‘You must be quite mad,’ exclaimed the queen. ‘Work for Charles?’ After a brief silence, the monarch’s evident surprise disappeared. ‘Well …’
When she found herself under pressure, she rarely uttered more than a few words, and in this case she appeared to resign herself to the news. The audience in the sitting room in Buckingham Palace was over. Malcolm Ross, the comptroller in the lord chamberlain’s office, took his leave. The queen would customarily give a parting smile, a gesture that many in Buckingham Palace treasured, but on this occasion it was absent.
The summons to Ross had come not from the queen but from her eldest son, in a late-night telephone call. ‘I need you,’ said the Prince of Wales. Ross’s protests were brushed aside: ‘No, I need you,’ repeated the pained voice. He wanted Ross to be his master of the household. As Charles well knew, a royal command was rarely ignored. Over the years he had enticed some of the cleverest and richest of his kingdom to serve him; some had been bruised by the experience but departed in silence, others remained loyal but critical. An important minority, mostly women, were permanently devoted. Ross accepted the job out of duty, and because he expected to forge a good relationship with Michael Peat. His confidence was misplaced. Within a short time he became alarmed by Peat’s denigration of the queen’s staff as ‘dinosaurs’ and ‘old has-beens’. Shaped by his eighteen years’ service in Buckingham Palace, Ross had anticipated personal support from Charles. Instead he became isolated.
Peat had proved himself to be a talented financial manager. In 2005 the Duchy of Cornwall made a record £14 million in profits. The following year he could quietly boast that Charles’s personal income had risen to £15.1 million, and in 2007 to £16.3 million. During 2007 Charles’s advisers sold most of his shares before the stock market crash, and also sold commercial property at the top of the market. Since the duchy did not pay capital gains tax, its value had risen to £647 million. With more income, Charles could increase his staff to 146, including nine media specialists, eleven gardeners at Highgrove and over thirty employees to support his private secretaries.
To minimise his own achievement, Peat issued a statement in praise of Charles for costing the taxpayer just 3.5 pence per person every year. To placate the prince’s critics even further, he announced that he had given up polo for the sake of the environment (because he usually travelled to matches by helicopter). To economise on water Charles placed bricks in the lavatory cisterns of his homes, and as proof of his code of duty he had sent 2,247 letters, raised £110 million, £119 million and £122 million for his charities over the past three years (receiving about half from the taxpayer), and voluntarily paid £3.3 million in tax every year, rising to £4.2 million in 2006. The low tax rate reflected his deductible expenses of travel, his homes and staff.
Charles’s employees no longer included Peat’s former deputy Elizabeth Buchanan. Her departure was not associated with the prince’s ‘economising’: rather, her unconcealed hero-worship of Charles and her frequent appearances alongside him in photographs had infuriated Camilla.
Understandably, Peat omitted from his latest report the information that one trip on the royal train from Highgrove to Penrith simply to visit a pub had cost £18,916, and that Charles had spent £20,980 for a day trip by plane from Scotland to Lincolnshire to watch William receive his RAF wings. Such costs were food and drink to republican MPs. By contrast, the queen would travel by train to Sandringham at Christmas on First Capital Connect. Her ticket cost £50, instead of £15,000 had she taken a royal carriage.
To emphasise his employer’s benevolence, Peat produced another sixty-page brochure, the fifth in five years, illustrated with forty-three photographs of Charles and Camilla. The text celebrated the prince’s championship of his green agenda. ‘Our animals,’ the brochure revealed of the royal cattle, ‘release less methane because they have better feed and eat more grass.’ Peat also wrote: ‘Charles is the world’s most successful philanthropic entrepreneur.’ Clearly he had forgotten others, not least Bill Gates. But only Peat would have measured Charles’s achievements by mentioning that he had shaken more hands than in the previous year.
