The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

by Penny Junor

  TWENTY-NINE

  A Thankless Task

  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.

  THIRTY

  Changing the World

  I have every sympathy with the poor man’s situation. The Prince’s life is extremely hard to fathom even today, when his interests and organizations have been rationalized; at that time everything was much less professional. He has sixteen core charities which focus on seven main areas – youth opportunity, health, education, responsible business, the natural environment, the built environment, and the arts – so there is a bit of overlapping. It is a massive enterprise, collectively the largest multi-cause charitable enterprise in the country, and he appears to take an active interest in all of them. Then he is patron or president of another 350 charities, for which he raises money and attends functions, and nominal patron – on the letterhead but otherwise scarcely involved apart from writing messages of support and so on – of a further 252 groups. One wonders when he ever gets any sleep – and to listen to those who run his charities, they sometimes think he doesn’t. The black spider memos go out 365 days of the year – even on Christmas Day; the phone calls arrive at all hours of the day or night – the later ones are usually when he’s in another time zone or when he has met some fascinating character over dinner who he thinks would be good to harness.

  His involvement with BITC took him to Boston in 1986 – a lot of the models on which the charities’ inner-city work was based were American – but fundamentally the focus of his core charities has always been British-based, with the exception of one. The Prince of Wales International Business Leaders’ Forum (since shortened simply to IBLF, International Business Leaders’ Forum) which he founded in 1990 as an offshoot of BITC, along with a group of international CEOs worried about the impact of unbridled capitalism in the emerging markets of the world. The aim was to promote good business practice in sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and most importantly, the engagement of business as a positive contributor to economic and social development around the world. For all his faults and foibles, the Prince has managed to attract and keep a number of remarkably dynamic, genuine and unsycophantic people over the years, and the man who runs IBLF, Robert Davies, is one of them. Davies was Stephen O’Brien’s deputy at BITC and had already worked with the Prince for seven years; now it’s more than twenty. ‘The only reason twenty years on I am still engaged in it in this way is that he is a very unusual person,’ says Davies. ‘He is someone who has a set of values, an unusual way of thinking, a most bizarre willingness to take risks, to back you on risks and shelter you from all sorts of organizations that would otherwise conspire to prevent you taking those risks.’ The Foreign Office, for one, was very hostile for the first two years – thought they were amateurs meddling and could undermine British interests; then it accepted IBLF, now it is so enthusiastic that ambassadors around the world call often on the charity for help in their new development and CSR agendas. The World Bank didn’t want to know at first, neither did the United Nations – both of which the Forum now works with and both of which now recognize it as one of the leading organizations in this area. Not long ago IBLF’s policy director, Jane Nelson, was seconded to work in Kofi Annan’s office and IBLF wrote the UN’s first ever policy on Partnerships with Business.

  At the end of its first year, the Forum had five staff, five member companies, a small office in an attic in the City of London and a turnover of less than £200,000. Today it has smart offices in Regent’s Park, staff of forty plus, seventy member companies, over 70 per cent from overseas, works in fifty countries and has a turnover of about £4 million. It rarely uses its own name or sets up branches, preferring to develop locally owned initiatives, never gives money, only more valuable know-how, it uses its unique convening power, and only ever works in partnership with others, often building the capacity of local partners. ‘Many of these stem from the founding values of local sustainability of the Prince,’ says Davies, ‘even though it results in a lower profile for the organization.’ Right now it is working with the World Health Organization to try and get the food and drinks multinationals together to combat the global epidemic of obesity. In 2002 more people died from overeating than undereating in all parts of the world except sub-Saharan Africa; by 2020 the prediction is that obesity will be the largest cause of death from non-communicable disease. It was IBLF that instigated the debate on environmentally sustainable tourism – and brought the hotel industries together to find solutions there. Robert Davies explains how

  Our ability to win trust to get competitors to work together is a precious part of our franchise. The Prince is very involved. We speak once every three weeks and there’s an endless stream of notes. On most of his foreign trips, three or four times a year, he does something for us – some privately, some publicly. He is very influential. We’ve loaned someone to the prime minister’s office in Bulgaria to help him sort things out and the Prince single-handedly helped arrange that. Working with people who can be very influential is valuable but you can’t sustain things on that basis. Our reputation is not just for talking about things but for doing things. Across Eastern Europe we’ve got about a thousand companies working together on enterprise and education pro
grammes, we’ve set up a careers service in the Czech Republic, we’ve taught the Hungarians how to restructure their coal and steel closure towns, we’ve helped bring management skills into the arts in Russia and we’re now working with the Russians on corporate governance.

  After Boxing Day 2004 the phone calls and black spiders went into overdrive when, following the tsunami disaster around the Indian Ocean, the Prince and Robert Davies were in contact across the Atlantic almost every day for the next ten days in helping mobilize and engage the hotel industry and other corporate industry leaders in the relief and recovery effort where the IBLF had local presence. In the first week IBLF members had committed over $40 million and were actively involved in relief logistics, water purification, medical aid and coastal village recovery, as well as rescue in the hotel properties belonging to IBLF members, some of whom lost hundreds of guests and staff in the disaster.

  His charitable life has not only become the central part of what he does in his role as Prince of Wales, it has also become a major industry. The Prince scarcely hiccups these days without raising money for the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation. Visitors to his garden – of which there are 20,000 a year – even the Prince’s dinner guests in Gloucestershire find themselves in the Highgrove shop, classy wicker basket in hand, shelling out for delights such as jams and marmalade, chocolates and biscuits, fudge and fancy oils – all adorned with Prince of Wales feathers – before they feel able to return to their cars. Last year the shop raised nearly £90,000 from such unsuspecting visitors to Highgrove.