CHARLES’ TEA PARTY SUMMIT WITH TRUMP
PRINCE Charles will host Donald Trump for tea during the US President’s state visit to Britain next month.
The unexpected meeting will take place at Clarence House, the heir to the throne’s official residence in London.
It will come on the same day as the Queen’s official state banquet for Mr Trump, which Charles will also attend. The prince did not meet the President on his working visit to Britain last year, which included a meeting with the Queen at Windsor Castle amid massive protests in the capital.
Reports at the time suggested Charles and his sons William and Harry had refused to have anything to do with the arrangements, which was seen as a snub by the Americans.
There were also claims – strongly denied – that a future state visit was in jeopardy because Mr Trump feared being lectured by Charles over issues such as climate change.
In a sign of the prince’s growing role in the light of the Queen’s advanced age – she is 93 – it will be the first time he has hosted a US president in a personal capacity.
It also suggests that Charles has put his personal feelings aside in the interests of the country, as he promised he would in a BBC interview to celebrate his 70th birthday
FROM the pitch of his voice to every twitch on his face and every gesture, indeed any sign of discomfort, the Prince of Wales will be scrutinised as never before when he greets Donald Trump and welcomes him to Clarence House.
No one will be impolite enough to use the word ‘handover’, but this tea-time summit next month between the US President and the heir to the throne will come to be seen as a defining moment in Charles’s preparation for kingship.
For the first time, the prince will put personal and private antipathy to one side for the sake of protocol and the monarchy.
With so many of his views on everything from climate change and food production to dialogue with the Muslim world diametrically opposite to those held by Mr Trump, Charles is taking a significant step towards the throne.
By demonstrating that he is prepared to put the affairs of the state first with this meeting, his desire to assume greater and more official responsibility is being meaningfully addressed.
What we are witnessing is a significant shift in the delicate balance of monarchical responsibility between an aged queen and a long-time heir now in his 71st year. Prince Charles is also showing a pragmatism that has in the past been absent.
The message is clear: the days such as his famous boycotting of a state banquet over China’s human rights record, a decision motivated by his admiration for the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled leader, are now over.
It is also an early sign that he intends living up to the undertaking he made on a TV interview to mark his 70th birthday that he would not be a ‘meddling monarch’ when he becomes king, insisting ‘I’m not that stupid’, while adding: ‘I do realise it is a separate exercise being sovereign.’
Nevertheless one is entitled to wonder if the ‘old’ Charles would have been prepared to compromise on his opinions as the new one now is.
When talk of a President Trump visit was first raised two years ago, a timely speech the prince made about the dangers of global warming was – rightly or wrongly – interpreted as a rebuke to the president.
IT was also widely reported that the White House feared that Charles would lecture President Trump about climate change. Washington insiders made no attempt to play down suggestions that Mr Trump viewed the prince as part of the ‘urban elite’.
Even allowing for some undiplomatic exaggeration, the prospects of a tete-a-tete between president and prince seemed remote. But two years on and there has been a subtle shift in the prince’s role.
Increasingly, he is standing in for his mother not just on overseas
trips, which the Queen no longer does, but also on ceremonial occasions such as laying her wreath at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.
The retirement of Prince Philip from public duties has also served to increase the prince’s influence within the Royal Family.
So while politicians such as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will snub the official banquet to mark President Trump’s visit, Charles will be there alongside his mother.
Just two years in age separate the prince and the president but their lack of common ground means it will take every ounce of Charles’s savoir faire to keep their conversation on neutral ground. The presence of the Duchess of Cornwall, so good at putting world leaders at their ease in the presence of royalty, will be vital to its success.
All the same, it could prove one of the prince’s trickiest encounters. The Donald Trump Prince Charles met on a visit to New York, soon after his wedding to Camilla in 2005, is a very different figure from the outspoken president he will welcome into his home.
Mr Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris climate accords and his endorsement of America’s industrial-scale farming practices – including its infamous chlorinated chicken – are anathema to the prince.
Should he need any encouragement in how to conduct their meeting, the prince, surely, has only to look at the outstanding record of the Queen who has quietly overcome any number of awkward encounters.
OVER the years governments have asked the Queen to lay on the same welcome for more than 100 heads of state. Many have been representatives of repressive regimes and some have been monsters, notably Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu and Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko. Both repelled the Queen.
She found Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, so disagreeable that, on spotting them in the Buckingham Palace gardens, she hid behind a bush.
Few have seen her angrier than on the day she learned that Mobutu’s wife, the aptly-named Marie-Antoinette, had smuggled a small dog into the Palace in her luggage.
Yet as monarch she was duty bound to endure the presence in
her home of these tyrants. In many ways it has been the exemplary manner of the Queen as head of state that has allowed Prince Charles the freedom to speak out in the way he has.
And all too often he has been judged to have been on the right side of history.
His interventions on the environment, and education, the brutality of modern architecture and especially his campaigning on saving the planet have framed his years as Prince of Wales.
Now, he is showing he is ready to put such overt lobbying to one side as the day he assumes the crown draws nearer.
The Charles who penned private thoughts about the Chinese leadership – ‘ waxworks’, he called them – at the time of the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 is changing into a much less controversial figure.
Mr Trump will be the first serving American president to meet Prince Charles on such intimate terms. For the prince it represents a challenge – but he is certain to rise to it.