These presentations masked Charles’s continuing patchy understanding of finance. Always eager to increase the duchy’s income, especially from its investments, Peat occasionally summoned successful fund managers to explain the world’s economy to the prince. In 2007 he invited Ronnie Cohen, the creator of Apax, Britain’s largest private equity company, to meet Charles alongside Jacob Rothschild. Another guest, a respected economist, was invited to start the meeting with a ‘state of the world’ presentation.
‘What’s happening across the globe?’ asked Peat.
‘How long have I got?’
‘Five minutes,’ came the reply without a blink.
Five minutes later, Charles nodded. ‘Excellent,’ announced Peat. ‘Now,’ he asked Cohen, ‘what return do you get on your investments?’
‘About 11 or 12 per cent.’ Peat and Charles seemed impressed.
‘How much do you want to invest?’ continued Cohen.
‘£6 million,’ replied Peat. Charles smiled in agreement.
Cohen’s face fell. He dealt only in hundreds of millions.
At precisely 6 p.m., Peat gushed, ‘Your Highness, we have taken far too much of your time. I’m sure you have more important things to do.’ The three visitors departed with the impression that Charles had done them a favour by listening to their advice. In reality, he had little understanding of his own numerous and complex investments – not because of the limits of his education, but due to a lack of interest in matters he considered unspiritual.
Overall, the prince’s good intentions remained frustrated by disharmony. During the previous four years, Tom Shebbeare had struggled to assert control across his unruly empire. While assuring Charles that all was well, he encountered opposition from the charities’ directors to rebrand the corporate centre, or to accept any plan to save money. Supervision, he discovered, was difficult because the charities were similar to a federation, and ‘no one was in charge’. Because every charity was different, the chief executives resisted mergers of their administration. In 2006 Shebbeare began looking for a building to house all the charities at a low rent. Fred Goodwin told Charles that the Prince’s Trust could not afford to move. In a familiar pattern, the prince accepted this, and so the cost-saving scheme was abandoned.
The following year, Charles created a new crisis. During a dinner at Windsor Castle he was told about the fate of Dumfries House, a Palladian mansion in Ayrshire, designed in the 1750s by John and Robert Adam. The building, partly boarded up, its gardens overgrown, was located in a coalfield far from any desired destination and without a view. For two hundred years it had been in the possession of the Marquesses of Bute, but the family was about to sell up to a local hotelier and auction its unique collection of early Chippendale furniture at Christie’s.
For Charles, the house and its effects were an opportunity to prove that heritage projects could transform a derelict area. Although he had never visited the mansion, and his charities did not have sufficient money for the purchase, he invited the marquess to Clarence House to negotiate a deal.
Michael Peat was under pressure from Charles to buy the house and its furniture. The original valuation of £25 million, he knew, reflected the inflated levels of the property boom. In normal circumstances, even under orders to buy, he might have advised Charles to resist the temptation to rush in, and instead drive a hard bargain; but, meeting the marquess late at night, Peat lacked any leverage. The Chippendale furniture, said Bute, was at that moment packed in lorries and heading south for the sale in London. Peat agreed to buy everything for £43 million. The lorry drivers were told to make their way back to Ayrshire. The following morning, Charles was delighted. He was assured by Peat that the money could be found.
As usual, his staff obeyed the order without objection. A new charity was established which would initially borrow £40 million. The loan, Peat calculated, would be partly repaid by building and selling 770 houses on neighbouring farmland that he had bought separately for just £268,000. With planning permission, the land’s value would rise to £15 million. Just as he foresaw, after the purchase East Ayrshire council rezoned the farmland for housing. The land’s value soared – to collapse only weeks later as the global financial crisis hit. Charles’s new charity was engulfed by interest and loan repayments.
‘We were a little unlucky,’ Peat admitted. ‘But we were not the only property developer caught out by the crash.’ Although Charles’s income from the duchy had increased to £15.1 million, Peat refused to spend that money on Dumfries. Instead, he and Charles targeted rich donors to raise £20 million to pay off part of the debt and to finance the first renovations of the overpriced hulk.
