Charles at Seventy

by Robert Jobson

  The most significant moment came on the first day of her visit, when she bowed her head in respect to those who died for Irish independence after laying a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin. After all, she had lost members of her family, too, not least her cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten and one of his twin grandsons, Nicholas (aged fourteen), and local boy Paul Maxwell (who was fifteen), who were killed when a bomb planted by the IRA exploded on their leisure boat in Mullaghmore, County Sligo, on 27 August 1979. Another passenger, Lady Brabourne, aged eighty-three, died the day after the attack. Only a handful of people know what was in the Queen’s mind that day, Charles probably among them, and it was a gesture that will be remembered for many decades by nationalist Ireland.

  Prince Charles was devoted to Lord Louis, one of the most influential figures in his early life, whom he has described as ‘the grandfather I’d never had’. On 20 May 2015, he made a pilgrimage to the spot overlooking the bay where his great-uncle was assassinated. A small cross atop the cliffs marks it now and, as the prince’s cavalcade drove up to the castle, it deliberately slowed down beside it, until it was almost stationary for the briefest of moments.

  Earlier, a wistful Charles had stood and gazed out across the Atlantic from the small Sligo village on Ireland’s west coast, where, thirty-six years earlier on a clear blue-sky day, the thunder of an explosion tore the perfect sky, shattered the calm and ripped the canvas from so many lives, including his. Surrounding him was a small knot of well-wishers and villagers for whom memories were also painful and vivid. ‘It’s been a long time,’ Charles whispered to one, talking of his long wait to visit the spot. ‘I never thought it would happen.’

  On that fateful day in 1979, despite security advice and warnings from the Garda, Lord Louis went lobster potting and tuna fishing in a wooden boat, the Shadow V. But, unbeknown to him or his family, IRA member Thomas McMahon had slipped onto the unguarded boat that night and attached a radio-controlled fifty-pound (23kg) bomb. The bomb had been detonated by remote control at 11.39 a.m., when the boat was about two hundred yards from the harbour.

  The IRA quickly admitted carrying out the bombing, saying it was designed to ‘bring to the attention of the English people the continuing occupation of our country’. At the time of the explosion, McMahon, then thirty-one, was seventy miles away, in police custody; by chance he and a second man, gravedigger Francis McGirl, then aged twenty four, had been stopped at a checkpoint after he had laid the explosive. But McMahon had flakes of green paint from Lord Mountbatten’s boat and traces of nitroglycerine on his clothes. He and McGirl were charged.

  Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin said of Mountbatten’s death at the time, ‘The IRA gave clear reasons for the execution. I think it is unfortunate that anyone has to be killed, but the furore created by Mountbatten’s death showed up the hypocritical attitude of the media establishment.’

  Adams went on, ‘As a member of the House of Lords, Mountbatten was an emotional figure in both British and Irish politics. What the IRA did to him is what Mountbatten had been doing all his life to other people; and with his war record I don’t think he could have objected to dying in what was clearly a war situation. He knew the danger involved in coming to this country. In my opinion, the IRA achieved its objective: people started paying attention to what was happening in Ireland.’ There was insufficient evidence to place McGirl at the fishing village of Mullaghmore; he was acquitted and he died in 1995. McMahon was released from jail in August 1998 as part of the Good Friday peace agreement.

  At the Pier Head Hotel, where on that dreadful day the dead and injured had been brought on makeshift stretchers, local people gathered to greet Charles and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, who visited on 20 May 2015. Among those there was Peter McHugh, who helped pull the bodies from the sea and who described to Charles the events of that day. ‘I didn’t want to be too sombre. I just gave him the briefest outline of what happened,’ he said. Timothy Knatchbull, Mountbatten’s grandson, who was badly injured in the blast, guided Charles’s gaze out to where the boat had set off on its fateful trip that morning. Knatchbull has since been vocal in applauding the reconciliation process, having found his own path to ‘forgiveness and peace’.

