The opportunity must have seemed irresistible. Ever since Richard Rogers had been appointed Ken Livingstone’s architectural adviser, the mayor had encouraged the construction of tower blocks across London. In response, at a conference at St James’s Palace in early 2008, Charles had criticised the proliferation of skyscrapers – especially ‘the Gherkin’ and ‘the Cheesegrater’ – for having ‘vandalised’ the capital, overshadowing the Tower of London and Westminster. ‘Not just one carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend,’ he said, repeating his signature insult, ‘but a positive rash of them that will disfigure precious views and disinherit future generations of Londoners.’
In recent months, plans had been submitted for even taller buildings in or near central London, including ‘the Wireless’ and the Shard, five times higher than the proposed Mies van der Rohe tower at One Poultry that Charles had sabotaged. The prince’s war of 1984 appeared lost. In consolation, some developers had been influenced by the idea pioneered at Poundbury that contented communities were created by building houses that would enhance their occupants’ lives. The councils restoring the centres of Birmingham, Manchester and other cities were aware of the value of protecting Britain’s heritage, and had taken note of Christopher Smallwood’s recent report, commissioned by Charles to show how health and crime levels were influenced by the layout of urban areas. (Rashly, as he knew Charles’s ways, Smallwood had asked for a £25,000 fee for the six-month study. Inevitably, he was not commissioned again.)
Charles’s position of authority had persuaded developers to seek his opinion discreetly about ambitious schemes at King’s Cross, the Battersea Power Station and the Thames Gateway. Consulting him in advance might avoid a potentially fatal later intervention. ‘The prince has a big voice,’ admitted Peter Freeman, the developer of King’s Cross. That strategy had been ignored in 2006 by the developers of Smithfield Market, who intended to demolish the listed 150-year-old Victorian buildings and erect a seven-storey office block. After an appeal to Charles by opponents of the scheme, he denounced it, saying it would ‘destroy yet another part of London’s heritage’. The demolition was stopped, to await the developers’ revised proposals.
Those were small but important victories. In Charles’s opinion, the Poundbury philosophy was still the only route to happiness – even though his Dorset dream was still no more than a large village of 252 homes, lampooned by modernists as ‘HRH’s theme park’.
Despite his sporadic forays since 1984, Britain’s modernist architects continued to be globally acclaimed. Few were rewarded with more prizes and prestigious commissions than Richard Rogers, now Lord Rogers, the proud recipient of a Companion of Honour from the queen in 2008. Besides his design of new airport terminals at Heathrow and Madrid, he had carried out luxury developments for the super-rich, most recently at One Hyde Park, a prominent building near Harrods owned by the property tycoon brothers Christian and Nick Candy. Each flat would cost its owner up to £100 million, despite the whole construction being criticised as an eyesore, a home for billionaire oligarchs and Arabs who avoided British taxes. In self-defence, Rogers pleaded that there was no perfect client, which was nearly equivalent to Charles’s lament that he had no choice about his parents.
Politics and personality divided Rogers and his royal nemesis. For twenty-five years they had been jousting. Now they were destined for an outright confrontation. In 2009, Charles chose his ground: a Rogers-designed residential development on the site of the Old Chelsea Barracks, originally built in 1862, demolished and rebuilt in 1960–62, to be used for its original purpose by the army.
Charles had been alerted to Rogers’s design by the classicist architect Quinlan Terry, one of Poundbury’s leading designers. In 2007 the 12.8-acre site had been sold by the British government to the Candy brothers and the Emir of Qatar for £959 million. The Candys had been promised a fee of £81 million by the emir’s representatives once Westminster council granted initial planning permission for the £3 billion scheme.
Rogers proposed 320 luxury flats and some social housing in high-tech blocks built of coloured steel and glass. Chelsea’s conservative residents were outraged. To them, his ‘monotonous glass buildings’ jarred with the adjacent Royal Hospital, designed in the 1690s by Christopher Wren. Pertinently, a new extension to the hospital devised by Quinlan Terry perfectly matched Wren’s style and showcased Charles’s ideas. In the local residents’ opinion, Wren’s architecture of traditional brick was the ideal model for the Barracks. Terry shared Charles’s opinion of Rogers. ‘Modernism,’ he said, ‘is the work of the devil.’ In reply, modernists dubbed Terry ‘not a good architect’.