Charles and Fawcett approached a galaxy of property developers, bankers, lawyers, accountants and foreign billionaires from both sides of the Atlantic, Saudi Arabia, Latvia and Kyrgyzstan. Favours were asked from landowners such as the Earl of Leicester, who agreed to host overnight at Holkham Hall, his stately home in Norfolk, a group of Americans arriving by private plane before travelling on to Dumfries the following day.
Implicit in the request for donations was the opportunity of a lunch or dinner with Charles, and an assurance that a sizeable donation would be rewarded with a room in the mansion named after the sponsor. Among those approached were hedge-fund manager Michael Hintze, Sheikh Hamad of Qatar, and Knanysher Alefza, who reportedly gave £1 million each. A group of rich Canadians introduced by Amanda Sherrington, an employee of the billionaire Canadian Weston family, also contributed.
By then, there was a pattern to Charles’s fundraising events. If they were to be held in someone else’s home, the hosts were told the food he would like. If he chose lamb, they were instructed to contact Barrow Gurney, the suppliers of organic meat produced on the duchy’s farms. The richest person present would be seated next to Charles – ‘Look, I think you should write a cheque for this,’ the heir to the throne would murmur. During the meal, each guest was given a pledge card. After Charles’s speech about Dumfries, many wrote ‘£5,000’; but a frisson went around the room when they noticed Charles ostentatiously examining each card, and suddenly pens were retrieved and £5,000 became £50,000.
The casualties of this frantic scramble for money were the other charities. Since 2003, Tom Shebbeare had been unable to deliver fully on pledges of additional funds that had been made to newly recruited chief executives. Some were surprised when promised support failed to materialise. In the opinion of one trustee, ‘Without embarrassment, Shebbeare reneged on his promise of money. He wasn’t a villain but a courtier who played by the court rules.’ Another trustee described Shebbeare as ‘festering on the sea bed, living off the detritus of others’. In those circumstances, Mike Lake, hired to become Shebbeare’s successor as chief executive, resigned.
The ripples spread further. Julia Cleverdon, the chief executive of Business in the Community since 1992, left in 2008. Described by one courtier as the ‘obstacle in Clarence House’, she was criticised for ‘flabby thinking’.
The disarray reflected Charles’s increasingly insensitive attitude to public opinion. Earlier that year he had been invited to New York, along with Camilla, to collect a Global Environmental Citizen award from Harvard Medical School. At the Foreign Office’s insistence, he was told to fly on BA. Camilla demanded a private plane. The FO mentioned to Peat that the sight of Charles arriving on a chartered jet to receive an environmental prize would be unhelpful. The impact, the official went on, would be similar to Charles’s Bentley being driven from London to Prague for his visit there, despite the embassy owning a perfectly good new Jaguar.
On Peat’s recommendation, Charles agreed to BA, only to be met by Camilla’s stubborn resistance. She was proving a demanding spouse. Although Peat had written in his published report that she cost taxpayers a mere £2,000 a year, he omitted to mention that the taxpayer had spent £1.8 million on security around Ray Mill, and a further £200,000 on Camilla’s various travels. She also remained vulnerable to the criticism of being work-shy. During the previous year she had fulfilled thirty-eight official duties on her own; the queen mother had completed 130 when she was eighty years of age, and 118 at ninety.
Charles resented the criticism. Camilla, he explained, was not a solo royal but had appeared as his consort at 196 public events. That barely chimed with her excuse that a cut hand would prevent her travelling to New York. After a fierce argument, she retreated and agreed to fly on the BA plane with Charles – along with fourteen staff including her hairdresser, two valets, a butler, a dresser, press officers, a doctor and five police protection officers. ‘We told the prince his entourage was too big but he ignored us,’ recalled an FO official. Even then, Charles could not resist complaining to Higdon about BA’s ‘incredibly uncomfortable first-class seats’.
