Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (36 page)

“It is riveting how much inventiveness exists. People create scenarios and write scripts for strange almost-plays, I find, which bear no relation to reality, no relation to the way I view things or do things or think about things,” Charles complained to Jonathan Dimbleby more than twenty years ago. “Everyone is saying there’s a right to know everything. I don’t agree. There isn’t a right to know at all.”
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Even back then, before Edward Snowden but after Andrew Morton—and supposing the Prince hadn’t been unburdening himself to a biographer as part of a project he himself had initiated—the Prince’s yen for greater privacy was never likely to be fulfilled. Daylight had started to permeate the Windsor courts in ways that damaged the monarchy, strengthening the aversion of “that Dracula family” to sunshine when they might have benefited from unlocking some of the shutters before others prized them open.

This is not to suggest that the royals should pander to the revised definition of public interest as anything and everything that interests the public. The Windsors are entitled to conduct their personal lives in private. Nor is this an argument for every communication being automatically subject to scrutiny. There are missions the Prince undertakes, for example, during his Middle East trips, that would be compromised if conducted in the full gaze of the world. It is harder to see why he should enjoy a higher level of protection under Freedom of Information laws than a government minister. Bagehot’s dictum about the mystery of monarchy no longer applies in Snowdonia. Its mystery causes strife. We must let in daylight upon magic, which after all can be more impressive up close, as the Prince’s Trust alumnus Dynamo frequently demonstrates.

Clarence House sources say the Prince never sought his battle with the
Guardian
and long ago would have preferred to publish his memos than to fight over them, not least because he and his advisers are privately far from confident that the Supreme Court will rule in his favor. Whatever the outcome, there’s nothing to stop him asking the government that comes to power in Britain’s May 2015 elections to look at bringing the rules relating to his correspondence in line with those covering other public officials and bodies.

A royal insider argues that the royal households cannot be the advocates of public policy on disclosure because the Queen has been stoically doing her job for more than sixty years. A release of documents from earlier stages of her reign might not properly account for the way in which attitudes have evolved, inside the royal palaces as well as outside their walls. That argument might hold true for the retrospective release of letters and memos. There’s little sign that Prince Philip has imbibed the rules of political correctness or grappled with the issues that underlie them, but his son has done a better job of moving with the times, sometimes falling behind but just as often jumping ahead of them.

Charles now has another opportunity to show leadership, in redrawing and clarifying the boundaries between the private and public spheres of palace life. His views on most things are already in the public domain, laid out in
Harmony
and in his collected speeches. His courtiers gain nothing in downplaying these views or concealing his philosophy. The quality most prized in this trust-free era is authenticity.

The Prince might do well to offer up more access to the work he does—whether royal work or charitable work, especially as the two blend and merge. He might even consider beginning not only to speak for himself but to answer for himself. He leaves it to aides such as his Principal Private Secretary, William Nye, to present his Annual Review and to make his case to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. Yet, as I have seen at first hand, Charles can be the most fluent and persuasive of advocates for his own causes.

He should also take an open-minded look at what Tony Berkeley is doing. Berkeley—a rare creature, both a life peer and a hereditary; his full title is Anthony Fitzhardinge Gueterbock, 18th Baron Berkeley and Baron Gueterbock—in 2011 introduced a Private Member’s Bill on marine legislation, only to receive a letter from the clerk in the House of Lords bill office: “Dear Lord Berkeley, The marine navigation bill that you introduced on 5 July would affect the Prince of Wales’s interests and so will require the Prince of Wales’s consent for its consideration by parliament.… The government whips office in the Lords and the parliamentary branch of the Department of Transport are aware of what is required.”
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An arcane constitutional convention gives Charles a veto over any proposed legislation deemed to impact on “the hereditary revenues, personal property or other interests” of the Duchy of Cornwall, and given the wide-ranging nature of its business, this is potentially quite a considerable power. What is less obvious is whether he has ever used it to block or amend a bill. That information remains confidential under the same convention.