During 2008, as the emir’s planning application was formally considered, opponents of the development, led by resident Georgina Thorburn, unsuccessfully sought support from local MPs and councillors. To attract attention, Thorburn chained herself to the Barracks’ railings during that summer’s Ascot week – dressed in Ascot clothes. That gesture, like other protests extending over nearly two years, was ignored by the council. Even her letter seeking Charles’s help remained unanswered. In January 2009, Thorburn met Terry. ‘What took you so long to get to me?’ he asked. He sketched an alternative design and sent it to Charles, requesting that the prince intervene.
By arrangement, Charles and Terry met at the official opening of the hospital extension. Charles now opposed any design by Rogers – his disapproval had earlier prevented Rogers’s name being included in a development scheme for the Royal Opera House. Not surprisingly, he and Terry agreed that Rogers’s design was unsuitable. To stop the scheme, Charles decided to contact Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar.
He knew the emir personally, but he should have paused before making a direct approach: any interference before the democratic planning process was completed risked being seen as an abuse of privilege. Michael Peat had tried, at Downing Street’s request, to modify Charles’s criticisms of the government, but controlling his protests about architecture was particularly difficult, and Peat was powerless to curb his employer’s scorn for ‘greedy money-grabbing property tycoons’ and their acolytes who employed modernist architects. With a high-minded sense of protecting the interests of the capital, Charles was determined to prevent what he saw as the desecration of Chelsea – especially because at that very moment he was seeking to justify his future role as a ‘meddling king’.
A test of public opinion had been presented by Jonathan Dimbleby in the Sunday Times in November 2008. Under the headline ‘Crown Me King Meddle’, Dimbleby had written about ‘discreet moves’ to allow the future Charles III ‘to speak out on matters of national and international importance in ways that at the moment would be unthinkable’. Clearly briefed by Charles or his friends to test the water, Dimbleby, who had maintained a good relationship with the prince since his 1994 biography, described ‘murmuring’ between the palaces, Whitehall and Westminster for ‘tomorrow’s monarchy’ to become ‘more “active” as we move into ever more testing times’. He suggested that in the ‘vacuum of national leadership’ Charles should not submit to the constitutional straitjacket worn by his mother. Instead, through Dimbleby, Charles’s friends suggested that the new king could safely model himself as head of state on Germany’s president, because ‘It is inconceivable that he would misuse such responsibility to ride one of his hobbyhorses.’ But that was precisely Charles’s intention. He was determined to stop Rogers.
Rather than writing directly to the emir, he addressed his cousin, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani, Qatar’s prime minister. Charles’s letter of 1 March 2009 complained about ‘the destruction of many parts of London with one more “brutalist” development after another’, and continued, ‘This gigantic experiment with the very soul of our capital city and with many others in the UK and elsewhere has reached the point where it is no longer sustainable. Quite frankly my heart sank when I saw the plans for the Old Chelsea Barracks site.’ Urging the Qatari to reconsider his proposal, Charles wrote: ‘Many would be eternally grateful to Your Excellency if [you] could bequeath a unique and enduring legacy to London.’ He enclosed Terry’s sketches for a classical scheme. The letter was sent to Qatar in the FO’s diplomatic bag.
News of Charles’s protest soon bounced back to London. The emir had asked his representatives to consider amending the design. Rogers was outraged. His work was threatened, he said, by Charles ‘acting in an underhand and undemocratic manner’. The Candys were also furious. Their £81 million fee was jeopardised because Charles, as Christian Candy sniped, ‘pissed in the emir’s ear about how awful the scheme was’. Charles himself would tell Vanity Fair, ‘I just wrote a letter – a confidential letter to somebody I happen to know … Frequently, I’ve written letters to people [who] pay no attention at all.’
At the beginning of April the Qataris’ media spokesman, a former officer in the Life Guards, passed Charles’s letter to a newspaper. Many believed that the leak was intended to help the Candys, and that the publicity-shy Qataris would prefer to pay their £81 million fee to avoid the embarrassment of their secret communication with Charles being publicised. But the ruse rebounded, and the Qataris chose to stick to the contract. As the Candys’ hopes of payment faded, Charles became, Peat revealed, ‘very unhappy that the matter had become public’. But instead of retreating, he renewed his attack.