To allow time for Camilla to recover from the journey, the group flew first to Philadelphia, where Higdon had arranged a fundraising dinner. Charles and Camilla headed for the city’s concert hall to meet Leonore Annenberg, the eighty-nine-year-old widow of media billionaire and former American ambassador in London Walter Annenberg. Higdon forgot to mention that the reception would be on the eleventh floor. To avoid claustrophobia in the lift, Camilla walked up the stairs wearing a chandelier necklace of thirty-seven rubies and many diamonds, a recent gift from the King of Saudi Arabia. As she shook Mrs Annenberg’s hand, an oxygen tube stuck up the elderly woman’s nose blew out and disconnected from the bottle, spewing oxygen around the room. Camilla looked at Higdon and burst out laughing. ‘We had a great time together,’ said Higdon later.
The presentation of Charles’s award, by Al Gore, was greeted as an accolade for twenty years’ pioneering work. Nevertheless, the trip offended environmentalists, cost-conscious critics and those urging Charles to show more interest in the Commonwealth, the risk to his status among whose countries had not diminished – the governments of New Zealand and Australia were considering whether to remove the Union Jack from their national flags. Charles and Camilla’s presence at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Kampala alongside the queen in November 2007 barely affected their reservations. Despite his smiles and earnest conversations, he was told that he would again be a bystander at the next summit in Trinidad in 2009.
‘It would be too early to do more,’ his staff was told by Simon Gimson, a senior member of the Commonwealth Secretariat. ‘He can’t breeze into the CHOGM leaders’ banquets with the queen. He’d be resented. He’ll have to work his passage.’
As his retirement as secretary general of the Commonwealth approached, Don McKinnon was as irritated as ever that, while he had had thirty audiences with the queen during his eight years in London, Charles had refused to meet him privately even once. Camilla was not helping. She disliked hot countries, she said, and could not cope with jet lag. She refused to compete with Diana.
On the eve of his sixtieth birthday, Charles overtook his great-great-grandfather Edward VII as the longest-waiting heir to the British throne. As was his habit on such anniversaries, he contemplated the future. As the queen aged, he had hoped that more frequent appearances at events would win him greater public acceptance; but beyond the genuine respect he often won during personal encounters, his people remained sceptical. The scorn provoked by controversies over the previous twenty-five years had barely subsided. Charles’s uphill progress was still impeded by many of the old obstacles. Although at times downcast, he refused to admit defeat, and searched for new opportunities to win support. Casting himself as a misunderstood prophet, he appeared in The Passionate Prince, a BBC documentary explaining his insatiable idealism. ‘I don’t call it meddling,’ he told his audience. ‘I call it mobilising.’ So many of his causes had been unpopular at first, he said, but became justified over time: ‘Perhaps, though, after all this, eventually people might realise some of the things I have been trying to do aren’t all that mad.’
Grudging acceptance was the best he could expect. Stability, and no more scandals, would secure a bedrock of support. All too aware of his troubled relations with his parents, he knew he needed to heal those wounds. The best place to do so, he decided, would be at the headquarters of the Prince’s Trust. Just before his sixtieth birthday party, he welcomed the queen and Philip there. ‘May I say,’ said his mother to the staff, ‘that we are both enormously proud to have been reminded here today of his personal contribution to this remarkable organisation.’ Ten years earlier, that scenario – followed by a birthday party at Buckingham Palace for four hundred guests, including kings, queens, singers, actors and Camilla – would have been unimaginable.
By the third anniversary of his marriage, Charles’s domestic life had settled into a happy routine. Although his staff occasionally heard arguments, Camilla had become his anchor and his protector from his eccentricities. ‘I’ve been on the Tube, you know,’ he once told a friend after they returned from the theatre to Clarence House for dinner.
‘Yes, but only to open a line,’ was the accurate riposte.
