by Penny Junor
O’Brien’s successor, Julia Cleverdon, an equally dynamic character, is frequently driven to distraction by the Prince.
He’s like an extraordinary campaigning terrier with a memory like an elephant’s – he remembers the detail of every character he’s met on every visit, which is why, when junior ministers start arriving with shiny suits and shoes like conkers and being enthusiastic about inner-city problems, the Prince rolls his eyes to heaven. ‘What do they think I’ve been doing for the last thirty years?’ There’s a lot of frustration, a lot of here-we-go-again, new policy, new politician, new minister, having to explain all over again, ‘Yes, we know about this; yes, that would be a good idea; no, you’ll never make that happen in Bradford – unless you get the private sector going in Bradford you haven’t got much of a hope …’
She imitates him well but she’s a big fan. ‘He’s always had an extraordinary ability to push the agenda further than most of us thought it could go and spot things that other people haven’t seen,’ she says.
A year before Britain’s rural communities were devastated by the foot and mouth epidemic in 2001, Julia Cleverdon was hit by ‘the first onslaught of black spider memos’ saying that he wanted BITC to look at the issues facing the rural communities. ‘We now know the answers in the inner cities,’ he wrote; ‘we know what to do, the examples and the evidence are there; all we need to do in the inner cities is to make it happen. What no one has a bloody clue about is what you do in the rural communities where the tide has gone out. There is no way in which those Cumbrian hill farmers are going to be able to continue; what is going to happen to large swathes of rural Britain and does the business world not think this matters?’ ‘And the business world on my board,’ says Julia, ‘rolled their eyes slightly and said, “Oh God, we can’t cope with any more and we don’t really know what the answers are and perhaps someone in government can do something about it.” My chairman at the time, Sir Peter Davis from Sainsbury, did his best to keep the Prince in play but the Prince wasn’t having any of it. Absolutely furious he was. He said, “If BITC won’t do this and won’t take an initiative on this, I shall start a new organization called Rural Business in the Community.”’
At that point the board caved in – he had, after all, been President for nineteen years and his instincts by and large had always been right – and so they set up a feasibility study to discover whether there was a business case for business being involved. The Prince personally took 150 business leaders to Cumbria with him – ten visits with fifteen business people on each – to show them what the issues were and they came back convinced. The situation was chaotic – there was no affordable housing, no jobs, pubs and village shops and post offices were closing, communities dying, and there appeared to be no one in Cumbria who thought it was any part of their job to advise hill farmers on diversification. In one instance they found five generations working on a single farm – and average incomes in the countryside were £5200 per farm, per year. The only hope in this family was the daughter who had started a recycling business, collecting black plastic sacks off everybody’s fields and sending them to a recycling plant in Scotland. One of the chief executives ran a company that owned half the hill farms in Cumbria (but he had never been to talk to the farmers on the ground before). He jumped on the girl’s idea – black plastic was a menace in the waterways, they had been frantically looking for ways of solving the problem, they could fund her business, provide the cash flow …
The case for business to get involved was proven; and then foot and mouth hit. The countryside was closed down, tourism stopped overnight, hotels, pubs and restaurants had no custom, hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy animals were slaughtered, farmers faced ruin and the rural community was brought to its knees. But thanks to the Prince of Wales BITC was ahead of the game; the business world already had an understanding of what the problems were, Julia had put together a leadership team and some of the major food retailers were beginning to look seriously at the Prince’s ideas about local sourcing – his belief that the only way that Britain’s small farmers can survive is if the food retailers, in particular the supermarkets, buy from and thus support their local producers.
And now government has seen the logic – but, as Julia Cleverdon says, ‘Would the government at this moment be making so much fuss about local sourcing by the public sector on public procurement if the Prince of Wales had not written to Margaret Beckett every day for most of the past two years moaning on about it?’
It all arose from a dinner the Prince gave at Highgrove. With all the retailers gathered round the table he asked where they were on local sourcing – he just wanted to go through a few points. Julia takes up the story:
They held their temper very well and were able to produce some quite good examples of where they had been able to improve their performance and change their behaviour in this area and then Sir Peter Davis said as the final coup de grâce, ‘Well, thank you, sir, it’s been a very nice dinner and very good of you to harangue us for three hours on the whole subject and I do hope we have managed to make some points back on what we’re trying to do. But I would just point out that although 50 per cent of all food is, of course, sold through the retailers in the UK, a stonking amount of food is bought by the government of the day for use in the prisons, the hospitals and schools and the local authorities – and I don’t see them sitting round the table.’
