Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail. Tom Bower
could not halt the opprobrium that was threatening Charles. On a personal level, one salvation was the spiritualism of the poet Kathleen Raine, who had been introduced to Charles by Laurens van der Post. Listening to the prince’s laments about his isolation under siege and his forlorn search for meaning, this unusual woman, who lived an unorthodox life in London and was forty years his senior, offered comfort over cups of tea in her Chelsea house. ‘She was always there for me because above all she understood what I was about,’ Charles explained, voicing his attachment to much older people, ‘and that was a profound comfort in an age of growing misunderstanding and almost deliberate ignorance.’
Raine urged Charles to disregard his critics: ‘Dear, dear Prince, don’t give that riff-raff an inch of ground, not a hair’s breadth; stand firm on the holy ground of the heart. The only way to deal with the evil forces of their world is from a higher level, not to meet them on their own.’
Raine’s spiritualism, based upon what she called ‘prayer in action’, the worship of the sacred nature of all life, art and wisdom, buttressed Charles’s sense of superiority. In his vision of himself as the protagonist in his own tragedy, and freed from any sense of shame, Charles adopted a formula for survival taught at the Temenos Academy, a charity of which Raine was one of the founders, that divided faith into metaphysics, mysticism and visionary imagination. Casting himself as the exceptional hero, Charles later explained his bravery in a eulogy he delivered at Raine’s memorial service: ‘I had put my head above the parapet and, yet again, the shells and bullets had been exploding all around me … The world seemed to be periodically madder and the powers of darkness – as Kathleen described them – closed in. She did her utmost to reawaken an Albion sunk in deadly sleep.’ Feeding his self-indulgence, Raine wrote: ‘How my heart rejoices that you have mounted that chariot. The chariot of fire between two armies. This is the great battle and where would you, our prince, rather be than in that chariot?’ Most sane fifty-year-old men would have ridiculed Raine’s inflated rhetoric, but Charles inhaled her words like oxygen.
To survive in the real world, he needed to ignore the risks and make himself visible. Four weeks after Diana’s death, he agreed with some trepidation to visit a Salvation Army centre in Manchester. He arrived with a speech drafted by Downing Street’s best spin masters, including Peter Mandelson, but then set it aside. Instead, he spoke with unscripted passion to a group of curious spectators. Repeatedly telling them how ‘enormously grateful and touched both the boys and myself have been’, he was at his best. The media coverage described a loving father of two adored sons speaking from the heart about their grief and grateful for the public’s support.
This sympathetic press coverage persuaded Charles to take the thirteen-year-old Harry – who was on safari in Botswana with Geoffrey Kent to alleviate his misery – on a trip to South Africa arranged months earlier by the Foreign Office to meet Nelson Mandela.
‘Speak to the media and be friendly,’ Mark Bolland advised Charles.
He also told Robert Higdon, ‘He wants to raise money while he’s there.’
‘You’re mad,’ replied Higdon, ‘but I’ll try.’
Higdon approached Mary Oppenheimer, scion of the diamond-mining family, to host a dinner for thirty people, including a number of South Africa’s billionaires, prepared to contribute to Charles’s Global Foundation. ‘It was always about money,’ recalled Higdon, who was delighted by the event’s success and by Charles’s praise. Some years later, he revised his opinion: ‘The atmosphere to extract donations from the guests was very awkward.’
Media coverage of Diana’s son happily meeting South Africa’s hero, who had also invited the Spice Girls, liberated Charles. On the return flight to Britain, he offered journalists his new manifesto: ‘Tradition is a living thing but to be so it has to be made contemporary in each generation. That is always the great challenge.’ A few days later, a South African friend of Charles’s wrote reporting Mandela’s admiration of him. ‘How wonderful,’ he replied. ‘Why do foreigners praise me but my countrymen never share that feeling?’
He believed that Peter Mandelson could provide the solution. Their relationship had strengthened in the weeks after Diana’s death. Reflecting on Mandelson’s recent defeat in elections to the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, Charles commiserated: ‘It only goes to show, I suppose, what a ghastly, cut-throat business politics is. The throwing of knives into other people’s backs seems to be a pretty prevalent blood sport and it is not a pretty sight. But then, you would perhaps expect the representative of an “outmoded” hereditary organisation to make such an observation.’ He added that he wrote as ‘a person who, despite the inevitable outer carapace which has to be worn to confront the world, nevertheless has a rather vulnerable and sensitive inner core’.
Mandelson was an obvious guest for one of Charles’s ‘culture weekends’ at Sandringham that autumn. Others invited (the guest lists for many of these weekends were orchestrated by the philanthropist Drue Heinz) included Tate director Nicholas Serota, novelist Angela Huth, barrister Ann Mallalieu, Leo Rothschild and Stephen Fry. Clever, funny and endlessly flattering, Fry had an erudite wit that delighted Charles. ‘No one complains on his deathbed,’ Fry told the guests, ‘“Oh God, I wish I had spent more time in the office.”’
‘You’ll need black tie and white tie, clothes for walking,’ one guest was advised. Asked about attending church on Sunday, the official replied, ‘There’s no obligation to go, but if you don’t you’ll be ignored during the following lunch.’
All of this was in the spirit of the royal family. Sandringham formality had been inherited by the queen from her father and grandparents – even on Christmas Day she expected perfect behaviour from her grandchildren. Charles’s literary weekends were no different. Although he had not engaged with intellectuals during his time as a student at Cambridge, he enjoyed their company. ‘Of course, I know very little about this,’ he would say in a self-deprecating manner after mentioning paintings he had bought by little-known artists. His guests would depart on the Monday morning with a sense of privilege and memories of a remarkable performance by their host.
Charles had remained silent about Camilla’s absence. She was, he knew, suffering under the strain. ‘She’s a wreck,’ he told a friend, and half-joked to Bolland that in the past he would have been sent into exile and Camilla committed to a dungeon. All he wanted, he told those whom he regularly telephoned, now including Mandelson, was the chance to go out in public with the woman he loved.
By Christmas, the worst was over. The trip to South Africa had placated some critics. In one poll, 61 per cent of those who responded said they were satisfied with Charles, compared to 46 per cent before Diana’s death and that 4 per cent immediately after. The dissatisfaction rate had fallen from 42 to 29 per cent. These figures restored some sense of Charles being master of his destiny. His advisers spoke about rebuilding his reputation after a doomed decade. In the new era, he anticipated that an open relationship with Camilla would be possible, despite other polls that showed about 90 per cent of Britons still opposed their marriage.
One obstacle was Robert Fellowes. In a court corroded by inertia, he and the queen were struggling to estimate the damage caused by the ten-year crisis. Neither Charles nor Camilla saw any possibility of a normal life together unless the queen approved, and that was impossible until Fellowes was no longer there to advise her.
Charles’s machine went into action. The poison was planted in the Mail on Sunday. On 2 November 1997 the newspaper published an attack under the headline ‘Another Royal Farce … Carry On Sir Robert’. The article, by Peter Dobbie, a regular columnist, accused Fellowes of being prejudiced against Charles for wanting to live with Camilla. Worse, he was accused of being ‘a joke’ who ‘evokes loathing’ for having been ‘one of the prime instruments in the destruction of the monarchy’s public esteem’. Fellowes was singled out for blame for the ‘public perception of uncaring, dysfunctional senior Royals’ after Diana’s death. Dobbie ended with the knife-twist: ‘By staying on he can only perpetuate his views of outdated incompetence born of arrogant indifference.’
‘Robert’s been stuffed by Bolland’ was the word around