The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (22 page)

Like everyone who works with the Duke of Edinburgh, Arengo-Jones believes sixty-six-year-old Brigadier Miles Hunt-Davis is the key. They joined within a year of each other, had military backgrounds – Paul was a colonel – and had mutual friends.

The relationship with the Duke was also helped by a shared military background. Arengo-Jones viewed Prince Philip as his divisional commander.

To me he would have been a four-star general or admiral, regardless of whether he married Her Majesty. He has the intellect and the bearing and the strength of character to have reached that rank, no doubt. I get so annoyed when the press picks up on his comments. Remember the Indian fuse box? He went up to Scotland, looked at a fuse box, it was a mass of wires, said ‘That looks like an Indian fuse box’, the press reported it and the Asian community went through the roof. My Indian counterpart wrote to me a few days later and sent the leading article from their equivalent of the
Sunday Times
, and it said, ‘At last someone speaks
the truth.’ It was a long article extolling the virtues of what the Duke said. ‘He’s absolutely right, our electrical systems in India are appalling, every Indian has to have about six transformers and seven circuit breakers between the grid and their computer because of the surges and the blackouts and so on. We really have got to get a grip.’ Two days later he sent me the letters that the newspaper had had in response; about two disagreeing and ninety saying quite right; so I said don’t send them to me, send them to the Duke, which he did and he got a nice letter back.

But not everyone can cope with the Duke of Edinburgh’s challenging manner. One former director of the Award couldn’t. He was so intimidated he broke out into a sweat whenever he saw the Duke; his shirt would be wringing wet. He couldn’t and didn’t stay. Yet the young people who have done the Award seem to thrive on his provocation. Put him with a group of rough, tough teenagers and he is in his element. ‘What did you do for your Award?’ he’ll ask. ‘That’s not very challenging, couldn’t you do better than that?’ ‘They respond wonderfully,’ says Mike Gretton.

They come straight back at him, they’re not overawed at all. They think, ‘Who is this gaffer?’ His technique at Gold Award presentations is to head for the prettiest girl in the front row because he knows she will be fun to talk to and she’ll be confident and vocal, so it starts the conversation which quickly spreads out to the shyer boys and girls. It’s brilliant. He was a superb chairman to me, he remains a superb patron, and just to see him wandering around St James’s Palace or Buckingham Palace or Holyroodhouse when he’s awarding the Golds … he hasn’t missed a Gold Award presentation in forty-eight years. He’s passionate
about it, utterly dedicated, it’s his baby, his thing, and I’m quite convinced that when we cut him in half after he moves to a better place we’ll find a rock running through his insides saying The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.

Nevertheless, those who work for him have to be prepared for the whole package, to take the rough with the smooth. The Duke is punctilious about time and anyone greeting him is wise to be in position five or ten minutes early. On one occasion he was late, by five or ten minutes, for a UK Award General Council at the Barbican. Finally the car arrived – his personal black cab – he leapt out, growled at Mike Gretton about terrible traffic and it all being his fault, and, as they walked to the Green Room backstage at the Barbican, said, ‘And your bloody brief was absolute nonsense.’ He then went on to the stage and conducted the meeting perfectly and in total accordance with the brief. ‘He loves having a little poke to see how you stand up and as long as you don’t burst into floods of tears it’s all fine.’

Apart from such rare exceptions, meetings he chairs always start and end on time and it is a brave committee member who turns up late. He will walk into the room with no ceremony and start chatting, and then he’ll look at his watch and the meeting begins. Prince Edward, however, is a favourite and, some say, indulged son. He once arrived five minutes late for a trustees’ meeting after the chairman had begun. Edward said, ‘I’m frightfully sorry, sir’, and Prince Philip stood up, kissed him warmly on both cheeks and welcomed him with open arms. His skill at conducting meetings, like that of his daughter, is legendary. He allows everyone their democratic say but is very skilled and enough of a diplomat to end up with a consensus view which leaves everyone thinking they have the answer they were looking for.

Nothing has been confirmed but Edward, who will inherit his father’s title in due course, is almost certain to take over the Award, too. He is just as passionate about it as his father and, having done it himself – which his father never could because he was over age for the Award when it was launched – he is the best possible ambassador for the organization. Since giving up Ardent, his production company, in 2002, the Award has become his main interest; he is a trustee of both the UK and International Awards and also chairman of the International Council of the International Awards Association and when he is not swapping stories with current participants – who I suspect he gets on with better than adults – he goes all over the world making presentations and raising funds. ‘People say, “What shall we do with him?”’ says Paul Arengo-Jones. ‘I say, “Put him in a room full of young people and close the door.”’ Next year he is lead trustee for the Award’s 50th anniversary celebrations – and some of his riskier ideas are already resurrecting nightmares from the past.

