favourite causes. Even so, only the most churlish observer would deny that for almost his entire adult life, Charles has promoted the things he believes in with the kind of dedication we would usually commend in other people.
What would his critics prefer him to be?
A champagne-swilling party animal? A braying, blokey philistine? Or a genuinely earnest, sometimes woolly, occasionally vain but consistently well-meaning man?
Ah, say the critics, but the Prince of Wales has no business having interests of his own. He should suppress every last atom of conscience, thought or personality, lest they interfere with his future role as our head of state.
I find this argument utterly ridiculous. Our political constitution is not so delicate that it will collapse in ruins if our future King says he dislikes brutalist architecture and likes organic chicken.
Even Charles’s notorious ‘black spider memos’ — the personal letters sent to ministers and politicians over the years, usually on pet causes such as architecture, the countryside and organic farming — turned out to be pretty reasonable when they were revealed to the wider public.
The argument that he is in
danger of exerting undue influence on ministers strikes me as pretty worthless, too. Every day of the week, ministers receive letters from powerful lobby groups.
Are they really likely to change course because of a two-page letter from the Prince of Wales? Is Britain seriously going to plunge into an abyss of corruption because he writes an impassioned letter about the anxieties of the nation’s sheep farmers?
Indeed, in some cases we might be better off if our politicians actually listened to him. In 2004, Charles sent Tony Blair a long letter warning that ‘ our Armed Forces are being asked to do an extremely challenging job (particularly in Iraq) without the necessary resources’ — words that turned out to be all too prescient.
At the time, the News of the World claimed that Charles privately told senior politicians the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, warned them that it would create greater problems in the Middle East, and urged them to devote more attention to the IsraeliPalestinian conflict instead.
Well, you can hardly say he was wrong, can you?
At this, Charles’s critics throw up their hands in despair. ‘You can’t have a King with political opinions!’ they say. ‘ It will destroy the constitution and bring an end the monarchy!’ Well, I know some readers will think me a dangerous heretic, but this is complete drivel, too. Monarchs have always had political opinions. Yes, the Queen has been a notable exception, but the superhuman perfection of her public image has made us forget the flaws, quirks and eccentricities of many of her predecessors. In her stoicism and self- discipline, our current monarch has to always been an anomaly. Many previous monarchs were so outspoken that they made Charles look a model of taciturn self-restraint. Yet the constitution always came through unscathed.
The most obvious example is Victoria, whose political prejudices were notorious. She hated her Liberal Prime Minister, William Gladstone, whom she famously accused of speaking to her ‘as if I were a public meeting’. ‘ I never could take Mr Gladstone . . . as my Minister again,’ she wrote to a friend in 1879, ‘for I never could have the slightest particle of confidence in Mr Gladstone after his violent, mischievous, and dangerous conduct for the last three years.’ Since Gladstone went on to serve for three more terms as Prime Minister, Victoria’s threats were clearly completely worthless. Even so, he found her an immensely difficult woman. When he retired in 1894, he said that the Queen reminded him of a mule he once rode on holiday in Sicily: ‘I could not get up the smallest shred of feeling for the brute, I could never love nor like it.’ But Victoria’s prejudices spilled over into policy, too. A confirmed Russophobe, she pestered her favourite Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, to declare war on Russia in the late 1870s, and threatened several times to abdicate if he did not take her advice. Disraeli promptly ignored her and she never followed through on these threats either. Although much of this was hidden from the electorate, Victoria’s capriciousness was common knowledge in Westminster and Whitehall. But the constitution survived intact, as it will with Charles as King.
In fact, although Charles has a reputation for self-pity, history shows that he does have an unfairly bad press. For when you compare him with previous Princes of Wales, he comes out astonishingly well.
Would any sane person, after all, swap him with the Prince Regent, the future George IV, who illegally married a divorced Irish actress, Maria Fitzherbert, ate and drank so much that he weighed almost 18st and ran up debts worth a staggering £ 60 million in today’s money?
I appreciate that a reincarnated George IV would sell a lot of newspapers, but he really would destroy the monarchy. By his standards, Charles looks like a saint.
Would people really prefer the future Edward VII, another selfcentred glutton with a 48in waist, and a bully and a braggart who had at least 55 mistresses, drove his father to an early grave and bullied his ministers if they were not wearing the approved court dress?
Would you prefer Charles’s greatgrandfather, the future George V, a shooting maniac who once massacred 3,937 pheasants, three partridges, four rabbits and one pigeon in a single outing?
ORwhat about his greatuncle, Edward VIII (of Mrs Simpson fame), whose unreliability, womanising, selfishness, rudeness and idiocy almost destroyed the monarchy for good in the Thirties?
The plain fact is that we have never had a better- prepared future King. Yes, of course, Charles can be prickly, petty and self-indulgent.
But he has also shown himself to be admirably earnest, wellintentioned and public- spirited. Who among us can honestly say that we would do better?
And this is surely the key point. Moaning about Charles and mocking the monarchy are all very well, but we rarely stop to think how much worse the alternative might be.
Like most people, I shudder at the thought of some superannuated party hack becoming Britain’s president.
The pressure group Republic, which could probably fit its active membership into the gents at a provincial railway station, claim that we could have ‘an eminent scientist, a much-loved writer, a respected sportsperson or someone who’s made a great contribution to their community’.
But this is absolute nonsense. Far from having President Bradley Wiggins — now there’s a thought — we’d be far more likely to have yet another failed political hasbeen, as if we need more politicians in our lives.
And as we know, elections don’t always turn out as people expect. If a tide of public disapproval ever brought an end to the monarchy as we know it, can we really be so sure that Charles’s elected republican replacement would be so much better?
A British version of Donald Trump would be bad enough. But of course we don’t need to look across the Atlantic to remind ourselves how lucky we are. We need only look to North London.
‘I, Jeremy Corbyn, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the British Republic …’
That strikes me as just about the most frightening sentence in the English language. And even if you don’t care for Prince Charles, you’ve got to admit he looks pretty good by comparison.