The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (24 page)

Some sections of society have a lot to be grateful to the Prince of Wales for. Others would wish him airbrushed from history. He has certainly made some powerful enemies along the way, and, inevitably, the people he has helped, the most vulnerable, are those least likely to be heard. He has upset all sorts of revered bodies, from architects to the medical establishment, from the agro-chemical industry to wind farmers; and a lot of his activities have brought him dangerously close to politics, which in his position as part of a constitutional monarchy is out of bounds. Privately, though, he has been meeting and corresponding with politicians for years, telling them of his findings as he has visited communities around the country, expressing his concerns about all sorts of issues, from racial tension to the rural economy, asking for their reactions and impatiently waiting for their answers. He is remarkably knowledgeable; he sees and talks to many more people in the course of a year than any politician ever does, and through his charities has seen at first hand so many of the problems and needs which the politicians are trying to address. Occasionally
his letters have been leaked to the press, almost certainly by politicians irritated by being made uncomfortable by his questions, and, predictably, press indignation and outrage have followed with the familiar cry that the Prince of Wales is abusing his power. Once again, it all depends on whether or not you agree with what the Prince is saying.

The difficulty is that social ills are always essentially political, so a prince who would like to improve the lot of the underprivileged, help minority groups, tackle unemployment, racial discrimination, school truancy or any other of the hundred and one other things he tries to help, is almost certain to run into trouble. And it is a problem that has produced tensions within The Firm too, from the very first time he acted on impulse many years ago. On that occasion he was on a visit to Lewisham during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee year. There was an ugly demonstration going on behind the police barriers and, against all advice, the Prince stepped out of the safety of his crested limousine to find out what the problem was. According to one of the demonstrators, a black man sporting a badge which said ‘Stuff the Jubilee’, the black community felt they were being harassed by the police. Twenty-four black youths had just been arrested and the community felt that blacks were being targeted and picked up off the streets for no better reason than the colour of their skin. The Prince called over the police commander in charge and suggested that the two groups should get together and talk. Eight days later the two groups were invited to Buckingham Palace, under the auspices of the Prince’s Trust, and the situation was defused – but not before the Prince had been roundly rebuked by the press for having interfered in a matter that was none of his business and by his father, who broadly agreed.

He retired hurt but undefeated and continued to work towards improving relations between police forces and minority
communities in Britain ‘to dampen down a potentially disastrous situation’. His instincts were right about the mounting tensions. A year later violent race riots broke out in inner cities all over the country.

The Queen doesn’t notice colour. She is scarcely happier than with Commonwealth leaders from former African or Caribbean colonies. The Prince of Wales is the same – although their joint record of employing black people within their households has been a wasted opportunity to take a lead on race. Buckingham Palace employs 1100 people, of whom 6 per cent are from ethnic minorities and only thirty of those in senior positions (and only 25 per cent of those are women). They are acutely aware of the position and are working to improve it, but turnover of staff in senior positions is very slow. The Prince of Wales has a faster turnover of staff. However, Colleen Harris, the Prince’s Press Secretary until last year, was the only black woman to be employed in a senior position at St James’s Palace but she left (to take up a job in race relations, as it happens) because after three years of fire-fighting she was exhausted. The Prince also has a black police protection officer, but, as the statistics show, coloured faces are not a noticeable feature of life in either palace.

One of the Prince’s former courtiers thinks that the influence the Royal Family has in leading public opinion is very important and could be a potent force for good.

They have squandered the opportunity to lead by example in the last ten years, but there was a time when a known royal preference or interest expressed publicly was powerful. The Princess of Wales shaking hands with an AIDS patient was a potent piece of publicity. I always think in this country, where we all find the business of race and colour so difficult, that the best thing that happened in the
eighties was when the Prince of Wales went to a tram shed on his 40th birthday and was seen in the following day’s papers to be dancing with a black girl. It’s a very interesting thing about the Prince of Wales. He doesn’t feel bothered by colour differences, plus the fact that he’s rather given to religion, I don’t mean orthodox religion; he’s very interested in the whole spiritual thing, and my own speculative view of Africans, having visited Africa with him, is that the principal interest of Africans is not organizing themselves politically or making money or being intellectual, but being religious. The place has absolutely thousands of churches – Muslims, Christians – they are very religious. And there was one marvellous moment when we went to Finsbury Park, I suppose to look at that regrettable mosque that was put up as a result of his visit to Saudi Arabia. [The same mosque that was taken over by Al Hamza, the one-eyed, hook-handed Muslim fanatic who was eventually deported in 2004.] The Keeper of the Holy Places, King Fahd, agreed to give an awful lot of money for it after the Prince went to Saudi Arabia. He went to look at it and the programme said he should have ten minutes walking through. What actually happened was there were a whole lot of black men in a Portakabin and he disappeared into the Portakabin, and it was two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes and roars of laughter coming out of the Portakabin. He has no feelings about black and white, and I think one of his greatest gifts to this country could be to put everyone’s anxieties at rest about that sort of thing.

