Less than three months later, on a tour of the Caribbean, the Prince delivered his most forthright eulogy to the Commonwealth in many years, calling it ‘a wonderful resource’ embodying ‘a particular kind of decency and humanity’. That same year, a new Commonwealth Secretary-General arrived at Marlborough House. Don McKinnon was the experienced ex-Foreign Minister of New Zealand, a straight-talking, horse-riding ex-farmer who was keen to engage with the Prince and ‘pull him closer into the fold’. McKinnon had created provocative headlines by publicly stating (correctly) that the position of Head of the Commonwealth was not hereditary. Some at the Palace took it as barely concealed criticism. In fact McKinnon says he was simply keen to raise the Prince’s profile. ‘There was a need for people to get to know him,’ says McKinnon. ‘He could not just get away with saying “I was there in 1965 . . .” ’
McKinnon found that the succession kept surfacing during his time in office from 2000 to 2008. At one point, he says that the British Foreign Office demanded a detailed plan of action on succession arrangements. He refused, saying it was premature and irrelevant. He believed Prince Charles was the right man for the job and should not worry about ‘treading on the Queen’s toes’. As he puts it: ‘I think there were feelings in the earlier days that this was his mother’s territory. But I raised this with the Queen and she said: “The Commonwealth is big enough for all of us”.’ He likes to quote the former Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, on the subject: ‘We don’t feel so small that we have to reject the monarchy to feel big.’ That, says McKinnon, was the view shared by all the heads he spoke to, though he still believes the succession should not be automatic. ‘You may get a monarch in the future who does two or three amazingly stupid things so we don’t want to give automaticity to this. But we don’t want to look as if we are being pedantic either.’
One of the problems was that there were also influential figures in the Prince’s circle urging him to forget about the Commonwealth altogether and focus on shoring up his position at home. Tony Blair’s view of the organisation as an irritating anachronism was shared by some of the modernising forces in the Prince’s camp. It was a battle for the Prince’s ear.
Much of the Prince’s core charity work – from the environment to youth opportunities – was a natural fit with the work of the twenty-first-century Commonwealth. The glory days of nation-building and beating apartheid were now giving way to the less glamorous promotion of human rights and sustainability. In the new era of spin and ‘eye-catching initiatives’, the Commonwealth, like a good deal of the Prince’s work, was seen as worthy but dull.
However, the Prince was now much more contented in his private life. There had been a renaissance of his romance with Camilla Parker Bowles. She was, by now, divorced from the Brigadier (who says that most of the fault for the breakdown of their marriage was his own, even though ‘Camilla took the wrap’ in the press). The couple, who have two children and five grandchildren, would remain on very good terms.
In 2005, the Prince and Mrs Parker Bowles were married in a civil ceremony in Windsor Town Hall, followed by a blessing in St George’s Chapel. Thereafter, she would become the Duchess of Cornwall. Don McKinnon was among the guests and remembers ‘an upswell of goodwill towards a man who had gone through years of lurid headlines . . .a palpable sense of relief among guests, family and the couple themselves.’ There were some surreal moments, too. He remembers receiving a friendly wave from the Queen at the wedding reception. He walked over, to find her deep in conversation with her Windsor farming staff. ‘Don used to farm in New Zealand,’ she told them. ‘He’ll understand your problems with the heifers.’
With the Duchess at his side, the Prince now had a soulmate and, on his travels, someone with whom he could share the stresses and hilarities of royal touring. McKinnon had plans to ease the Prince into a more elevated Commonwealth role, inviting the couple to take part on the periphery of the 2007 summit in Kampala. ‘I wanted him to contribute at the foreign ministers’ meeting and made sure he met lots of young people,’ says McKinnon. ‘The Prince thoroughly enjoyed it all as I knew he would.’
