Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail. Tom Bower
signed ‘Yours ever, Tony.’ Lamport called Downing Street to stipulate that in future Charles wanted Blair’s letters to start ‘Sir’ and to end ‘Your obedient servant’. The prime minister’s private secretary replied that he refused to ask his master to change his style. Blair’s ignorance of the required etiquette extended to an invitation from Downing Street for Diana and her sons to spend a day at Chequers. Charles was not informed, which he complained was a breach of protocol.
When on 1 July 1997 Charles met Blair in Hong Kong for the former British colony’s handover to China, he put such lapses to one side. Instead, in a journal he wrote soon after, he praised Blair as ‘a most enjoyable person to talk to – perhaps partly due to his being younger than me!’ The prince found it ‘astounding’ that the prime minister listened to him, but he was critical of Blair’s ‘introspection, cynicism and criticism [which] seem to be the order of the day. Clearly he recognised the need to find ways of overcoming the apathy and loss of self-belief, to find a fresh national direction.’ As a traditionalist, Charles also disliked New Labour’s use of focus groups and reliance on untested advisers: ‘They take decisions based on market research or focus groups, or papers produced by political advisers or civil servants, none of whom will ever have experienced what it is they are taking decisions about.’ Charles did not consider that the same could be said about him.
He had arrived in Hong Kong in a bad mood, having been forced to fly Club Class in the chartered British Airways plane because government ministers had grabbed all the first-class seats. ‘It took me some time to realise,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘that this was not first class (!) although it puzzled me as to why the seat seemed so uncomfortable. Such is the end of Empire, I sighed to myself.’ He added a lament about his family’s last use of the royal yacht Britannia before it was scrapped. Without those perks and privileges, he feared, his status was diminished.
Blighted by monsoon rain, the ceremony in Hong Kong was dire. In his private journal, headed ‘The Handover of Hong Kong or The Great Chinese Takeaway’, Charles was scathing about the Chinese leaders, in his view ‘appalling old waxworks’. Sympathetic to the Tibetans, he regarded Beijing’s rulers as ‘corrupt’, and ridiculed the People’s Liberation Army for an ‘awful Soviet-style display’ of goose-stepping. Wind generators, he noticed, were employed to enable the Chinese flags to ‘flutter enticingly’. Charles appeared unaware that his host, President Jiang Zemin, was the architect of the phenomenal economic growth that had tripled China’s average wages in fifteen years and was transforming the country into a global power.
Blair would have sympathised with Charles’s mockery. His own meetings with the Communist Party chiefs were disappointing. By contrast with the prime minister’s tactful concealment of his true feelings, his pugnacious spokesman Alastair Campbell was uncharacteristically generous towards Charles during the visit, summing him up as ‘a fairly decent bloke, surrounded by a lot of nonsense and people best described as from another age’. Campbell astutely added that there was ‘something sad about him. All his life, even on the big issues, he had to make small talk, surrounded by luxury, as here, people fawning on him, and yet somehow obviously unfulfilled,’ and with his ‘private life a mess’.
Campbell was unaware of the full scope of Charles’s arrangements during the visit. The prince never travelled without Michael Fawcett. Dressed as a perfect gentleman in an Anderson & Sheppard suit with a silk handkerchief in the breast pocket, a Turnbull & Asser shirt and a silk tie, Fawcett flattered his employer by adopting his style and mannerisms, fashioning himself as Charles’s doppelganger, even furnishing his home with items purchased from the prince’s suppliers.
With a love of grandeur and extravagance similar to his master’s, he was skilled at satisfying Charles’s expectations, and set himself to provide the luxury Charles demanded day and night. Every morning, wherever he travelled, the prince was woken by Fawcett who ran his bath and laid out his clothes – matching suit with shirt, socks, tie, handkerchief and highly-polished shoes – all carefully folded between tissue paper for the journey. Every night Fawcett prepared Charles’s bedroom with masterly attention to detail. With familiarity spawned by living close to his employer since 1981, he could anticipate his employer’s requests without any order being issued. He would discreetly replenish the royal lavatory paper, clean up vomit, wash the royal boxer shorts by hand (salacious gossips on the Sun credited Fawcett with revealing that Charles’s underwear had to be specially adapted because he was so well endowed), guarded his liaisons, bowed to his tantrums, tested the royal boiled eggs and always spoke in deferential tones. At each of Charles’s homes he supervised every detail, ensuring that the gravel on the drive was raked, the paintings hanging precisely, the cushions properly positioned, the kitchens supplied with organic food from the prince’s favourite suppliers, the elaborate flower arrangements refreshed daily, and the dining table covered with the appropriate linen tablecloth, silver cutlery and candlesticks.
Some of those who witnessed Fawcett’s outbursts of fury when he spotted an error considered him a thug, but Charles embraced this one servant who, in his eyes, could do no wrong. Most royals have a weakness for a special retainer. The queen’s was Angela Kelly, her personal assistant; Queen Victoria’s her beloved attendant John Brown. Charles would confess, ‘I can manage without just about anyone except Michael.’ Operating like a general, Fawcett was given the keys to the front and back doors of Charles’s homes – and control over his life.
Shortly before leaving for Hong Kong, Fawcett was told about an important dinner party that would be hosted by his master during the trip. Charles was focusing on his charities, for which he hoped to raise money from American billionaires. ‘Show your good side,’ said Mark Bolland. Searching for a new fundraiser, the prince asked Geoffrey Kent for a recommendation. Kent had heard about Robert Higdon from Alecko Papamarkou, a Greek banker. At the time Higdon was accompanying Margaret Thatcher on her speaking engagements, having been recruited by Thatcher’s son Mark, who knew of the American’s successful work for Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
In July 1995, Colin Amory, an architect and sometime adviser to Charles, invited Higdon to meet him and Geoffrey Kent at Claridge’s. Higdon arrived with the billionaire American publisher Kip Forbes, who was said to have first met him in a Red Lobster restaurant in Florida. Over a drink, Amory and Kent told Higdon that the Prince of Wales’s Foundation in America, which had been created two years earlier, needed a professional fundraiser.
‘I have met Charles,’ said Higdon, ‘when he and Diana came to the White House to meet the Reagans.’
Soon after, Kent asked Higdon as a trial to arrange a dinner with potential donors.
‘What’s your platform?’ asked Higdon.
‘The Prince of Wales’s interest in architecture,’ replied Kent.
‘No one’s interested in that over here,’ said the American bluntly. ‘I raised money for the Frick, but for the prince there’s nothing to discuss.’
Kent managed to overcome Higdon’s objections, and a dinner party was arranged in New York for people who had previously ‘written a cheque for Charles’. To Higdon’s surprise, 150 people accepted the invitation, including members of the Rockefeller family, and the event was reported in the city newspapers’ society columns. ‘I raised about £75,000,’ said Higdon. ‘I was the money whore.’
Delighted by the evening’s success, Charles asked Kent to sign up the American for further fundraising. ‘I’d need to meet Charles again,’ replied Higdon. Before long he was in the prince’s office at St James’s Palace. ‘We chatted as long-lost friends,’ said Higdon. With Lamport sitting in, ‘I bluntly told Charles what would and wouldn’t work.’
Lamport interrupted: ‘You cannot speak to His Royal Highness like that.’
‘Lamport didn’t like me or want me to help,’ Higdon concluded, ‘but Charles trusted me.’
In January 1997 Charles formally asked Higdon to run his foundation under Kent’s chairmanship. Within weeks the new recruit encountered obstruction: ‘The gatekeepers wouldn’t let me speak to Charles. Fawcett and others were fighting against me. I saw no good.’ Eventually