On 8 April Peat met John Ward, the emir’s manager responsible for the development. Ward told him that the ruler was ‘unhappy that Charles was unhappy’, and promised that the problem would be sorted out. Since the emir was ‘not wedded to the Rogers design’, he would consider modifications. The conversation, however, did not end well. Peat became angry at the Qataris’ equivocation over the process to manage Charles’s objections. In an echo of other misinterpretations, he failed to understand that the Qataris were seeking to placate Britain’s heir, but also to avoid circumstances making them vulnerable to the Candy brothers’ legitimate demand for their £81 million. By meddling in their commercial agreement, he was steering Charles towards an embarrassing cameo appearance in a nasty legal battle.
In mid-April, Rogers publicly complained that Charles’s abuse of his privileged access and secret lobbying had usurped the ‘established planning consultation process’. He would later add that ‘most local groups were supportive’ of his scheme, and that Westminster’s planners ‘were going to recommend approval’. ‘What utter humbug,’ Quinlan Terry fulminated, and accused Rogers of hypocrisy.
Seven years earlier, after Westminster council had approved Terry’s design for the Royal Hospital extension, Rogers had, in a last-minute bid to avert the democratic process, emailed his political ally John Prescott, the deputy prime minister and environment minister, asking him to overturn the decision. Prescott, said Rogers, should insist on a modern building to replace Terry’s ‘architectural plagiarism’. That secret plea was rejected, but news of Rogers’s use of privileged access leaked.
Delighted by Terry’s riposte, Charles approached Simon Milton, Westminster’s deputy mayor responsible for planning. They met at Poundbury, and after their conversation Milton declared his opposition to Rogers’s scheme, although he knew the council’s officials still supported Rogers. Accordingly, Charles asked Andrew Hamilton, an architectural adviser, to approach the planning officials employed by Boris Johnson, London’s newly elected Conservative mayor. Since Johnson’s attitude was unpredictable, Charles offered the emir the help of Manon Williams, his deputy private secretary, and Hank Dittmar, another architectural adviser, through the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. Both could provide support against the Candys.
Belatedly, Peat grasped the constitutional implications of what Charles was doing. In an internal message written in his elegant handwritten script he noted, ‘This would suggest the personal involvement of the prince.’ John Ward was also upset. Charles’s opposition, he believed, would cause ‘a huge embarrassment to Qatar’, and would cost the emir money.
Not to be deterred, Charles met Sheikh Hamad at Clarence House on 11 May. Afterwards Peat noted, ‘The Emir was surprised by the Rogers design[s] for Chelsea Barracks and said he would have them changed.’ The accuracy of this memorandum would be disputed by the Qataris, and a judge would agree that Peat had recorded what he hoped the emir meant, rather than what was actually said.
By coincidence, two days later, as a gesture of reconciliation, Charles addressed RIBA, twenty-five years after his groundbreaking ‘carbuncle’ speech. ‘I think RIBA are completely mad to invite such a terrible thinker about architecture,’ wrote Piers Gough, a well-known London architect, in the Guardian, ‘and to kow-tow to this noblesse oblige is absolutely appalling.’ Poundbury, he added, ‘is despicable and decadent’. He appealed to fellow RIBA members to boycott the speech.
In the event, the meeting was packed. ‘I am sorry,’ Charles told his audience, ‘if I have somehow left the faintest impression that I wished to kick-start some kind of “style war” between classicists and modernists, or that I somehow wanted to drag the world back to the eighteenth century.’ His speech in 1984, he said, was a protest about ‘the brutal destruction of our towns and countryside … [because] much of the urban realm was becoming depersonalised and defaced’. He was applauded, no longer a pariah.
Without restraint, he urged Peat to continue lobbying against Rogers. In a telephone conference call on 29 May, Peat discussed how to stop the scheme with Simon Milton, Westminster council officials and a representative of the emir. In another call, he explained to the Qataris’ executives that Charles would press for them to use Terry. The prince, he added, was ‘going to fight to the finish’. In a note written after the conversation, Peat boldly told Charles that the Qataris understood that using Rogers was ‘a problem’.