  The other child victim, schoolboy Paul Maxwell, had been on holiday from Enniskillen and was earning pocket money as a boat hand. His father, John, a teacher, had to steel himself to attend the royal visit, but did so, saying it was the right thing to do. For Paul’s mother, Mary Hornsey, it was her first time in Mullaghmore since the day of her son’s death, but she had accepted the invitation to meet the prince on a visit she said was ‘extending the hand of forgiveness’.

  Richard Wood-Martin, who with his wife Elizabeth was in a boat behind Mountbatten’s, recalled how they pulled Timothy Knatchbull from the sea: ‘There was a puff of smoke, a loud bang, a shower of bits of timber and the boat was gone. One person was blown to the left and it was Timothy. I managed to pull him into the boat. He was facedown in the water.’

  Understandably, Charles was profoundly affected by the murder of his beloved mentor and great-uncle, Mountbatten. At the time he said that it ‘made me want to die too’. To this day, as in many during the quieter, solitary moments, he talks to his departed loved ones and in that way keeps Mountbatten and many other dearly departed spirits alive in his heart. In many ways his death has contributed to Charles’s fatalistic attitude towards his own mortality. On Australia Day of 1994 in Tumbalong Park, Sydney, when protester David Kang, then twenty-three, stormed a stage and fired two blank shots at Prince Charles, he was about to deliver a keynote speech. I was among the reporters who were there that day and watched the drama unfold. After Charles’s PPO had checked that the attacker was on the ground he secured the prince, who remained cool, if a little bemused, throughout.

  ‘Suddenly a man leapt out of the crowd to the right and started running flat out towards the dais, firing a pistol as he ran,’ he recalled. Of course, the gun proved to be a starting pistol. Later, Charles even joked about the incident. Turning to an aide, he recounted an anecdote about how he was charged by a bull elephant while in Kenya. He said the African encounter was far more frightening.

  A few years later, on 8 November 2001, I was inches away from another serious incident when the prince was attacked by a young person, later identified as sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Alina Lebedeva, who slapped him around the face with a flower during a walkabout in a protest over NATO’S involvement in bombing raids in Afghanistan. He later privately joked about returning home with facial scars from a ‘crazed assault by a carnation-wielding, adolescent Latvian Bolshevik’ that he admitted ‘frightened me rigid’ (she was a Latvian Communist of Russian ethnicity). The poor Latvians, Charles said, were mortified by this incident. The prince pleaded for her to be treated leniently and she was spared prison but sentenced to a year of educational measures by a court. He applauds the great strides former Communist countries have made towards freedom with some help from the UK, although he remains sceptical about how so many former Communists in all these countries suddenly succeed in becoming the wealthiest businesspeople and yet do not seem to be prepared to take any corporate responsibility for providing social assistance within the community. Not a fan of the system, he says it shows how ‘crooked’ the whole system was in the past.

  His view on his own personal security is that he has to leave it to the professionals who surround him and just get on with his job. If advised not to do something, he will always take that advice, but he is not going to hide away. He once famously said to reporters during a reception trip in Spain, ‘There is nothing you can do if your name is on the bullet.’

  Mountbatten was paramount in his development from boy to man in almost every area. They wrote long and meaningful letters to one another, and the urbane Louis became his most trusted mentor, filling the void left by Charles’s more complicated relationship with his father, Prince Philip, Mountbatten’s nephew. There was nothing he couldn’t share with
Mountbatten, from affairs of the heart to advice on matters of state to his military career, that the old man didn’t seem to have a handle on. Mountbatten had always been there for him, just like his beloved grandmother, the Queen Mother. When the IRA detonated that deadly bomb it robbed the future king of his wisest adviser. He was lost without him.

  ‘At the time I could not imagine how we would come to terms with the anguish of such a deep loss,’ Prince Charles told an audience in the nearby town of Sligo before the visit. ‘Through this dreadful experience I now understand in a profound way the agonies borne by others on these islands of whatever faith or political persuasion.’

