INSIDE THE TOXIC COURT OF CHARLES
Old friends dropped for daring to disagree. Loyal staff brutally dismissed. Vicious backstabbing. Even digs at the Queen. A startling portrait of life...
Several months later, Aylard was at a dinner party with the Prince when Natalia Grosvenor, the wife of the 6th Duke of Westminster, asked Charles why he’d confessed.
‘He pointed across the table at his private secretary and angrily said: “He made me do it!”’ recalled a dinner guest. ‘It was a very unattractive moment. He is not loyal to the people who work for him.’
Another revealing glimpse into Charles’s rather chaotic household was offered by the Queen’s former Comptroller, Sir Malcolm Ross.
In 2006, at the age of 61, he’d agreed to work for Charles as his Master of the Household.
Talking to me seven years later, Ross was so scorched by the experience that, as he put it, he was willing to drop his guard ‘as the polished courtier’ to ‘let the truth come out’.
On day one of his new job, he had discovered he’d gone ‘from something incredibly disciplined to something that had no rules’.
Working for Charles was a ‘shock to the system’, Ross recalled. ‘I had three calls from the Queen outside working hours in 18 years. I had six to eight of them from the Prince of Wales on my first weekend.’
He noted that Charles’s strength — ‘he never, ever stops thinking, he never stops pursuing ideas, he wants to get a move on’ — led to exhaustion and fits of temper. These minor tantrums weren’t malicious, Ross said — they usually involved demands to know why his orders weren’t being carried out on the spot.
‘I was called names I hadn’t heard since my early days in the Army,’ added Ross. He also sensed a pervasive fear among the other employees.
Assistant private secretaries lingered in the office, afraid of being dressed down by the Prince if they left at a normal hour.
ROSS was particularly taken aback when he found that Charles’s private secretary, Michael Peat — who had worked for the Queen — seemed to have turned on the monarch, denigrating Buckingham Palace advisers as ‘dinosaurs’ and ‘old has-beens’.
The new Master of the Household couldn’t restrain himself: he announced that he’d leave the room if such discourtesy continued. But it did, in several more meetings, and each time he walked out.
Ross concluded that ‘this was Prince Charles’s view, and Michael Peat was a clone of Charles. If the Prince said: “Oh God, what is Mummy up to?” Michael Peat would adopt the same view in his own language.’
It wasn’t long before Ross sensed information was being withheld from him. He saw no camaraderie among the staff, and began to hate his job. Was Charles responsible for his household’s unpleasant undercurrents? ‘He is not a fool,’ said Ross. ‘He was more than aware of what was going on.’
Despite the tensions, Ross acquitted himself well in the Prince’s service. But after less than two years, he was fired. The pretext was that Ross had done some consultancy work for a security firm — while on his annual leave. ‘I was delighted,’ he said. ‘I had had it . . . I couldn’t adapt, and I tried. I did everything I could.’
The Prince of Wales, he added, was ‘a tremendous guy in many ways, but he has a bad side, too’.
Others would agree. David Checketts served from 1967 to 1978 and helped Charles launch The Prince’s Trust.
But as private secretary, he repeatedly found himself on the receiving end of his boss’s irritability — usually when engagements on his schedule bored or irked him. He’d call a charity golf tournament ‘idiotic’, for instance, and then refuse to present a trophy.
HIS changing moods kept his private secretary off balance and the end, when it came, was humiliating. The Prince simply offered Checketts’ job to someone else, without telling him.
So the private secretary left, feeling understandably embittered. ‘It was messy, not deft,’ said a courtier who witnessed how Charles got rid of him.
One of Charles’s problems is that the cocoon of privilege that surrounds him seems to make him oblivious to how he is perceived.
Thanks to the Duchy of Cornwall, he has far more millions in spending money than the Queen. Even the 2008 financial crisis failed to dent his fortunes: his shrewd advisers managed to pull his funds out of the stock market before the crash.
His wealth has given him a stupendous level of luxury. By 2003, he had a retinue of 91, including 17 on his personal staff. A year later, the number of personal staff serving Charles, Camilla, William and Harry was 28.
The Prince also has a weakness for the perks — and the company of — the super-rich. Over the years, he has taken full advantage of offers of yachts, flights on private jets and sumptuous estates for private holidays.
Indeed, he can become querulous if the level of luxury isn’t to his satisfaction. In 1997, after being forced to fly club class rather than first class on a chartered British Airways 747 flight to China, he wrote self-pityingly in his journal: ‘It puzzled me as to why the seat seemed so uncomfortable.’
He was doubly irked to learn that several politicians were in first class, including Robin Cook, Edward Heath and Douglas Hurd. ‘Such is the end of Empire, I sighed to myself.’
Ten years later, Charles was in first class as he flew back to the UK after receiving an award in Manhattan for his apocalyptic pronouncements on the environment. Later, he moaned in a letter to a friend about the ‘incredibly uncomfortable’ first-class seats and how he yearned for the luxury of a Gulfstream jet, owned by one of his charity donors.
Despite his sterling work for the young and underprivileged, Charles’s extraordinarily cosseted lifestyle can create blind spots.
He saw no contradiction, for instance, in spending £5.6 million in public funds on refurbishing Clarence House for his own use, plus £2 million of his money on redecoration. And then running a
plastic hose out of his bathroom window — ‘I empty my bathtub with a hand pump to water the plants,’ he told his architect friend Andres Duany.
Without a trace of self-awareness, in 2003 he praised a shanty town in Bombay as a primitive form of community that could teach the West about sustainability and interdependence.
It never occurred to him it might be condescending to glorify a squalid, malodorous and unhealthy community whose residents were mired in poverty.
Or that the Dharavi slum, which had a population of a million and just one bathroom for every 1,500 residents, was half the size of his Highgrove estate.
FOURTEEN years have passed since then and Charles’s rhetoric has recently become more muted. The government boxes he used to set to one side while he tended to his correspondence and speech-writing are now thoroughly examined.
He will never be like the Queen, who has spent a lifetime concealing her thoughts, even her mundane likes and dislikes. But as he edges closer to the throne, the signs are he may yet buckle down to his constitutional role.
‘I’d imagine the audiences with prime ministers will run longer,’ said one of Charles’s former advisers. ‘He won’t be as agreeable with them as his mother has been — their sessions with the Queen were therapeutic.
‘I don’t think that’s how it will be with the Prince of Wales.’
ADAPTED from Prince Charles: The Passions And Paradoxes Of An Improbable Life by Sally Bedell Smith (Michael Joseph, £25) to be published on Thursday. © Sally Bedell Smith 2017. To buy a copy for £18.75 (offer until April 11), call 0844 571 0640 or order at mailbookshop. co.uk. P&P free on orders over £15.