Understanding the Duchy isn’t easy. It operates like a corporation but isn’t taxed like one. “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and swims like a duck you sort of assume it’s a duck,” said Nick Smith, Labour MP for the Welsh constituency of Blaenau Gwent, at a July 2013 hearing of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. “Given the Duchy of Cornwall looks and behaves like a corporation with income from complex investments and quacks like a corporation with a council including the great and good from banking, on the face of it many of my constituents would say the Duchy should pay corporation tax and capital gains tax. Aren’t my constituents being reasonable?”

No, said William Nye, one of three witnesses to appear. “The Duchy is a very unusual organization. It is a private estate; it is not a corporation. It is a private estate in many respects like other private estates, but in one or two respects not like a private estate. Some of the things that you have highlighted, Mr. Smith, still do not make it a corporation. There is a council. It is an advisory council that advises the Duke of Cornwall.… Essentially it is a set of properties that belong to the Duke of Cornwall. The fact that it is a large set of properties and is worth a lot of money does not, per se, make it a corporation. The memorandum of understanding [on royal taxation, agreed in 1993] establishes that it is not a corporation and not subject to corporation tax.”

The Public Accounts Committee had already attempted—and failed—in an April 2005 hearing to get to grips with Prince Charles’s tax status and the nitty-gritty of the Duchy. Again it floundered, even after Nye essayed another definition of the Duchy. “It is a bit like a trust in some respects, although it is not formally, legally speaking, a trust. It is a little bit like a family business in some respects, but it is not solely a business. It is an estate, which has a sort of entail in it, although it is a slightly complex entail. It has aspects of social enterprise, in that although it is commercial, it is able to take a long-term stewardship view of what is in the interests of the Duchy overall, meaning the assets for the Duke [of Cornwall] and future dukes, and of the communities and the tenants. To that extent, it has aspects of social enterprise.”

As the hearing drew to a close, Richard Bacon, Conservative MP for South Norfolk, made a final stab at comprehension. “If it looks like a private ducal estate set up to provide an income to the heir to the throne, and it quacks like a private ducal estate set up to provide an income to the heir to the throne, can one assume that it might just possibly be a private ducal estate set up to provide an income to the heir to the throne?” “I think that must be possible,” deadpanned Nye. Britain’s unwritten constitutional arrangements, built on precedents and conventions that may have been easily graspable in earlier times, can now seem wilfully obscure.

The committee called for changes to drag the Duchy into the twenty-first century. “Greater transparency is needed,” said its 2013 report. “The Duchy enjoys an exemption from paying tax even though it engages in a range of commercial activities. This tax exemption may give it an unfair advantage over its competitors who do pay corporation and capital gains tax.” Its recommendations show no signs of being adopted, and that means the fact of the Duchy and the privilege it represents continues to overshadow some of the extraordinary things it has enabled Charles to do.

Berkeley responded to the letter by introducing another Private Member’s Bill into the House of Lords intended to iron out inconsistencies between the Prince’s status under British law and the position of other subjects of Her Majesty and to make the system more easily understandable as well as bringing the Duchy in line with the other entities with which it competes commercially. Berkeley says he knows the bill needs further work and anyway has no chance of becoming law without government backing, but he is using the process to generate debate. “What I’d really like to see is the Duchy making these changes voluntarily,” he explains. “Either a government does it or the Duchy will have to do it proactively to get the laws changed.”

It will always go better for the Windsors to initiate reform rather than to have reform imposed. The small numbers of avowed republicans in Parliament belies the speed with which sentiment could turn. Misty patriotism—and that is all that sustains many parliamentarians’ support for the monarchy—would evaporate in the heat of sustained public rage.

The most obvious locus of public neuralgia, especially at a time of economic uncertainty and straitened budgets, is around the expense of maintaining royals in their palaces, in their carriages, on walkabouts, in helicopters, on their private train. Even for those who believe monarchy still matters, the contribution royalty makes must always be balanced against debits.