In the next few years the Prince’s profile would begin to shift, almost imperceptibly, towards the role of King-in-waiting, with the full support of the Queen and her new Private Secretary, Christopher Geidt, a powerful advocate of greater Commonwealth engagement. The Prince would stand in for the Queen at the opening of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, a far-from-straightforward substitution. In the absence of the monarch, the hosts wanted the Indian President to open the Games. The Games federation and the Palace were adamant that it should be the Prince. In a classic diplomatic fudge, the Prince declared the Games open while President Patil then proclaimed: ‘Let the Games begin.’
During the Queen’s 2012 Diamond Jubilee celebrations, it was the Prince who took on most of the long-distance travel to ensure that her Jubilee message was trumpeted through her realms. By now the Prince had been touring the Commonwealth so extensively for so long that the only people who knew it better than he did were his own parents.
A year later, in 2013, he was at that Commonwealth summit in Sri Lanka and standing in for the Queen following her recent self-imposed ban on long-haul travel. It coincided with the Prince’s 65th birthday. ‘The Colombo summit was a very delicate one,’ says one Secretariat insider. Many heads of government had stayed away in protest against President Rajapaksa’s crackdown on the Tamil minority, although the President argued that he had managed to bring the years of carnage to an end. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, had arrived with major concerns about human rights in the north of the country. Cameron concedes that he was not making things easy for the Prince’s position. ‘It was obviously difficult for him as I was lashing the Sri Lankan President in bilateral meetings really quite toughly and there was this blinding row going on about Rajapaksa’s behaviour,’ he says.
While human rights were the headline issue, there was also a tentative attempt to raise the delicate issue of Commonwealth succession. Both Buckingham Palace and the Commonwealth Secretariat were pushing for the heads of government to reach a settled position on the next Head of the organisation. At the 2013 Commonwealth Day reception in London, the Queen had come to Marlborough House to sign the Commonwealth’s new charter. McKinnon’s successor as Secretary-General, Kamalesh Sharma, made a speech saluting her stewardship of the organisation, before adding pointedly: ‘The support given to you in this endeavour by the Prince of Wales deepens the Commonwealth’s links to the Crown.’ The Queen, in turn, thanked Sharma for his ‘thoughtful words about the link between the Crown and the Commonwealth and its enduring value’. To old Commonwealth hands, the message was clear: it was time for the Commonwealth to endorse the Prince as Head-in-waiting. ‘The view here was that he’d earned it,’ says a senior Buckingham Palace adviser. ‘So, that was the opportunity for anyone to stand up and say they didn’t want Charles. And they didn’t say anything!’
A plan was hatched at the Palace. Since there had not been so much as a murmur of disapproval, royal officials were keen to move forward at the summit in Colombo, given that the Prince would be there himself. The idea of addressing the succession issue would have to be raised by one of the leaders, but preferably not by the British government, for fear of raising republican or anti-imperial hackles. Instead, the Queen’s officials talked to the Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key.
‘The Palace came to us and asked if we would push that issue,’ says Key. ‘We formally wrote that we were going to support that proposition and progress it. The Commonwealth wouldn’t exist without the monarchy and I was very supportive of the Queen and of the family.’ In the end, however, it was the Prince and his officials who applied the brakes. They felt it was too soon and did not want the matter raised while the Prince was at the summit. ‘Clarence House was keen not to be seen to be pushing it,’ says Key. So apart from a cursory discussion, during which it seemed everyone was entirely happy with the
idea of the Prince taking over, nothing was resolved.
None the less, all the politicians present were left in no doubt about the Prince’s feelings towards the organisation. At the summit banquet, which he hosted on behalf of the Queen, the Prince was expected to say the customary few words of thanks and let dinner commence. Except that, on this evening, the Prince said rather more than that. Speaking from a few notes rather than a script, he reflected that having made more than 150 visits to more than forty Commonwealth nations, the institution was ‘in the blood’. He reminisced about representing the Queen at handover ceremonies in places like Fiji and the Bahamas – where he had been expected to dance the night away -and a challenging waterskiing trip with Dom Mintoff, Prime Minister of Malta. His abiding memory was of Mintoff’s bath hat and of the wax plugs in his ears.