Even Camilla could be amused by Charles’s loftiness. That same evening, she had told the staff to leave salads and cold cuts of meat on the sideboard. ‘Let’s see what’s for dinner,’ said Charles after finishing his Martini. He walked into the dining room and shrieked. Fearing the worst, Camilla dashed in after him. ‘What’s this?’ trembled her husband, pointing at the food.
‘It’s cling film, darling,’ she replied.
However, there were limits to her common sense. In public she appeared as a benign, good-hearted, amusing woman, but in private her expectations continued to grow. Bowing to Buckingham Palace’s complaints about his acceptance of free holidays from questionable hosts, Charles had chartered a private yacht for an eleven-day Caribbean cruise, at a cost of about £210,000. Camilla later grumbled that the boat was smaller than Yiannis Latsis’s or Donald Gosling’s. Thankfully for the royal family, the public were unaware of such complaints.
The success of Camilla’s ambition to be queen depended upon her silence. She knew that the latest polls showed a decline in her popularity to just 17 per cent in her favour. Wisely, she realised that a single misplaced interview could torpedo her long-term plans. The contrast with the increasing popularity of William and his girlfriend Kate Middleton was all too obvious.
Prince Andrew’s behaviour, too, was harming Charles’s efforts to win support. To the public he represented the worst of hereditary privilege. Damned as ‘useless’ across Whitehall while undertaking so-called ‘official trips’ in the Far East and America, he was chasing women with a protection officer in tow at a cost of between £140,000 and £250,000 per trip, including private jets. Back in Britain, he attracted criticism for inviting John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg to use the tennis court at Buckingham Palace for a charity match sponsored by bankers. More troublesome was his relationship with Timur Kulibayev, the son-in-law of the president of Kazakhstan, who had bought Andrew’s marital home, Sunninghill Park in Berkshire, for £15 million, a suspiciously inflated price suggesting an inappropriate relationship between the two men. But Andrew’s worst mistake was his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, an American businessman he invited to Balmoral, Windsor and Sandringham. Although Epstein was already notorious for seeking out underaged girls, Andrew refused to end the relationship. Without considering the consequences, he asked Epstein to help resolve his ex-wife Fergie’s £2 million debts.
Andrew’s conduct prompted a visit to Buckingham Palace by a Whitehall official to discuss with the queen whether the by-now middle-aged prince should continue as an official trade ambassador for Britain. Warned in advance about the coming encounter, Andrew asked a public relations consultant to visit him and discuss how his position might be improved. As the consultant was escorted down the palace corridor to Andrew’s office, he could hear the prince screaming down a telephone. ‘It was appalling behaviour. He was demanding respect for his entitlement,’ reported the visitor.
Prince Edward was little better. As the new president of the Duke of Edinburgh Award he frequently flew ‘on business’ to the Caribbean, including the Cayman Islands and Barbados, where few local young people undertook the award’s challenges. For Edward it was an opportunity to play golf in the sunshine, but his excuse quickly wore thin. Prince Michael of Kent was another misbehaving royal who was actually reprimanded for using his position to further his business dealings with unsuitable partners. A Buckingham Palace official told Kent that the British ambassador in Moscow would henceforth refuse to help him during his visits to Russia, or to arrange meetings with oligarchs and other unappealing Russians.
Repeated descriptions in the media of these and other royals exploiting their privileges bespattered Charles, and to his irritation magnified reports about his own extravagances and mismanagement. And just when he would have benefited from a calmer profile, he was embroiled in another dogfight – once again attracting attention to his hubris.
To Malcolm Ross’s distress, ‘Peat failed to seal a relationship between Buckingham Palace and Clarence House,’ and in 2008 he was abruptly dismissed by Peat. This was followed soon after by the unexpected departure of Ross’s deputy, Andrew Farquharson. Both had been recruited by Charles from Buckingham Palace, and both, colleagues agreed, were ‘unceremoniously dumped after half a lifetime’s work’. The two men were irate. The queen was also angry. ‘If you take my staff,’ she reportedly told Charles, ‘you should look after them, not sack them.’ But that was not the main disagreement at issue.