Many people date the beginning of the monarchy’s recent troubles to that fateful television spectacular,
It’s A Royal Knockout.
Everyone at Buckingham Palace, including the Queen’s Private Secretary, Bill Heseltine, was against the idea. He had tried to get it stopped but Prince Edward was too far down the road with the negotiations, adamant that he should be allowed to do it, and the Queen, never good at confrontations, was unable to say no to her youngest son, even though she too had misgivings. Nearly twenty years on, Edward is older and wiser having not been allowed to forget the disaster.
It’s A Knockout
is the benchmark for every idea that is floated at the Award. ‘As long as it’s not like
It’s A Knockout
’ the cry goes up and he will be on a short leash this time around.

Bad publicity and royal scandals appear to have surprisingly little impact on the charities with which members of the Royal Family have links. The Duke of Edinburgh’s remark about Indian fuse boxes had one Award field worker saying he was not prepared to continue, but there has been no evidence of donors pulling out. Mike Gretton admits he worries about it but says that scandals reverberate very little.

Big corporate donors are usually ensnared over lunch at
either Buckingham Palace or Bagshot Park, invitations to which – with the promise of Edward, usually Sophie, and occasionally the Duke for company – have chairmen and chief executives responding by return of post. Edward gives a presentation, there is a discussion, lunch and the suggestion that they might like to give £20,000 per annum for five years. In the last six months they have had a 50 per cent strike rate and are purring.

‘It’s partly altruism – the corporate world would like to support young people in their development across the board – but, secondly, they can mix with other captains of industry and, by the way, it’s in St James’s Palace or Buckingham Palace and you can bring your clients along and you introduce them; the royals have a strong cachet, that counts for one hell of a lot,’ says Gretton.

We’ve done a lot of research on corporate giving, and people say they’ve done it entirely for altruistic reasons, but you scratch a little bit harder and actually there is bound to be some self-interest. If I’m a shareholder or a private company owner, I want to know that my donation is doing something for me. It might be called corporate social responsibility – fine, but they’re doing it because there might be something in it for them and I don’t blame them, they’re hard-nosed businessmen. We do think about that quite a lot – the debasing of the monarchy or a bicycling monarchy would have a huge effect on us on the fundraising side – and we have our thoughts and are building other planks to our fundraising which will be less dependent on the royal scene because that makes sense in itself and as a back-up – but it would be very damaging if the royals disengaged.

There’s no question about the value of having a royal around – other charities would bite my arm off to have
what we have. Whatever criticism there is of the Royal Family there are enough people around who want to meet a royal and be associated with something royal, for good reasons and bad, but that makes it a very, very positive advantage.

Privately he worries about what will happen when the Duke of Edinburgh goes because he is a stronger brand than Edward, but he has absolutely no doubts that in fundraising terms, and also operationally, having the royal connection is very important to the organization.

As Arengo-Jones says, royal patronage is a priceless commodity. It allows charities to offer their donors access to the most exclusive address in the country and the chance to shake the hand of a member of the British Royal Family. That is something that money simply cannot buy.

‘It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got; unless you know the person with the key to the door, you won’t get through.’

The member of The Firm who has perfected the art of using his position – in the interests not just of charity but of issues – is the Prince of Wales. He discovered many years ago that an invitation to Highgrove or Kensington Palace would be accepted before it hit the doormat. This enabled him to bring together disparate collections of people with a common thread, who without his intervention would never normally have met. He put them round his dining-room table, posed searching questions and coerced them into finding answers. What could have been read as impertinence had chairmen and chief executives twice his age returning to their desks and working for their lunch. The result, to cite but one example from twenty years ago, was that after listening to the needs of the disabled, at least one of the major builders of modern housing estates was persuaded to add an extra fifty millimetres to standard door frames, to lower the sills and build ramps instead of steps into the landscaping so that their houses could accommodate wheelchairs; and the disabled, who were so badly served by society, could feel less alienated.

Since 2003 the government has made it statutory for all public buildings to be wheelchair-friendly but that was long after the Prince of Wales first put heads together and
effected a change, albeit small, via less draconian methods.

He discovered he could do the same internationally, too. In the early nineties he convened a two-day meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, for 120 senior executives from the United States, Britain, Europe, Japan and Australia. Declaring himself merely a ‘catalyst’, he posed one question after another to which he wanted written answers. With the Prince as their guide they wandered through the old streets of Charleston to try to capture the romantic essence of a traditional community and to admire the local architecture. ‘How are we going to tackle the huge challenges facing us,’ he asked them; ‘vast population-growth rates, poverty, hunger, mass migrations, environmental degradation, potential conflict over diminishing natural resources – unless business, with its presence in these crucial areas and with so many people, their children and families, revolving around such business, takes a long-term view?’