The $405,000 bill for flying Charles to Nelson Mandela’s funeral and back in December 2013—a figure released in the annex to Buckingham Palace’s
Annual Report and Accounts 2013–2014
along with other journeys costing more than $16,000 in that period—looks venal if you assume the Prince might have used ordinary scheduled airlines for the journey. His aides insisted at the press conference for his own Annual Review that the short notice and complexity of getting to Qunu in Kwazulu Natal made private charters the only practicable option. Staffers who made the journey say he was not traveling in style. My own overseas jaunts with royals, including the May 2014 trip with Charles and Camilla to Canada, have not been luxurious. The nose section of the Canadian air force jet contained a cramped private cabin but everyone apart from the royal couple rode in conditions familiar to economy class fliers—in the 1980s. (Journalists and photographers reimbursed the Canadian government C$1,800 [US$1,592] apiece for this no-frills transport.)

Aides maintain that security in part dictates the manner of royal travel and swells the size of retinues. Convoys expensively deploy skilled police drivers to recce the routes in advance as well as moving the retinues around once the visit begins. Charles and Camilla travel with valets, assistants, a hairdresser, and extensive wardrobes as part of the pageantry of such visits, to project majesty and protect dignity.

There are nevertheless clear arguments for finding ways to project majesty and protect dignity more cheaply. In 1994, a high-water mark of royal turbulence, John Major decided that the forty-one-year-old royal yacht
Britannia
should not be recommissioned when the next major repair bill fell due. Like the royals, the yacht presented an image of Britain to the world; like the royals, that image was becoming increasingly dilapidated. “You had to judge whether it was worth spending fifty million pounds on it, or, to be more accurate, whether it would have been a good idea to spend fifty million pounds on it in the middle of a deep recession, with a public mood deeply aggrieved,” he says.
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During the 1997 election campaign, the Conservatives pledged a replacement for
Britannia
. Labour won power and swiftly scrapped the yacht instead, consigning the vessel to a new life in Edinburgh as a tourist attraction. The stoical Queen was seen to shed tears at the decommissioning ceremony. She may have cause to weep over the royal train after Britain next goes to the polls: as expensive as if it ran on gilded rails, the nine-carriage train is an obvious target for any incoming government keen on finding quick savings. The Public Accounts Committee has already recommended that it be scrapped. In 2014 Buckingham Palace told the committee that the train will stay in service “for as long as the rolling stock is working, which it believes will be for another five to ten years. However, it has not yet developed alternative options or a replacement to a royal train, which it considers provides safe and secure transport, particularly for overnight travel to early-morning royal engagements.”
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The Prince’s aides make a similar point, insisting this form of travel is better value for money than the cost of individual journeys suggests; Charles uses the train not to undertake solo travel but as a mobile hotel and conference facility. A former Cabinet minister enthuses that the train, like the monarchy itself, is an asset, a touch eccentric but ineffably British. To many people, though, the Prince, in taking the train, simply appears on the wrong track. A two-day trip to York and Harrogate in northern England added $36,900 to his travel bill in July 2013; a regional tour to the Midlands the previous month cost $31,113. His sons, by contrast, have not only both opted for commercial flights for private travel, but in May 2014 Harry arrived in Estonia on budget airline EasyJet for a two-day official visit to the country, and in December William caught the US Airways shuttle from New York to Washington to meet President Obama at the White House.

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Many of his opponents assume Charles stands for the status quo. In fact he already purposes to make some significant changes. As King, he intends to preside over a monarchy that is smaller.

For all that the Prince is more inclined to conserve than cut, for all that he dislikes the pain of rationalizing and restructuring, he is also focused on distant horizons. His activism is aimed at benefiting populations not yet born. In performing his royal role, he has not only formulated a model for his own potential kingship but is intent on securing the monarchy for the future. He knows that he and his kith must continue to adapt to survive and that part of this process must involve streamlining the Windsor family firm by pasturing older and more marginal—or problematic—members. He is also pondering ways better to preserve the heritage of royal residences and retain their capacity as venues for state occasions while opening them up to more public access and for other uses.