Charles has had conflicting advice over the years on how he should be behaving and what is and is not his business. David Checketts was behind the Prince’s social conscience, and would have been relaxed about detours into a Portakabin full of black labourers; but it is interesting to conjecture whether the Prince would have become quite so involved with the social issues that have taken him so perilously close to political intervention if he had been guided by a different man when he was scribbling ideas on the back of an envelope at the age of twenty-three.

The Hon. Edward Adeane, who replaced David Checketts in 1978, was a very different man with much less understanding of the philosophical, tortured soul for whom he had come to work. He was a traditional courtier – Eton, Cambridge, a barrister, a fiercely clever man – cerebral rather than spiritual or emotional. His father and grandfather had been private secretaries, so he was third-generation courtier; closer in age to Charles than Checketts had been, and kindly but stiff. He had traditional ideas about what royal behaviour constituted and the path a Prince of Wales should be following. And as the Prince grew more and more mystical, the more Adeane despaired. The Prince fell under the spell of the writer Laurens
van der Post and there was an Indian Buddhist woman who pursued him relentlessly and introduced him to a spiritual world beyond Christianity. She was responsible for his brief flirtation with vegetarianism.

Adeane tried to rein in the Prince but the Prince is difficult to rein in, as Adeane has not been alone in discovering. If Adeane had had his way Charles would never have delivered his blistering attack on the architectural fraternity. Horrified by the speech that was destined for the RIBA’s 150th anniversary dinner, all the way in the car to Hampton Court he tried to persuade the Prince to tone down his words but to no avail.

During the early years of his marriage, when the Prince was struggling with the demands of domesticity and fatherhood, Adeane was at a loss. Unmarried himself, he couldn’t understand the pull that these new responsibilities had on the Prince – yet another instance of the difficulty the Royal Family faces in having no clear distinction between the public and the private roles. No government minister, no company chairman, would have his PPS or managing director taking instructions from his wife, but in late 1984 the Princess of Wales sent Adeane a note saying that the Prince would no longer be available for meetings early in the morning or evening because he would be upstairs in the nursery with William. He was flabbergasted. Mornings and evenings were their best time of day, the only time within a busy schedule when there was a moment’s calm to talk and to go through letters, paperwork and briefings.

Their relationship was heading for the rocks and when the Prince lashed out at Adeane once too often – just as he had with Michael Colborne a few months earlier – Adeane handed in his notice and left at the beginning of 1985. It was six months before a permanent successor could be found. The Prince wanted his own man, not in the traditional mould, not
someone imposed upon him by Buckingham Palace, which was where Edward Adeane had come from; someone of a high calibre with business and administrative skills who would run his office efficiently. But, given the Prince’s interest in mysticism and alternative lifestyles, there was much relief in the Big House when Sir John Riddell arrived to take up the post wearing neither a long beard nor open-toed sandals. Riddell had been found by a headhunter; aged fifty-one, he was a successful merchant banker, a director of the Independent Broadcasting Authority and the Northern Rock Building Society, a man who met all the necessary criteria. And as thirteenth baronet from an old Northumberland family, with estates to match, educated at Eton and Oxford, he had the pedigree to fit in with the hierarchy of court. Equally important, so stunned and flattered was he to be offered the job that he was prepared to take a drop in salary. And, with a wife and three young sons, he was entirely sympathetic to the Prince’s domestic situation; with no previous experience of working within royal circles, he came to the job with a fresh approach and no preconceptions.

John Riddell is a delightful, funny and charming man. I first met him when I interviewed the Prince of Wales in 1986. I was writing the Prince’s biography and to my great joy my request to meet him was granted and, although it took months to set up, I was finally invited to Kensington Palace. After the faintly jaded grandeur of Buckingham Palace, arriving at Kensington Palace was like being a guest in a very comfortable smart town house. A friendly young butler greeted me at the door, knew my name (it is a nice touch, and the same happens when you arrive at the Privy Purse door at Buckingham Palace) and offered me coffee. The decor at KP was bright and pretty (Diana’s doing), the carpet lime-green and pink, interwoven with Prince of Wales feathers. Good oil paintings, mostly portraits, covered the walls and the furniture was a mixture
of antique and modern with vases of scented fresh flowers everywhere.