As the businessmen there commented, no one else in the world, not even the President of the United States, could have got so many top people together at such short notice.

Architecture is the area in which the Prince’s amateur involvement has earned him probably more enemies than anywhere else; and where (apart from his private life) he has most divided opinion. From the night when he stood up at Hampton Court in 1984, as guest of honour at the 150th anniversary dinner of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and, as his audience of seven hundred settled back with brandy and cigars expecting to hear a few congratulatory words, tore the profession limb from limb, he has been accused of abusing his power. Architects, he said, were consistently designing buildings without a thought for the people who were to live in them, and called the proposed extension to the National Gallery in
Trafalgar Square ‘a kind of vast municipal fire station … like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend’. Inevitably, some people agreed with him, others disagreed and the architectural practice which had designed the monstrous carbuncle lost the job and their business took a nosedive.

A few years later, he was at it again, criticizing the planned development for Paternoster Square next to St Paul’s Cathedral. Following a competition, Charles had been invited to see the plans submitted by the seven finalists. He was appalled. Facing what he knew would be a hostile audience at the Mansion House he said, ‘You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble.
We
did that.’ Richard Rogers, one of the finalists, described the Prince’s remarks as ‘very vicious – and very questionable democratically’, a charge that has repeatedly been made against Charles in the last twenty years by those who disagree with his views.

‘I believe I have been accused of setting myself up as a new undemocratic hurdle in the planning process,’ said the Prince of Wales, ‘a process we are supposed to leave to the professionals.’

But the professionals have been doing it their way, thanks to the planning legislation, for the last forty years. We poor mortals are forced to live in the shadow of their achievements. Everywhere I go, it is one of the things people complain about most, and if there is one message I would like to deliver this evening, it is that large numbers of us in this country are fed up with being talked down to and dictated to by the existing planning, architectural and development establishment …

Richard Rogers’s words rankled. ‘Sadly, in recent years,’ he told commentators, ‘our Royal Family have had a poor record as patrons of arts and sciences. As yet there is little to suggest that the Prince is an exception in this respect. As a man with strong views about architecture, a high public profile and enormous private wealth, he has an extraordinary opportunity to commission buildings for his large estates. But he has yet to produce a noteworthy construction …’

As it happened the opportunity had already presented itself. In 1987 West Dorchester District Council had selected a four-hundred-acre plot of open farmland belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall to the west of the town for development to meet local housing needs. This was the second time the Council had commandeered Duchy land for expansion. The first development had been entirely conventional and the Duchy was again preparing plans for a conventional housing scheme for between two and three thousand dwellings on the second site when the Prince intervened and brought in the distinguished classical architect and urban planner Leon Krier as master planner. ‘Rather than see development of another zoned conventional housing estate with its accompanying separate industrial estate,’ he said, ‘I was determined to break the mould and to ensure that such growth should recapture the organic form and sense of place of our historic towns and villages.

Poundbury represented a challenge to achieve this without compromising its unspoilt rural setting. It also presented the opportunity to build a community which included a wide range of housing intermingled with economic activity.’

Poundbury has been a reality now for over ten years, yet it doesn’t feature on
www.Streetfinder.co.uk
, and although it is on my 2004 road map there is no road signage to it, not even off the Dorchester ring road just a few hundred yards away, so you can – as I did – sail straight past. I am sure this is not
the intention but it all adds to the feeling of unreality when you arrive – as though you might be in a dream. It sounds clichéd to suggest it feels like a toy town – his enemies have been writing it off as a joke town from the start – but it does at first blush and even the locals in the old town refer to the buildings as Noddy houses.

Poundbury seems altogether too perfect and the scale too small to be real. The streets are all perfectly named, and black iron signposts, the sort you find in the pedestrianized parts of historic towns, guide you to places such as the Middlemarsh Clinic, the Enterprise Centre and Pummery Square, the heart of the community with the Poet Laureate pub, the Octagon Café, a parade of little shops and the Brownsword Hall, that stands on chunky, honey-coloured pillars (a dead-ringer for the town hall in the Prince’s home town of Tetbury) – where all the clubs and societies meet. The houses might have been models made for a child’s play set. They are a hotchpotch of different designs and sizes but all have chimneys and tasteful front doors; they have lintels and bow windows, brick and sandstone, tiles, slates and gables, with not a telephone wire, aerial or satellite dish in sight, and not one with a car parked out front. Some are detached, others are terraced and at odd intervals there are fountains, water features and trees. I was looking for the Duchy development office – ‘just beyond Sunny Days nursery’ – and was being talked in on my mobile phone. I followed the roads I was told to follow and although I was horribly late and instinctively, therefore, inclined to hurry, I suddenly found myself driving at a snail’s pace. The road surface was uneven and mostly gravelled, it had no markings, no white lines or triangles, no indication of whose right of way it was at a junction, none of the signs that drivers are so familiar with and which allow us to drive on autopilot. As a result I felt uncertain and dropped my speed dramatically.