He talked of his childhood memories of Australia’s Sir Robert Menzies; of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah (who had given him a bow and arrows as a boy); and of being greeted by one million people on the streets of Malawi, courtesy of Dr Hastings Banda. By the end of this whistlestop tour of Commonwealth greats – concluding with Canada’s Pierre Trudeau – and his tribute to Commonwealth ‘family values’, the Prince’s audience could be in no doubt. There was no one else in the room with a remotely comparable grasp of this organisation. David Cameron says that the Heir to the Throne handled this ill-tempered summit very skilfully, particularly when it came to entertaining all the heads. ‘I remember being very impressed at how well he knew everyone,’ says Cameron. ‘He had something to say to all of them. His speech was very well-judged.’
It was Cameron’s offer to rescue the 2017 Commonwealth summit from cyclone-battered Vanuatu and stage it in London in 2018 that would be a game-changer for the Prince. The fact that this would almost certainly be the Queen’s last Commonwealth summit meant that there would be a record turnout of heads of government, and also that the issue of the headship could be addressed without any awkwardness.
In the run-up to the summit, the Prince joined the Queen to host a Palace reception for every strand of the Commonwealth diaspora in Britain, many of them people whom the Prince had nominated himself. The guests included Pakistan-born Carlisle spice-shop owner Saj Ghafoor, England rugby players Billy and Mako Vunipola (whose parents are from Tonga), and Jude Kereama, the New Zealand-born masterchef with an award-winning restaurant in the Cornish village of Porthleven. The Prince talked to them all.
So the scene is set as the summit begins. While fifty-three leaders converge on London, countless similar, multi-layered, people-to-people Commonwealth connections emerge. The Prince is in his element as he tours the various conferences alongside the main summit, like the Youth Forum and the People’s Forum. ‘The Youth Forum’s getting older,’ he jokes as he bumps into the Duchess of Cornwall in a room full of youth activists. He has something to say to all of them. When one young man explains that he is from Cameroon, the Prince excitedly recalls his visit there in the Royal Yacht and the saga of the ship’s cooling system being blocked by jellyfish: ‘I’ve never been so hot in my life!’ Jonathan Barcant, twenty-nine, talks about using climate-resilient plants to build hurricane defences in Trinidad. The Prince is thrilled: ‘I’ve thought for years that Nature holds all of the answers!’ He is equally excited to meet a young economist from the Seychelles who has successfully campaigned for a ban on plastic bags. They are soon deep in conversation about raw sewage.
The following day he is holding audiences for individual visiting heads of government – the Queen cannot meet all of them – and entertaining delegates to an al-fresco tea party at Clarence House in honour of the international arm of his Prince’s Trust. Speakers include a police officer from Barbados, who has slashed youth offending with the help of the Trust, and Roland Vella, fourteen, a Maltese schoolboy who says the Trust has turned his life around. Just more human layers in the tangle of global connections that make up the modern Commonwealth. At the summit’s opening ceremony, the Prince is centre stage as the Queen voices her wish for him to continue the ‘important work started by my father’ and the Maltese Prime Minister, the outgoing ‘chair in office’, announces that this is the consensus position anyway. Later on, the Prince helps the Queen host a reception for those leaders attending their first summit. Before the evening banquet, as the ninety-two-year-old Queen is on her feet for over an hour meeting and greeting all the delegations, the Prince is at her side doing the same. He is entirely at home with this lot, just as they are with him. The next day, his endorsement as future head is actually little more than a formality. ‘It was very clear that people wanted the Prince of Wales to be the next head of the Commonwealth,’ says the summit host, Theresa May, afterwards. ‘There was a tremendous feeling of coming together -the family of the Commonwealth – and also of continuity.’
‘He continues that link between what has gone before and what will be with his own dedication to climate change, to the Prince’s Trust and to all those other charities strongly embedded in the Commonwealth,’ says the Secretary-General, Baroness Scotland. ‘He’s been there.’