Sir John greeted me and we sat and took coffee together. He was relaxed and chatty; I had once filmed with his wife and middle son – a video about bringing up babies – so there was instant rapport, and, anyway, he is very easy company. Then he took me to meet his boss in a modest little study on the first floor, with a portrait of the Queen hanging on the wall above his desk. It was the first time I had met the Prince of Wales and I was immediately struck by his size – smaller and slighter than I had imagined. After shaking my hand he offered me a chair, and then took his own behind his desk where he sat and throughout our conversation fiddled nervously with his signet ring, his pen or his tie knot, every now and again bringing out a crisply laundered handkerchief to blow his nose. Sir John (fifty-one) sat opposite the Prince (thirty-eight) and to my left, a notebook on his lap, knees together, pen at the ready, his demeanour suddenly quite changed, like a fifth former in the company of a rather unpredictable headmaster.

The study was a picture of disorder: the desk covered with papers and books, envelopes with jottings on the back of them and a large diary filled for every hour of every day for every month, with scarcely a white space – people to see, places to go, receptions, ceremonies, presentations, openings. More books and clutter were piled around the room, as you might find in any home, and paintings – including a still life he had painted himself – stood on the floor, propped up against the wall. Next to them a brown canvas fishing bag which contained his painting equipment – sketchbooks, pencils, pens and a small tin box of watercolours. I know this, because, when at the end of our meeting I said I’d like to see more of his painting, he opened it up; while Sir John Riddell cleared his
throat to indicate that the Prince had already overrun by forty-five minutes and there was no time for art, he slowly turned the pages of two sketchbooks, explaining each sketch as he did, while I looked over his shoulder.

We had talked about the inner cities, about his concerns and anxieties for people, for society and for the environment, about his attitude to politics and his disillusionment with politicians, about his admiration for the black community and the need to harness the talent of its people and not alienate them. He talked about his love of the countryside and his spiritual awakening. He had become more philosophical in his thirties, entering what Jung would probably have described as the ‘middle period’. Intuition now played an important part in his life, even in his speech writing. He explained how his speech to the British Medical Association on its 150th anniversary in 1982 had come about. (This was where he suggested that modern medicine was ‘like the celebrated Tower of Pisa, slightly off-balance’ and horrified his hosts in much the same way as he did with the architects two years later.) ‘I agonized over what on earth I was going to say,’ he told me, ‘and then the most extraordinary thing happened. I was sitting here and I happened to look at the bookshelf, and my eyes suddenly settled on a book about Paracelsus. So I took the book down and there was my speech; and the response to it was extraordinary. I’ve never ever had so many letters. I’ve been a great believer in intuition ever since.’

I came away from Kensington Palace that day with two impressions. One, what a very genuine but sad and tortured character the Prince of Wales was but with a very big heart; and two, what artificial relationships he seemed to have. Perhaps he and Sir John did have frank and fruitful discussions and relaxed together occasionally over a glass of wine at the end
of the day but I doubted it. I suspected instead that the Prince, for all his insecurity – and perhaps because of his insecurity – was that unpredictable headmaster, and if Riddell had put up too much resistance he would have been slapped in detention. And John Riddell didn’t strike me as the sort of man who enjoyed being in detention. As one member of staff said of him, ‘I cannot count the number of times I have been into John’s office with a disastrous problem to solve, to come out again with the problem still unsolved but feeling that the world was a much nicer place.’

Riddell admired what the Prince was trying to do and gave him his wholehearted support and enthusiasm, but he was not used to dancing attendance on anyone. Nor was he used to working round the clock; when the day was finished he wanted to go home to his wife and children. But the work began to escalate as the Prince embraced more and more causes and ideas, and became more and more excited by the challenges that presented themselves that he could take on now that he had a Private Secretary who was in tune with him. But Riddell was not an administrator so the office was as disorganized as it had ever been with too few people trying to do too much for a man who had no real understanding of the effect his demands had on his staff. When his five-year contract was up, Riddell went back to the City and a decent salary. He had, as he would put it, a marvellous opportunity to reconnect himself into his pension fund and took it, knowing that while he and the Prince had worked perfectly well together, their chemistries were ultimately different. And by that time Richard Aylard was working for the Waleses and the Prince had identified someone whose chemistry did match his own.

Before Aylard stepped into Riddell’s shoes, however, the post was occupied by Sir Christopher Airey, whose feet hardly touched the floor beneath his desk before he was on his way
back to retirement in the West Country. A former major general commanding the Household Division, he was in his late fifties and entirely out of his depth trying to control a chaotic, understaffed, overworked office and an impatient and demanding boss who quoted Paracelsus and Jung and flitted between the ills of the inner cities, effluent in the North Sea and homeopathy in the space of a morning. He was utterly charming but never fully understood the difference between the Prince’s various organizations, never fully grasped where the Prince’s Trust ended and Business in the Community began, what the Prince’s Youth Business Trust had to do with either of them, or where the Prince’s interest in organic farming or wildlife fitted into the picture. And when, after a year, he was little the wiser, he began to irritate the Prince and was persuaded that the time had come for them to part company.