Manuel Colonques knew that flattering Michael Fawcett would secure access to Charles, and with that the prince’s invaluable promotion of Porcelanosa tiles. Accordingly, in 2010 the valet was invited to the wedding of Colonques’s daughter, and was listed by the company as Charles’s ‘private secretary’. In the Spanish media, the British guest was called ‘Sir Michael Fawcett’.
Through Fawcett, Charles had over the years accepted about £1.6 million from Colonques for the Architectural Foundation, more money for Dumfries House, and also a substantial donation for the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts. That last donation was the price for allowing Colonques to invite 250 guests to Buckingham Palace for a dinner captured by a ¡Hola! photographer. Under the headline ‘Prince of Wales Hosts a Gala Dinner in Honour of Porcelanosa’, ¡Hola!’s thirty-six pages of photographs illustrated Charles promoting the Spanish tiles. The company faithfully abided by the prince’s stipulation that the photographs should not be available to the British media. ‘Ask Manuel if I made him look good,’ Charles said through an interpreter at the end of yet another dinner, this one for a hundred architects at St James’s Palace. Colonques’s inability to speak English meant he could not enjoy a natural conversation with his host, but he did provide tiles the following year for the kitchen and bathrooms at Birkhall, and thereafter for other royal homes, including Highgrove’s garden.
In May 2001, at Charles’s suggestion, Porcelanosa had exhibited an Islamic garden at the Chelsea Flower Show with cypresses, fruit trees, a marble fountain, terracotta pathways and seventy thousand handmade mosaic tiles. That same year, the prince flew to Spain to open a new wing of the company’s factory and be its guest of honour at a dinner for 452 people. In return, the company agreed that an extended version of the Islamic garden would be installed at its expense at Highgrove. ‘We gave the garden to him, and he repaid us with a dinner for our clients,’ company director Pedro Pseudo admitted. As part of this arrangement, Colonques sought and received an invitation to Prince William’s wedding to Kate Middleton on 29 April 2011, a watershed moment for the monarchy. In the run-up to the ceremony, Colonques boasted to Spanish journalists that he had provided the tiles for the young couple’s personal bathrooms.
If Charles’s relationship with his parents was set in a permanent frost, his connection with his sons was almost as uneasy. He painfully recalled a visit to Kensington Palace while Diana was still alive, and they were small children. Young Harry ran towards him, then pulled up. ‘Mummy says I mustn’t,’ he cried, just as Charles was about to hug him. Diana had poisoned the boys’ minds towards their father. After her death, the revelations about both parents’ adultery and much worse haunted their youth. Grieving, William would say, was especially difficult because ‘it was so raw’, and with Diana’s story so widely known, there was minimal privacy. Since leaving university, William had not shared his father’s interests or offered to continue his charities. Specifically, he refused involvement in the Prince’s Trust. Detached from politics and from Charles’s cultural pursuits, he appeared a very different royal from his father. Charles’s relationship with William and Harry was not helped by Camilla’s presence, a constant reminder of their mother’s torment.
Having failed to interest his sons in classical music, Charles invited Kate to her first opera, Bellini’s La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker) at Covent Garden. As usual, Fawcett organised for dinner to be sent from Clarence House and served in the Royal Box during the interval on Charles’s personal china and using his silver cutlery. Sadly, the prince had ignored warnings about the production. ‘It’s awful,’ he later told the Opera House’s chief executive. His hope that Kate might be converted to classical music was lost. Like William, she preferred Phantom of the Opera.
Charles had a new fear: that the public’s attention was switching to William and Kate. The Canadian government had told Buckingham Palace that a proposed tour by Charles and Camilla should be delayed, so that it would follow a visit by William and Kate after their wedding. The reaction in Clarence House was mixed. Charles was disappointed, while Camilla was unconcerned about Kate taking the limelight. ‘She didn’t give a damn,’ noted Robert Higdon. ‘She loved Charles and wanted him to be a success; Charles saw Kate and William as the new stars and feared he’d be in trouble.’ Camilla also dismissed the presumption that Kate would be the first commoner queen. ‘That’ll be me,’ she would say with a laugh.
Regardless of the opinion polls, that was certainly Charles’s intention. In a public display of her status, Camilla had lunch with Kate at a Knightsbridge hotel just before the wedding ceremony, to give her advice about marriage. Many of Diana’s old friends were not invited to the wedding – taken off the guest list, it was said, by Camilla. Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown was invited, but Jon Zammett, the senior public relations director for Audi, was in the Abbey. Many royals drove Audis, and the company had agreed to sponsor a charitable tour of California in July for the newlyweds. Like his father, William was not one to let an opportunity go to waste, and also among the guests were Lily Safra, Don Gosling, Jürgen Pierburg (the nephew of a former Nazi SS officer and a generous donor to Dumfries House) and Joe Allbritton of Riggs Bank.