  This following year, 2018, Charles and Camilla were on the Emerald Isle once again flying into Cork Airport on 14 June for a three-day visit. Following in the footsteps of Charles’s great-great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, the couple undertook visits to Derrynane, Tralee and Killarney in County Kerry.

  The freedom they both felt was clear. Camilla, ever aware of a picture opportunity for the loyal photographers who follow her, felt the sand beneath her feet when she joined her husband on a Kerry beach to highlight the problem of plastic pollution. She removed her heels when the couple walked onto Derrynane strand. There, they learned about the work of local schoolchildren collecting waste from the shore. Charles told his wife, ‘You’ll get sand in your shoes’ when she later slipped them back on. She certainly didn’t seem to let it bother her. Before getting into a helicopter, which had brought the royals to the southwest Irish coastline, she could be seen shaking the sand from her footwear. From there, the couple moved on to Derrynane House, the home of the nineteenth-century campaigner for Irish rights, Daniel O’Connell, taking a guided tour through the rooms where the man, known as ‘the Liberator’, lived and worked. O’Connell, who was born in the late eighteenth century, campaigned for Catholic emancipation, including the right to sit as MPs at Westminster.

  Their last stop was a visit to Siamsa Tire, Ireland’s National Folk Theatre, in Tralee, and a garden party at Killarney House. Queen Victoria stayed at the original Killarney House during her visit to Ireland in 1861. In neighbouring Cork, where they had dinner with Deputy Prime Minister Simon Coveney, Charles again paid tribute to Anglo-Irish relations that had made such a visit even possible.

  ‘Our countries have travelled a troubled road together, but, with reconciliation and understanding as our guide, we have found a very important new path to share prosperity and security and together we are determined we must never lose our way again,’ the prince told guests at the dinner at Crawford Art Gallery.

  Louis Mountbatten will forever live in Prince Charles’s heart and soul. And one could see the joy in his face at the christening of his grandson Prince Louis, so named in honour of Mountbatten, during the summer. Her Majesty’s years and remarkably busy schedule meant that, by mutual consent, she did not attend Louis’s christening by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, on 9 July in the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, leaving Charles in the role of patriarch.

  But the ninety-two-year-old monarch poignantly retained a place in an intimate family portrait taken in the Morning Room at Clarence House, watching over the next generation of her family. The oil-on-canvas portrait of the Queen, by Michael Noakes between 1972 and 1973, appears to have been raised several inches up the wall from its previous position to ensure its visibility in the official picture by photographer Matt Holyoak. Below her, gathered together for the first time, were the faces of those who will carry the baton for decades, including one cradled in his mother’s arms bearing the same name as his grandfather’s most trusted confidant.

  Chapter Fourteen

  FUTURE HEAD OF THE

  COMMONWEALTH

  ‘I am deeply touched and honoured by the decision of Commonwealth Heads of State and Government that I should succeed the Queen, in due course, as Head of the Commonwealth.’

  HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES, 20 APRIL 2018

  The Prince of Wales is an avid listener to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. When his son Harry guest-edited the flagship news show on 27 December 2017, Charles was given time to expound on climate change. Charles himself had been offered the chance to guest edit the show but, when his publicity-hungry younger son heard about it, he suddenly revived earlier interest in doing the gig. Harry had been offered to edit and appear in the show some months earlier but had done precious little about it. His father magnanimously withdrew to avoid any conflict. Perhaps as a compromise, Harry then invited his father to be one of his interviewees, along with former US president Barack Obama.

  The prince took full advantage of the media platform given to his ‘darling boy’ (as he referred to Harry on air) with aplomb. He remained light-hearted throughout and joked that he was relieved people were finally waking up to his ‘dotty’ opinions on climate change. The pair joked, too, about the influence of Charles’s opinions on his son, with the Prince of Wales saying it was ‘amazing’ that Harry had listened to him at all. The two royals agreed the biggest issue facing the world was climate change and the havoc it was wreaking.