Those who have been with him on Commonwealth duty have no doubt the Prince is the man for the part. ‘He’s travelled God knows how many miles to meet and greet and talk to these people. He’s knowledgeable. I think he’ll be a great success,’ says Brig Andrew Parker Bowles. And he firmly believes that the Duchess of Cornwall will be an asset, too. ‘She’ll do a good job, do her best. That’s her usual form.’
The Prince who has presided over so many handovers in his time will eventually find that the Commonwealth handover is going to be somewhat easier than most dared imagine a few years before. It is a slightly different picture when it comes to the realms, where the monarch automatically becomes head of state. Some officials expect a change of reign to hasten moves towards a republican model in some of them, but time and again, the public has shown itself to be stubbornly resistant to constitutional change. And how long before the Prince himself decides to curtail his own long-haul travel plans and delegate them to his sons?
As for the rest of the world beyond the Commonwealth, most people have now known the Prince, just as they have known the Queen, for so long that they have a settled view that is unlikely to move much. ‘Once the Prince is on the Throne, he is the ticket,’ says the German commentator and royal biographer, Thomas Kielinger. ‘The monarchy is older than any given person and you’ve lived with some very funny characters on the Throne. The Queen’s high age has given Charles an umbrella. Our first chancellor after the war was seventy-three so age is not an issue.’
Continuity in a turbulent, changing world is one of the Prince’s strongest suits. His familiar and outspoken views on well-known subjects – which once alarmed diplomats and senior civil servants – have lost their novelty value and, in many cases, have become received wisdom. His tours have taken on a more serious, more statesmanlike feel. Instead of artists, his entourage now includes senior government representatives. Suggestions of unconstitutional interference in political matters, through his famous handwritten ‘black spider’ memos to ministers, have turned out to be earnest missives on non-political issues – subjects such as badgers or the Patagonian toothfish – rather than hard-nosed lobbying. Former ministers have no complaints. In fact, they have welcomed his input.
Lord Hague, the former Foreign Secretary, says that he received plenty of princely memos, but not about foreign affairs. ‘I knew him well when I was Secretary of State for Wales. I used to get the black spider memos particularly about agriculture and the environment. I found them fascinating. I didn’t find it inappropriate. He wasn’t trying to override democratic process.’ After a lifetime of diplomacy, the Foreign Office veteran, Sir Roger du Boulay, sees the Prince as a great asset. ‘He’s got his bees,’ he says. ‘Let them buzz.’
* The monarchy, with the exception of the Prince of Wales and his family, is funded primarily by the Sovereign Grant. This consists of 15 per cent of the surplus of the Crown Estate (incr
eased to 25 per cent for ten years from 2017 to cover the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace – yielding £76.1 million in 2017-18). The monarch also receives the surplus from the thirteenth-century, 46,000-acre Duchy of Lancaster (£20.1 million in 2017–2018) and income from private investments. The Prince of Wales, his wife, his sons plus dependants are funded by the surplus of the fourteenth-century, 130,000-acre Duchy of Cornwall (£22 million in 2017-18).
† Acland’s ADC in Rhodesia, a young Scots Guards Officer called Iain Duncan Smith, would later become leader of the Conservative Party.
‡ Artists including Emma Sargent, Susannah Fiennes and James Hart Dyke have been among those invited to join royal tours. The Prince would always pay their costs himself. In return, artists would offer him one or two pieces of their work from the tour – plus tuition, if there was enough time for the Prince to escape with his easel.
§ Named Maksat, the horse had an unhappy spell with the Household Cavalry, was obviously unsuitable for army life and ended up living happily on a Welsh farm.
¶ Australia-born David Kang, twenty-three, fired two blank shots at the Prince on Australia Day 1994. The Prince, who barely flinched, was widely praised for his sangfroid and later likened it to standing his ground when he was charged by an elephant in Kenya. Lucky not to have been shot, Kang was spared jail, sentenced to community service, later studied law and has since qualified as a barrister.
# On 6th October 1981, the Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat, was viewing a military parade in Cairo when a handful of soldiers taking part in the march-past attacked the presidential box with grenades and AK-47 rifles, killing Sadat and ten others.
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 63