Two years earlier, at Charles’s request, Higdon had persuaded Allbritton to invest about £500,000 in Duchy Originals, the prince’s food brand that produced and sold organic oat biscuits, sausages and a growing number of other products in duchy shops. By way of thanks, in 2007 Allbritton and his wife rode in the fourth carriage behind the queen at Ascot. Now, on the eve of the wedding, Allbritton was asked for more money, this time to save Duchy Originals. Although in the past the brand had contributed about £7 million towards the Duchy of Cornwall’s income, in 2009 bad management had caused £3.3 million losses. Temporarily, Duchy Originals managed to survive with a loan from the Prince’s Charities Foundation, a sensitive arrangement because the financial demands of Dumfries House were depriving his other charities of funds. Not only were they financially stretched, but Charles’s £2.5 million investment with three property tycoons in an environmental development project in Wales had ended badly. Once again, poor financial management was destabilising his philanthropic ambitions. The saviour was Allbritton, who at Higdon’s request agreed to give Duchy Originals $3.25 million in exchange for the rights to sell its products in America, and to spend $2.5 million on the American launch of the brand.
Then he was asked for another favour. Just before William and Kate’s wedding, Charles agreed to meet President Barack Obama in Washington. The Foreign Office refused to provide a private jet, and insisted that he fly on British Airways. His foreign travel costs, a civil servant pointed out, had increased over the previous year by 18 per cent, to nearly £2 million. He would also spend £29,786 on a round trip with Camilla on a private jet to Balmoral for a four-day holiday, and £19,583 for a day trip from Aberdeen to London after the capital was blighted by riots. Furious that Peat had failed to persuade the RAF to provide a suitable plane, Charles asked Leslie Ferrar, his office’s treasurer, appointed in 2006 to supervise the charities, to telephone Higdon.
‘Can you find a private jet for Charles’s trip?’ she asked.
Higdon was not surprised. ‘It was quite normal,’ he said, ‘for me to call and ask people like Joe Allbritton, “Can we borrow your G5?” People like the Allbrittons got a fascination of lending Charles their trophy plane. The gift of their plane gave legitimacy to folk from Texas and Colorado.’
Allbritton agreed that his Gulfstream would fly empty across the Atlantic to collect Charles, transport him to Washington, and then, after returning him to Wiltshire, fly back empty to Texas. When asked to justify the flights, a Clarence House spokesman replied, ‘In the current economic climate, it was felt that it was right to accept the Allbrittons’ offer.’
Joe and Barbara Allbritton duly took their place in Westminster Abbey for the royal wedding. ‘Other patrons,’ said Higdon bitterly, ‘were not invited.’ Among those off the list was Kip Forbes, an important donor to Charles’s Foundation in America. Forbes turned his anger on Higdon. The fundraiser himself was also in some difficulty. American donors’ interest in Charles and Camilla was still declining. The foundation’s annual revenues had fallen to less than £1 million, and half of that income was spent on Higdon himself. ‘When I wasn’t invited to the wedding,’ he admitted, ‘I knew I was in trouble.’
Four months later he was shocked by what he interpreted as the high-handed treatment of Joe Allbritton by Leslie Ferrar. In September 2011 Higdon discovered that during Ferrar’s visit to Washington ‘the auditors had gone into Duchy Originals’. To save Charles’s reputation and the company from insolvency, the brand’s licence rights had been sold to Waitrose.
‘What about the American rights?’ Higdon asked Ferrar. ‘Have you secretly sold them?’
According to Higdon, Ferrar looked surprised. ‘You know, Robert,’ she replied, ‘people are very uncomfortable about you and your relationship with Prince Charles.’ She went on to say that Higdon’s familiarity with the prince had crossed the line. He acted like a friend, while in reality he was a servant.
‘Is my relationship with Charles unprofessional?’ asked Higdon.
‘Everyone believes it is,’ said Ferrar.
‘You’re out of your mind,’ exploded Higdon, and their argument escalated.
Higdon dug deeper, and discovered that Duchy Originals’ global rights had indeed been sold; the Allbritton investment, which he had delivered, had been ignored. Ferrar subsequently insisted that she had told Allbritton the full details, albeit after the sale, and the two sides eventually agreed an amicable settlement.