  ‘There’s a whole lot of things I’ve tried to focus on over all these years,’ said Charles, ‘that I felt needed attention. Not everybody else did but maybe now, some years later, they’re beginning to realise that what I was trying to say may not have been quite as dotty as they thought. But the issue really that has to go on being focused on big time is this one around the whole issue of climate change, which now, whether we like it or not, is the biggest threat multiplier we face.’

  Harry told his father there was ‘so much hope’ among the younger generation about what could be done to combat the problem and many of the solutions already existed. ‘The future lies in working in far greater harmony with nature and trying to make sure our own economy mimics nature’s economy,’ Charles said.

  It had been a great success, an excellent platform for both the enthusiastic Harry and his father and great coup for my old Evening Standard editor and the new editor of Today, Sarah Sands. Recently, the BBC was not quite so accommodating or generous. A few weeks later, in February 2018, a so-called BBC exclusive ‘revealed’ what many, including me, had long known: that the Commonwealth had secretly begun to consider who might succeed the Queen as its next head. Charles was far from a shoo-in, it gleefully reported, and the BBC claimed its reporters had seen documents to prove it.

  Worse still, soi-disant pundits on BBC’s Today wrongly claimed that Prince Charles was not all that keen on the job anyway and that the Commonwealth didn’t mean as much to him as it did to his mother. It was enough to make him choke on his wholemeal organic muesli and he was understandably furious.

  In actual fact, Charles has been a vocal and active supporter of the Commonwealth for more than forty years – albeit in the shadow of his mother. But the Queen hasn’t carried out long-haul flights for several years and now it is Charles, supported by his sons and siblings, who do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to overseas Commonwealth visits. As I discovered in my lengthy conversation with him on the royal flight back from Vanuatu to Australia, he is deeply passionate about the organisation that represents 2.3 billion people and fifty-three nations – a third of the world’s population. ‘I have long had an instinctive sense of the value of the Commonwealth,’ he said, and has spoken of the ‘pivotal role’ the Commonwealth has to play in safeguarding our planet.

  This was the kind of vision and leadership expected of a future head of the Commonwealth, stressing that its leaders must listen to the views of the next generation in London the following April at the CHOGM. Charles shows his support through official visits, military links, charitable activities and other special events. In April 2018 in Brisbane he opened the highly successful Commonwealth Games and then toured Australia before flying back for the Commonwealth summit in London and Windsor.

  Since 1969, the prince has visited forty-four Commonwealth countries. Most recently, he has led the charge for member island states tha
t face being wiped out by a rise in sea levels with his Blue Economy initiative. In growing the Blue Economy, he hopes to combat poverty and accelerate prosperity in these under-threat regions. But still some say he is not passionate. The problem for the monarchy is that the position of head is not enshrined in the constitution. It is symbolic, with no formal powers. The Queen has been working hard in private to ensure the Prince of Wales succeeds her as head of the Commonwealth. It is a responsibility she says she has cherished – but it is not one that her son and heir would inherit automatically.

  The BBC was right to discuss the matter but it was also stirring the pot ahead of the CHOGM. It was true, prior to a formal decision on who would be the next head of the organisation, that the prince was by no means assured of securing the position. He was always going to rely on Commonwealth leaders giving him their formal blessing and wanting him to replace his mother. That said, there was little doubt, after years of distinguished service, that there were few better qualified for the albeit titular role.

  On 20 April, Charles took another step closer to the chalice when Commonwealth leaders backed the Queen’s ‘sincere wish’ to recognise that her heir, the Prince of Wales, would one day succeed her as the next Head of Commonwealth. Theresa May, the British prime minister, announced the decision from the fifty-three Commonwealth Heads of Government after private deliberations at Windsor Castle, where Commonwealth leaders said they had reached an agreement to honour Her Majesty’s ‘vision, duty and steadfast service’ to the institution.

  Speaking at a press conference after the retreat, Mrs May said that the Commonwealth itself exists in ‘no small measure because of the vision, duty and steadfast service of Her Majesty in nurturing the growth of this remarkable family of nations. On behalf of all our citizens I want to express gratitude for everything Her Majesty has done and will continue to do,’ she said.