‘You’re absolutely right!’ said the Prince; seized a pen, wrote it down, letter off to Margaret Beckett the next morning: ‘What are you doing about public procurement?’ Discovers a bloody example in Wales of the Powys Public Procurement Initiative, rings me up at midnight, says he’s found an amazing initiative being run in Powys, did I know the man? Of course I didn’t know the man; would I get on to the man at once? Yes, I’d get on to the man at once. They had produced the most amazing thing in the Powys Education Authority which says that the food that is to be served in the schools of Powys is to be dew-fresh, sunrise-plucked, right through the Treaty of Rome with a coach and horses, and all of that food is now being driven as a Welsh food initiative. ‘Why can’t this be done everywhere else? What are the reasons why not? Send me the name of the man, get him into my study; would it be helpful if I went to Powys, would it be useful if I led a Seeing Is Believing trip to Powys to produce other examples for other procurement initiatives … ?’
The Prince is tireless. When I saw Julia she was just back from holiday and by Tuesday had had five ‘black spider memos’, each one four or five pages long, about things that had caught the Prince’s imagination, or concern, or to find out what she was doing about something he had mentioned previously; had she followed up a suggestion he had made, where was she with chasing up a company or an individual? He spends a phenomenal amount of time and interest on causes he thinks are not popular and not listened to and she senses that he is more desperate now than ever before. ‘It’s not that time’s running out exactly, but because he feels he’s been at it so long, he’s got to make more difference than he has already been able to.’
When Michael Peat published a booklet early in 2004 called ‘Working for Charity’, setting out for the first time some facts and figures about the Prince’s charitable activity, Julia, like the chief executives of his other core charities, was astonished by just how huge his charitable empire had grown. An idea, scribbled on the back of an envelope in 1972 that became the Prince’s Trust, had spawned dozens of similar and sometimes rival charities; and for many years Allen Sheppard, who was chairman of Grand Metropolitan as well as the International Business Leaders’ Forum, the Prince’s Youth Business Trust and BITC, had been telling the Prince that he needed to coordinate all these subsidiary charities. He needed to get them together on a regular basis to make sure that they were singing the same tune and sharing the same brand values. His advice fell on deaf ears; coordination was not a priority for Stephen Lamport and nothing ever happened. ‘Stephen Lamport let go of the tow rope on that,’ say
s Julia. ‘He wasn’t particularly keen to get too much coordination going because it was going to produce a lot of work for everybody and we were much more concerned about the quick wins in the tabloids than understanding and communicating more clearly what had been achieved and how it had been achieved, and so now you wake up six years on and discover there are seventeen organizations.’ But since Peat’s arrival, the Prince’s charitable house – as well as his domestic house – has been put in order and set out clearly and transparently for all to see.
Having no prescribed role in life was one of the Prince of Wales’s great problems. He and his first Private Secretary, David Checketts, who was with him during most of the seventies, had to feel their way with nothing to go on but the knowledge that the example of the previous Prince of Wales was not the one to follow. The young, sensitive and dutiful Prince wanted to give something back to society, to justify his position in some way, and Checketts, a serviceman at heart rather than a hidebound courtier, encouraged him in this direction. He was a squadron leader in the Air Force who had been equerry to the Duke of Edinburgh and was then persuaded to look after the Prince of Wales in Australia during his school-days and to stay on as his equerry. He became his Private Secretary when Charles was twenty-one – he was thirty-nine – and his role as Private Secretary was as ill-defined as the Prince’s, but they had a good relationship. And when Charles felt moved to set up some means of helping alienated and disadvantaged young people, he had no qualms about supporting him. The result, from that idea in 1972, was the Prince’s Trust, which today, thanks to its high-profile Parties in the Park, is a brand that is as well known as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme.
It was sparked off by pure chance. Charles happened to hear a radio programme in which a probation officer called George Pratt was talking about a new scheme of community service for young offenders in London. Charles was deeply moved by what he heard, and unaware there were so many people growing up in such deprived conditions and turning to crime because they had no one in their lives to encourage them to do something positive. Spurred on by Checketts, he got in touch with George Pratt and asked what he could do to help. After much discussion with representatives from all the professional groups working with the young, his scribblings evolved into a charitable trust, formed in the spring of 1976 with the Prince’s severance pay of £7500 from the Navy. Its purpose was to help individuals aged between fourteen and twenty-five (now thirty) turn their lives around. Applicants had to write down what they felt would most help them improve their lives and, in the early days, the Prince saw every application and chose which ones the money – usually a maximum of £75 – should be given to. At that time he was paying the grants anonymously out of his naval allowance; and then, as now, there were no strings attached. The Prince hoped it would challenge young people’s sense of responsibility and show troubled teenagers that someone trusted and believed in them.
It worked. Today, the Prince’s Trust is the largest youth charity in the United Kingdom. It employs twelve thousand staff and volunteers, has an annual turnover of nearly £60 million and has helped more than half a million young people. Its activities have mushroomed but the core principles are the same. The facts and figures that drive it are simple. There are nearly 120,000 young people unemployed long term in Britain and many of them have no skills to take up jobs, even if they could find them. Increasing numbers of children are being excluded from school, particularly among the ethnic minorities. Young black men are twice as likely to be unemployed as their white counterparts. And according to studies commissioned by the Prince’s Trust, crime committed by unemployed youth costs the nation more than £7 billion a year.
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 prefer
ence 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.