In the aftermath, despite fourteen years’ loyal service, Higdon was fired. The reason, he assumed, was his alcoholism. News of his departure was leaked to a newspaper, for which he blamed Michael Fawcett. ‘He’s one of the most horrible people I’ve met in my life,’ Higdon complained. ‘It was just such a nasty story. I didn’t do anything to anyone. I just did my job. I put up with the corrupt, mean, vicious people Charles is surrounded by. The most horrible people I’ve ever worked with. They used my resources. I didn’t like their Machiavellian behaviour, the dishonesty. They weren’t straight.’ He also criticised Ferrar: ‘We were a team, and Leslie played the alcoholic card and it hit the wall at 100 mph. I had raised $40 million, and it baffles me that they wanted to fire me. They were ungrateful and stupid.’
As with Bolland and others, neither Charles nor Camilla called Higdon after his departure. ‘I loved Charles and I loved Camilla. It hurts that I had a relationship with them and then no “Goodbye.” Not even a Christmas card. It was hard. In their world it’s all about them. Charles probably doesn’t know about the casualties, but Camilla does.’
Bolland called Camilla to ask about Higdon. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘there was a problem of too many cocktails.’
In New York, Joan Rivers was upset by the dismissal. Not only was Higdon a friend of long standing, but his contribution to both the prince’s profile in America and his finances did not deserve to be passed over so carelessly. For a time she considered breaking with Charles, but was persuaded by calls from London to stay loyal.
Not without coincidence, Higdon’s firing was followed by other changes at Clarence House – a total overhaul of the prince’s top team. The clearing of the decks included the departures of Leslie Ferrar and Paddy Haverson, Charles’s media spokesman. To some it appeared that the queen’s private secretary Christopher Geidt was orchestrating the start of a new era, but others denied that Buckingham Palace had any influence. The departures, said Charles’s spokesman, were coincidental rather than the outcome of a conspiracy. The resignation of Geoffrey Kent as chairman of the American Foundation after twenty-five successful years contradicted that bland explanation. Ominously, Fawcett was present when Charles personally told Kent that he would be replaced by an unknown American who lacked the same relationships and flair to lure rich donors. Fawcett’s influence was always paramount. The truth was that employment by Charles invariably ended in tears, but the gloss was advantageous: to make Charles more acceptable as the future monarch, he was to be surrounded by new staff.
Above all, at the age of sixty-one and after nine years’ service, Michael Peat announced that he too was to leave. He wanted to earn more money, and his wife complained about Charles’s constant telephone calls – at night, at weekends and while they were on holiday. Among his future employers would be Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch and owner of Chelsea FC, who was closely associated with Vladimir Putin. At Peat’s request, Abramovich had provided his helicopter to ferry Charles across Gloucestershire for social visits. In gratitude, and with an eye to securing Peat’s future loyalty, Charles agreed to generous severance terms. After the deaths of Diana, the queen mother and Princess Margaret, their staff had been told to leave their apartments in Kensington Palace within twenty-eight days. Peat, however, was allowed to remain in his five-bedroom flat for a further eleven months, a reward for increasing the duchy’s annual income from £10 million to £18.3 million, and its value to £712 million.
Peat was replaced by William Nye, a forty-six-year-old former Treasury official. Nye was not allocated an apartment in Kensington Palace, or anywhere else. Unlike Peat, he was prepared to forge the close relationship with Buckingham Palace that had never come to pass with Peat. Also unlike his predecessor, he did not welcome telephone calls after 6 p.m. – a restriction that Charles would not tolerate for long.
Peat did not bequeath a perfect legacy, especially for the charities. In spite of Tom Shebbeare’s efforts, Charles had set up even more of them, the latest being the Countryside Fund, intended to highlight rural problems. Over twenty chairmen were still bidding for his time. Without coordination, the same problems that had been identified in 1997 and again in 2003 had re-emerged. The prince’s charities were bureaucratic, expensive, overmanned and increasingly ineffective. Traditional Arts, meant to be a self-financing charity supporting artists, was losing £2 million a year. Business in the Community, under its new director Stephen Howard, was criticised as unimaginative and institutionalised, and lacking its former influence in the business community. The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment had, despite serious debts, dispatched full-time officials to the Galápagos Islands, Mumbai and Sierra Leone. The Prince’s Charities Foundation had a £4 million deficit without any reserves. The income of the Prince’s Trust, the flagship, was declining, and relied on an annual £15.8 million from the government. To cover a recurring yearly deficit of £2.6 million, the duchy lent the trust about £9 million. In parallel, the trust’s success was also declining. Civil servants discovered that despite its contractual commitments, the Prince’s Trust could not provide enough people to join the government’s new National Citizen Service. Even the more flourishing charities struggled to survive the endless management meetings: Arts & Business, which had been successfully managed since 1985 by Colin Tweedy, lost its autonomy in 2012. Many of these financial problems had become more acute since the purchase of Dumfries House in 2007.