Neither Peat nor the prince, it appears, realised the consequences of seeking to disrupt a commercial agreement. Collateral damage to a professional’s income never troubled Charles. But, after receiving legal advice, Peat did finally understand that his intervention was unwise. To protect himself, he made it clear that he had not participated fully in the conference call of 29 May, saying that he had abruptly ended his involvement after grasping that it was not appropriate.
To distance Charles and himself from the accusation of commercial sabotage, Peat would later say that Charles’s letter to the emir was ‘not down to any personal opposition’, but merely reflected the opinions of local residents: ‘They asked him to do what he could to ensure that their views received exposure. It is part of the Prince of Wales’s role and duty to make sure that the views of ordinary people that might not otherwise be heard receive some exposure … For many developers, hearing the views of local residents is very unexpected and unwelcome. They are just wanting to make money.’ But tellingly, in his letter to the emir Charles had not once mentioned local residents. He wrote only about his personal abhorrence for Rogers’s design – precisely the ‘personal opposition’ that Peat would later deny had been his motivation. As the Candys would highlight, while Charles claimed to be supporting powerless local residents, he had not replied to any of the protesters against the building of two thousand houses on duchy land near Truro. Contradictions rarely stymied the prince.
By June, Charles scented victory. Boris Johnson declared that he ‘strongly opposed’ the scheme as ‘repetitive’, and Westminster councillors, led by Simon Milton, announced their opposition. Under pressure, the council’s planning officers switched from support to a neutral stance. The following day, 11 June, the Qataris withdrew their application and asked Westminster council to ‘look favourably’ on a new scheme. ‘It knocked the stuffing out of me,’ admitted Rogers. ‘Charles single-handedly destroyed the project.’ Unelected power, he protested, broke ‘the bond of trust’ and was ‘totally unconstitutional’. Clarence House replied tersely, ‘The Prince of Wales, like everybody else, has the right to express his opinion.’
Angry about losing both his fees and the scheme, Rogers wrote in the Guardian: ‘He sees this debate as a battle of the styles which is against the run of history because architecture evolves and moves, mirroring society.’ Charles, he continued, ‘knows little about architecture … I think he pursues these topics because he is looking for a job … He is actually an unemployed individual which says something about the state of the royal family … The idea that he is a man of the people fascinates me. He is a man of the rich people, that is for sure.’
Rogers’s jibes did not compare to the embarrassment heaped upon Charles by the Candys. In their legal claim against the Qataris for breach of contract and the loss of their fees, they demanded the disclosure of the prince’s administrative records. Charles resisted, seeking as usual to influence a sensitive decision without public scrutiny. A judge rejected his bid for secrecy, and the royal file, including Peat’s revealing memos, was the highlight of a widely publicised trial. For a moment, Charles was also at risk of being sued by the Candys, and being compelled to testify, for inducing a breach of contract. But thanks to a loyal monarchist lawyer, the brothers were persuaded not to summon the prince. At the end of the trial, Mr Justice Vos was certain that Charles’s intervention had persuaded the emir to abandon the Rogers design. In an obscure judgement, he ruled in the Candys’ favour that there had been a breach of contract, but also ruled that it was not a ‘bad faith breach’. He made no immediate award of damages, but said that a claim would be considered, and advised the Candys and the emir to negotiate a settlement. To recover their fees, the Candys would have to prove that their plans would have been approved by Westminster council had the emir not withdrawn them. The brothers did eventually receive compensation. Only Charles walked away financially unscathed. Described by The Times as ‘a self-appointed vigilante wreaking revenge on any proposal to build a column of glass and steel’, he accepted his supporters’ praise.
‘That’s another reason why I battle so hard … despite the unbelievable abuse that’s heaped on me every time I open my mouth,’ he told them at the next annual conference of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. Richard Rogers and others may have trampled on his good name, but, posing as the traumatised hero, he hoped that after his death he would finally be appreciated. To reaffirm his values, he resigned as president of the patrons of the National Museums of Scotland to show his disapproval of the modernist extension to the National Gallery in Edinburgh.
The alliance between Boris Johnson and Britain’s heir was short-lived. Not long afterwards, Charles heard from prime minister David Cameron that control of the royal parks had been transferred to the Greater London Authority.
‘Boris is taking over the royal parks?’ he screamed. ‘Why have you given the royal parks to Boris?’
‘The queen agreed,’ replied Cameron.
‘What? Mama down the road? What does she know about the royal parks?’