Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ Gordonstoun. In the journalist’s graphic description, Charles never understood close companionship between schoolboys or the mutual reliance that existed among friends. Immune to the social revolution of the sixties, he resented his peers for not appreciating or understanding him.

      At Cambridge he remained ‘the prince’, denying himself any relationship between equals. Nurtured to believe in his superiority, he became intolerant of criticism and refused to accept blame. Speaking to Dimbleby may have provided some therapy to relieve his demons, but by exposing his limited self-confidence he showed himself as self-destructive, thin-skinned and over-eager to find fault with others, especially his parents.

      As a young man, Charles had craved a spiritual guide. He found one in Laurens van der Post, the South African explorer, writer and somewhat eccentric philosopher. Employing mystical terms, van der Post offered the young Charles a voyage of self-discovery and a comfortable port by telling him that, despite his possibly limited time as king, he could prove his greatness as Prince of Wales. Inspired by van der Post’s lectures about African tribesmen, environmental pollution and the benefits of complementary medicine, Charles developed a ragbag of beliefs linking mysticism, divine powers, geometric measurements, orthodox Christianity and Islam.

      Dimbleby’s book revealed other impolitic principles. Previously, the public had been unaware that the heir to the throne was not a conventional Anglican. One single sentence threatened centuries of British stability. As monarch, Charles told Dimbleby, he would prefer to be ‘defender of faith rather than of The Faith’. The Church of England and constitutional experts alike were disturbed by his doubt about swearing the traditional coronation oath to protect the Protestant settlement of 1701. There were now not one but two religious objections to Charles succeeding.

      In Dimbleby’s television documentary, the aspiring king pleaded for understanding. ‘It’s not a holiday, you know,’ he said to camera. ‘It’s all so difficult … I can’t describe the horror of seeing your life set in concrete.’ Instead of offering himself as a visionary leader, he came across as a picture of harassed weakness. As he rambled on, with a series of eye-rolling expressions, grimaces and scowls, his audience was left perplexed. ‘Who are you?’ he was asked by a child in the documentary. ‘I wish I could remember,’ he had replied.

      In preparation for the programme, uppermost in the TV producers’ thoughts had been ‘the Camilla question’. The relationship had never been officially confirmed. After some discussion, Charles believed that a confession would ‘clear the decks’. Dimbleby’s enquiry about his marriage was straightforward: ‘You were, because of your relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, from the beginning persistently unfaithful to your wife and this caused the breakdown?’ Instead of briefly expressing his regret, Charles replied, ‘I was faithful until it was clear to me that my marriage had irretrievably broken down.’ He then admitted his adultery, denied that he was considering divorce, and insisted he would be king. Royalist newspapers proclaimed that Charles had ‘willingly cooperated in [his] own destruction’. The Sunday Times headline for its serialisation of Dimbleby’s book summarised its central message: ‘Charles: My Agony’.

      The public was aghast. Soon after publication he made a ceremonial return to Caernarvon, where twenty-five years earlier a global TV audience had watched his investiture as Prince of Wales. Just days after his televised confession, Charles drove through the town’s empty streets; local television did not interrupt its coverage of racing from Sandown Park.

      In hindsight, Dimbleby’s highlighting the facts about Charles’s marriage had in one way been a blessing, forcing the pace for his divorce. But while Charles may have settled the score, he had prepared the way for far-reaching repercussions that he could never have anticipated.

      The battle with Diana had revealed the woeful mismanagement of the royal family by the queen as well as by Charles’s senior advisers. The prince’s relationships with his private secretaries had always been fractious. Aylard, appointed in 1992, was his fourth in seven years. Edward Adeane had resigned in 1985 after a row about Charles’s uncontrollable love of controversy; John Riddell, a genial businessman who was appointed in 1985, laughed about the chicanery of courtiers and cursed the shambles of Charles’s lifestyle. ‘Every time I made the office work,’ Riddell observed, ‘the prince fucks it up again. He comes in, complains that his office is “useless” and people cannot spell and the world is so unfair, and then says, “This is part of the intolerable burden I put up with. This incompetence!”’ Such outbursts manifested the prince’s intolerance rather than a desire for perfection. After Riddell resigned five years into the job, Charles refused to award him the customary knighthood, an omission later rectified by the queen. ‘Charles would be fantastic as a second-hand-car salesman,’ Riddell told a colleague. ‘He has the right enthusiasm and conviction to sell. Then you remember he’s heir to the throne.’

      Riddell’s successor was Major General Christopher Airy, the former commander of the army’s London District. Airy was hired only after being vetted, at Charles’s request, by Jimmy Savile. The TV personality, dressed in a silver tracksuit and sporting gold bangles, had met the candidate in Kensington Palace. ‘My job,’ explained Savile, ‘is to persuade you not to take the job. That’s what Prince Charles has asked me to do.’ Airy was bewildered. How, he wondered, had Savile – posthumously exposed as a serial predatory paedophile – induced the royals to allow him to make unannounced visits to Kensington Palace and be invited to Charles’s fortieth birthday party? The prince had even sent Savile a box of Havana cigars – a gift from Fidel Castro – with a note: ‘Nobody will ever know what you’ve done for this country, Jimmy. This is to go some way in thanking you.’ On his second interview, Airy was told by Savile that his appointment had been approved – but to expect lengthy waits whenever summoned by Charles.

      The prince’s misjudgement about Savile coincided with his sympathy towards another sexual offender. He allowed Peter Ball, the Bishop of Lewes and Gloucester, to live in a property in Somerset provided by the Duchy of Cornwall despite the prelate’s admission that he had abused boys. The police, documents would later reveal, had cooperated with leaders of the Church of England, particularly George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to ‘prevent a scandal’, partly because Ball was ‘friendly with Prince Charles’. ‘I wish I could do more,’ Charles wrote to the paedophile in 1995, angry that Ball had not been re-appointed as bishop. ‘I feel so desperately strongly about the monstrous wrongs that have been done to you and the way you’ve been treated.’ Ball would be jailed in 2015.

      These shameless relationships were unfamiliar to Airy. Within a year of his appointment, the ceremonial guardsman was reprimanded for suggesting to Charles that a forthcoming and unwelcome visit was ‘your duty, sir’.

      ‘Duty is what you do!’ Charles shouted at him. ‘Duty is what I live – an intolerable burden.’

      Soon after, unaccustomed to his employer’s campaigns about poverty and his propensity for flying to hot climates for environmental summits, Airy was summarily fired – knifed, some speculated, by Aylard, his successor. Airy’s misery on his dismissal was later rekindled by gratuitously unpleasant comments about him in Jonathan Dimbleby’s book. Charles was a bad enemy. He carried grudges. That was the background to his disillusionment with Aylard. The fallout from the Dimbleby project exposed Aylard as hidebound by court procedure and unable to think outside the box. His lack of sympathy for new ideas increased the temptation for Charles to recruit Mark Bolland. He needed a saviour to relieve the agony of the previous fifteen years.

      Ever since 1981, when a billion people around the world had watched his marriage to Diana, the battle of the Waleses had aroused global fascination. The accepted story of a selfish and cruel older man betraying a beloved icon was, Charles believed, the product of mismanagement by his advisers, although Charles conceded that even the best spin doctors would have been overwhelmed by the revelations about his private life.

      Ken СКАЧАТЬ