Palace; he had horses, dogs and cars, and a fleet of royal helicopters, planes and trains, not to mention the royal yacht at his disposal, plus holiday homes in all the places he most liked to be. He only had to click his fingers and what he wanted arrived or was fixed. The only benefit a wife could bring, which he could get nowhere else, was an heir.
By an accident of birth the Prince of Wales was cursed with a life in which his waking hours are mapped out six months in advance, and there are fixtures in his diary which will be there on the same day every year for the rest of his life. He is surrounded by people who tell him what they think he wants to hear; he is paraded like a performing poodle on high days and holidays, and his every twitch and grunt recorded and analysed by the tabloid press. His right to exist is debated regularly, as though he had some say in the matter, and his character and physique considered fair game for whoever fancies taking a passing punch. This is how it has been since he was three years old, when his mother became Queen.
He is an uneasy mix of old and new, half expecting the deference, service and lifestyle of another era, and half wanting to be a modern man of the people in an egalitarian age. But he is hampered by being kept at one remove from the life modern man leads. Diana had one huge advantage over the Prince: she did understand how the other half lived, because she had grown up in the real world. The Prince, try as he might, has never been given a chance. He has wanted to meet people in their own environment, but he is always cushioned. Try as he might to empathise, he will never know what it is like to queue for hours in a hospital casualty department or have petty bureaucrats be rude to him. He will never be elbowed out of the way in the rush for the first bus to appear in twenty minutes, know the frustrations of a train being cancelled, or have to hang around an overcrowded airport lounge. And if it starts to rain, someone will appear with an umbrella to keep him dry.
When he was forty minutes late for an Order of the Bath ceremony at Westminster Abbey with the Queen not long ago, he was incandescent with rage. The helicopter had been unable to land at Highgrove because of fog, so he was told to drive to RAF Lyneham nearby, only to discover that the fog was just as bad and the helicopter couldn’t land there either. There was no alternative but to drive all the way to London, which made him late. Some unfortunate person had got it wrong, and he hit the roof. When his staff once failed to organise his supper menu on the royal train because they had been working exceptionally hard on a very tricky weekend of engagements that had gone like clockwork, he was furious. The chef said he could do him one of three dishes: some salmon, a salad or steak and kidney pie. He petulantly said he didn’t like any of them. When a member of staff once failed to call him ‘sir’ or ‘Your Royal Highness’ – terrified by the experience of meeting the Prince for the first time – he said, ‘Do you think you could ask that chap to call me something when he meets me?’ Friends will say, ‘He only lets people know who he is when they forget,’ but it evidently depends upon what sort of mood he is in, and during the difficult times in his marriage, his moods were highly unpredictable.
Employees see this side of the Prince more than friends, which perhaps makes it all the more reprehensible.
Yet at other times he is relaxed and will laugh when things go wrong. A trip to the United World College in Trieste some years ago fell during the transition period between two private secretaries. The one who had done the recce – when the precise details are worked out of where HRH will go, who he will speak to, and how long it will all take – was not the one there on the day. Thus with great élan, but no certainty about where they were going, the Prince and accompanying entourage were led off down an alleyway, only to discover it was a dead end which led to the dustbins. Covered in confusion the party did a swift U-turn and with photographers swarming around them beat a hasty retreat. The incoming private secretary, Major-General Sir Christopher Airy, a highly efficient man, was mortified, but the Prince simply laughed.
He was also amused by an encounter with Chris Eubank, the champion boxer, who had been running a fitness workshop at a Prince’s Trust residential course in Brighton. He was standing at the end of a line-up to meet the Prince and was obviously very nervous, so the private secretary went across to try and calm him down. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘the Prince is very easy to talk to, just enjoy it.’
After they had met, he went up to Eubank to see how it had gone. ‘Yes, of course it was okay,’ said Eubank. ‘I wasn’t frightened. If you’ve been in the ring with Nigel Benn you’re not frightened of the Prince of Wales. So it was absolutely fine.’
The private secretary beat a retreat. A little later Eubank called him back. ‘Anyway, I hope I did the right thing. I called him Mr Windsor. I’m Chris Eubank, so I’m Mr Eubank. He’s Charles Windsor, so he must be Mr Windsor. Right?’
‘Yes,’ said the private secretary, fearing for his profile. ‘That’s absolutely fine.’
Charles does have a sense of humour and a great sense of the absurd, but anyone who knows him well knows how important it is to judge his mood before ever presuming familiarity. His children are the exception; they can say and do what they like to him and if he starts to get testy or pompous about it, they simply tease him out of it. They are sensitive enough, though, to know who not to tease him in front of.
One other person who can stop the Prince taking himself too seriously, and get away with it, is Mrs Parker Bowles; but she too picks her moments and would never embarrass the Prince in front of anyone other than his closest friends. They all acknowledge she has a miraculous effect on him, and whenever invitations to dinner at Highgrove are issued, they desperately hope Camilla will be there. If she is, the evening will be relaxed and good fun, with a great deal of gossip, jokes and giggling. Without her, the Prince is likely to be serious and if he’s feeling down – which without her he often is – he can be fairly leaden company.
Thousands of young people whom he has helped during the course of the last twenty-one years rightly regard him as someone very special: without him they might never have had a chance in life. He has helped when no bank manager would have considered their application – even if they had known how to apply for a loan. He believed in their potential and has put time, thought, effort and money into helping through the Prince’s Trust and its various offshoots. The Prince’s Trust was just the beginning. He has spread himself over a wide range of interests and concerns, and he has done a huge amount of good in his fifty years, much of it unrecognised by the majority of the population. He has exploited his privilege and his position to very good ends, and there is no doubt that he is an extremely sensitive man, who cares desperately and sincerely. Yet he remains intrinsically very selfish and very spoilt.
The problem is that Charles has no social equal, and few people have ever been brave enough over the years to say what needed to be said. There have been a few exceptions, and whenever rebuked for behaving in an inconsiderate manner to someone, the Prince has always been deeply ashamed. On one occasion, speaking at a Queen’s Silver Jubilee Trust dinner, the Prince made some rather barbed remarks about a couple of people in the room who were dragging their feet about taking up one of his ideas. At the end of the evening, Michael Colborne told the Prince he thought he had been unnecessarily harsh on the two individuals. Colborne had known the Prince during his time in the Navy and joined his staff in 1974. He felt so strongly that over the following weekend he sat down and put his feelings on paper, and sent the letter to the Prince, who was by then staying on a Duchy farm. A week later Charles was back at Highgrove, and called Colborne into his office.
‘You know that letter you wrote me?’ he said. ‘Do you know what I did with it? I read it and I screwed it up into a ball and I kicked it round the bedroom.’
‘Oh you did, did you, sir?’ said Colborne with a slight smile. ‘Why was that?’
‘Because unfortunately you were right. I wasn’t very nice to those two men that night.’
‘She