This, I discovered, is all part of the plan, not, as I assumed, because the development was as yet unfinished; it is one of the major differences between Poundbury and other new housing estates built since the war. In rubbishing the development, the Prince’s critics tend to focus on the architecture, which is unashamedly traditional, and accuse him of being stuck in an earlier age. Simon Conibear, development manager for the project, urges me not to follow that line. That is the least important part of the experiment.

What is interesting about Poundbury is that the design has created an instant community, and that is what the Prince was after: a development on a human scale that puts people before cars. It has a mixture of private and social housing in the same street, to prevent the formation of either rich enclaves or poor ghettos and a mixture of homes, offices and factories (including a chocolate factory that sells seconds at the back door) within the same area. And because garages and car parking areas are all in courtyards behind the houses, and walkways run between the buildings, the whole village is permeable, which makes it very user-friendly – but not so friendly, evidently, for burglars: crime levels are significantly lower than in any other part of Dorchester, and so far nothing more than petty. The streets are designed for pedestrians first and cars second, as I discovered. The result is that people can – and do – walk down the middle of roads in such safety that parents let their children walk to school and even five-year-olds go to the shops for their mothers. What Poundbury has done is to break the mould in which town planners and house builders have been stuck for the last fifty years, in which the car dominates everything; in doing so it has created – to hear the residents talk – a safe, friendly community that people are proud of and want to look after, where neighbours know one another and look out for one another.

‘The whole concept has worked remarkably well,’ says Kim Slowe, one of the developers, who now lives in one of his own houses in Poundbury,

… and I admire the Prince for doing it. He put his neck on the line without question and it has genuinely worked. If people move in Poundbury they move to another place in Poundbury, from house to flat maybe. That’s very telling. There’s no question it could have gone the other way, if the factories had created problems, if the highways – every single highway rule is broken because the planning officer was broadminded enough to listen to what was being explained to him and accept it. If he had changed and a by-the-book man had come to Poundbury, it would have been destroyed overnight. If someone had said ‘You’ve got to have bollards, yellow lines, and county-standard street lights’ it could have gone off the rails. If the social housing experiment had not worked it
would
have gone off the rails and would have turned very sour, very quickly.

The developers have had to agree to work very closely to a highly prescriptive building code imposed by the Duchy of Cornwall that governs everything, from the materials and detail of the brickwork to the colour of doors and window frames and the positioning of house names.

Although traditional on the outside and built from local materials in the local style, the houses in Poundbury are wholly contemporary in terms of energy efficiency and ecofriendliness. They all have double glazing – all wooden window frames, no plastic allowed – and some, like Kim Slowe’s, are ‘interjer’ houses with sheep’s wool for roof-space insulation and thermomax vacuum tube solar heating, heat recovery systems and grey water – too technical for me, but
ground-breaking to those in the know, and all without using concrete and glass.

Poundbury had a rough start. They began building Phase One in 1993. It was the middle of a recession, the media was taking potshots at the Prince of Wales over all sorts of issues and his private life was all over the newspapers; he was accused of wrecking the countryside, of getting special treatment to build on a greenfield site because of who he was. They got the mix between social and private housing wrong – too much social – and there were tensions. Social, owned by the Guinness Trust, a housing charity, and rented to council tenants at a fraction of the market value, now accounts for between 20 and 35 per cent – and it’s impossible to tell which it is. As one resident who takes round hundreds of visitors a year says, ‘I offer a pound for every one identified and I’ve never lost my pound.’

Developers have always avoided mixing social and private housing for fear of depressing house prices; for the same reason, they have never put factories and commercial buildings alongside private housing. But the experience at Poundbury has turned that theory on its head; property prices are higher in Poundbury than on the executive estates or anywhere else in Dorchester. And with its mixed use, Poundbury fulfils all the government’s ideals of reducing journey times to work and being able to walk to schools and shops.

But that didn’t happen overnight. It was five or six years before Phase One suddenly gelled and began to work and what emerged was a highly bonded community, where everyone spoke to everyone else no matter which front door they emerged from. ‘People identified with it and liked the architecture,’ says Simon Conibear.