An added complication in the prince’s life was Camilla’s demand for private dinners – jolly gatherings of friends. She wanted Charles to be rid of some responsibilities and people. Among her targets was Sane, a thriving charity for the mentally ill that he had energetically supported. She appeared to have taken against Marjorie Wallace, the charity’s resolute founder and director, who had been close to Charles during his troubles with Diana. Fawcett made onerous financial demands on Sane as a condition for Charles to continue fundraising. Then Tom Shebbeare intervened and told Wallace that Charles had decided to focus on complementary medicine rather than mental health. ‘Camilla didn’t give a damn,’ recalled Higdon. The prince’s association with Sane duly ended.
At that moment, Shebbeare hoped his principal task was about to be accomplished. Over the past six years he had forlornly attempted to merge the charities’ administration under one roof. By 2010 he had found a perfect site in King’s Cross, but Charles Dunstone, the chairman of the Prince’s Trust, opposed the move, and won Charles’s backing. That decision set the seal on Shebbeare’s career with Charles’s charities. He offered his resignation to Peat, only to be told that Peat had ‘beaten you to it’.
Shebbeare’s departure coincided with another challenge to the charities’ finances, especially from Dumfries House. Besides repaying the original £43 million for the purchase, millions of pounds were needed for reconstruction and new outbuildings to accommodate the working community. A further £600,000 was required for annual maintenance. To bring in additional money, the house was let out for weddings and conferences, was put into use as a hotel, and also promoted as a tourist attraction.
Three months after Jonathan Bryant described his appointment as Dumfries’s first manager as ‘a dream come true’ he was replaced by Fawcett. Just as he had done at Birkhall, by then rebuilt and open for weddings and conferences, Charles’s indispensable aide provided Dumfries’s guests with ‘the Sandringham experience’. They would be greeted by a retinue of servants – maids for women and valets for men – who unpacked their suitcases, ironed their clothes and filled the well-furnished rooms with flowers. In the previous year Premier Mode, Fawcett’s catering company, had made a profit of about £250,000. Over the following years it would perform even better.
Within his first six months at Dumfries, Fawcett arranged four fundraising events hosted by Charles. In cultivating his network of relationships, the valet-turned-consultant appeared indiscriminate, so long as the millionaires donated sufficient cash. Among those targeted were the Indian businessmen Lakshmi Mittal and the Hinduja brothers, and Mick Flick, the son of a convicted Nazi war criminal whose mines and factories killed thousands of European slave labourers during the Second World War. Others invited included Hans Kristian Rausing, the Tetra Pak billionaire and former drug addict, who gave £10 million, and Cyrus Vandrevala, another Indian businessman, who contributed £200,000 for an adventure playground. The hedge fund operator Michael Hintze gave £5 million. That relationship had started after Fawcett organised Hintze’s fifty-fifth birthday party in 2008. Coincidentally, Charles was at that moment seeking money for Dumfries House, and he accepted Hintze’s invitation to the party along with four hundred other guests. Soon after Hintze made his donation, he was appointed chairman of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment.
Within four years, Fawcett had helped Charles raise about £19 million to repay the loan from his charitable foundation. More money was raised from rich Sunni Muslims, especially Saudis and Qataris, including Dr Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz, a forty-five-year-old Saudi businessman, and Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani, who had presumably forgiven Charles for the debacle over Chelsea Barracks. Like all donors, both Dr Mahfouz and Sheikh Hamad were promised that a bench, garden or fountain in the grounds of properties they had never visited would be named in their honour.
The seamless process of money-raising would even recruit the queen to travel to the Goring Hotel in London to meet Sheikh Hamad at a charity reception. None of the donors believed their money was wasted. Charles had hired unemployed local young people to train as plasterers and craftsmen to restore the house and garden, or as chefs to work in the kitchen. Those young people owed their enhanced lives to him. During a tour of the property, one group of visitors listened for more than an hour while Charles explained the importance of preserving traditional farmyard sheds. Fastidious about every tree, bench and compost heap, he soon created a garden at Dumfries that was as immaculate as Highgrove’s.
Charles’s eccentricities were often on show at events to raise money. At one dinner to honour the German industrialist Jürgen Pierburg for his donations, Charles sat between Pierburg’s wife Clarissa and Lily Safra. To Clarissa Pierburg’s embarrassment, the prince sat with his back to her throughout the meal and spoke only to Safra. By Charles’s reckoning, his behaviour was not a social sin, but his position in society affirming itself. At another dinner at Dumfries House to thank the Armenian businessman Bob Manoukian, an erstwhile partner of Prince Jefri of Brunei, Fawcett, wearing a dinner jacket and with a large diamond stud in his tie, placed himself next to Manoukian’s wife. After Charles left the table at 10.30, Fawcett announced that dinner was over, and ordered the guests to leave.