Prince, Son and Heir Charles at 70 - BBC

A special documentary to mark the seventieth birthday of HRH the Prince of Wales.

For this observational documentary, film-maker John Bridcut has had exclusive access to the prince over the past 12 months, both at work and behind the scenes, at home and abroad. He speaks to those who know him best, including HRH the Duchess of Cornwall and the Dukes of Cambridge and Sussex. His sons discuss their upbringing and their feelings about the prince's working life.

As the prince reaches his seventith birthday, he has been involved in public affairs for 50 years, championing environmental and social issues long before they reached the mainstream, from plastic waste and global warming to lack of opportunity for young people.

The documentary charts the prince's working life at a time when he is taking on an increasing amount of duties in support of the Queen. He is seen on working visits to County Durham, Cornwall and the Brecon Beacons, and at home at Highgrove in Gloucestershire and Birkhall in Aberdeenshire.

The film features behind-the-scenes footage of the Prince with the Queen in Buckingham Palace at the time of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in April, when the prince was named as the next head of the Commonwealth.

Also included is the stunning ceremonial welcome given to the prince in the Pacific island republic of Vanuatu, when he was invested as a high chief, and his visit to three Caribbean countries struggling to recover after hurricanes Irma and Maria a year ago.

What emerges is a revealing and intimate portrait of the longest-serving heir to the throne, who still feels he has a lot more to do

BBC

 “I Don’t Really See Any Value in Saying, ‘I Told You So,’”: Prince Charles on His Climate-Change Fight, Life with Camilla, and Becoming King

“I Don’t Really See Any Value in Saying, ‘I Told You So,’”: Prince Charles on His Climate-Change Fight, Life with Camilla, and Becoming King

by JAMES REGINATOphotographs by ALEXI LUBOMIRSKI

NOVEMBER 1, 2018 12:00 AM

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/11/prince-charles-becoming-king-camilla-british-monarchy

“Anyone of my age knows that days pass at a far greater speed than when they were young,” a man nearing his 70th birthday recently told me. “But in my case there are so many things that need to be done.”

“Things that need to be done” takes on a strikingly different quality if you are on the verge of ascending the British throne. Past the age at which many people retire, Charles Philip Arthur George, the Prince of Wales, is still waiting to begin the job he’s been in line for since he was three years old, when his mother, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, began her monarchy in 1952. As she has become the longest-reigning sovereign in British history, he’s become the longest-waiting heir apparent. While the Queen, at 92, still vigorously carries out the major elements of her role as head of state, her reign is inexorably beginning to wind down. At her request, the Prince of Wales has begun to ramp things up.

“Charles figured out a very long time ago that he was going to be Prince of Wales for a very long time,” an English peer intimate with the royal family says. “He planned his life accordingly, and he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish half of what he has if he had become King earlier.”

Dodging the sovereign’s constitutionally mandated straitjacket and muzzle, the Prince of Wales has been able to express strong opinions on many issues—including climate change, alternative medicine, and architectural preservation—for which he has been harshly criticized.

He has also been a prolific worker bee in the Windsor hive, his work constituting charity appearances and other public forays for the greater good. A tally of “jobs” attended by the royal family in 2017 attests to the amount of heavy lifting Charles is doing. With 546 under his belt, Charles was at the top of the list, while the Queen came in fourth (behind Princess Anne and Prince Andrew) at 296. Prince Harry and Prince William, future King himself, notched considerably fewer: 209 and 171, respectively.

As the United Kingdom lurches toward Brexit and relations with the European Union fray, the royal family’s soft power may be Britain’s trump card. They charm, they command respect; they impart a sense of stability and continuity. Meanwhile, the Commonwealth states—home to 2.4 billion citizens, a third of the world’s population—are ever critical. It was not just an act of fashion when Meghan had her 16-foot veil embroidered with flora from each of the 53 member nations. In April, the heads of these countries—which include India, New Zealand, and Nigeria—officially voted that Charles will succeed his mother as leader.

While his relatives and his subjects tiptoe around the mere thought of the Queen’s death, Charles has become a proxy head of state for his mother, while his own children have helped garner massive positive press for the royal family. (Some two billion people around the world tuned in to watch Meghan and Harry’s wedding and their baby news is a global preoccupation.) So, on May 7, when I boarded a plane with the Prince of Wales and his wife of 13 years, the Duchess of Cornwall, bound for an official royal tour through France and Greece, the couple was in high spirits.

ON THE ROAD

Since 2016 the royal family and the prime minister have shared a jumbo jet for long-haul flights. (Previously, they had to charter aircraft or, worse, fly commercial.) The RAF Voyager, a massive military tanker based on an Airbus A330 capable of air-to-air refueling and missile detection, was ordered by David Cameron and refitted at a cost of £10 million.

Impressive yet discreet, the aircraft is gray and blue inside and out, with 158 seats in three cabins on one deck. As it sits on the tarmac of R.A.F. Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire, and its two pilots and eight cabin crew prepare for flight, what would be the business class on a commercial plane fills up with Clarence House staff members: dark-suited, solemn-looking private secretaries, personal protection officers (P.P.O.’s), the royal doctor, a valet, Communications Secretary Julian Payne, and the Prince’s equerry, Major Harry Pilcher, as well as Hugh Green and Jacqui Meakin, the Duchess’s longtime hairdresser and stylist. In the rear cabin are dozens of uniformed military personnel—engineers, soldiers, baggage handlers, and other tactical officers—along with about five members of the British press who regularly report on the royals. And me. All journalists are later invoiced for their flights—the cost being comparable to an equivalent full-fare coach seat. Finally, after about an hour, a large black car pulls up to the front stairs of the plane. As soon as Their Royal Highnesses climb aboard, into the first-class cabin, the Voyager roars into the sky and cabin attendants in blue military uniforms offer beverages, including good Moët, to passengers. The atmosphere is one of restrained elegance. Typically, midflight, Camilla will appear for a few moments in the rear cabin, prompting all military personnel to immediately stand at attention.

“He figured out a very long time ago that he was going to be Prince of Wales for a very long time.”

Though he’s not yet a head of state, the Prince of Wales is received like one wherever we land. In Nice, a military band plays the British and French national anthems and an honor guard stands at attention as T.R.H. disembark onto a red carpet at the end of which stands a long convoy of official vehicles.

Our first stop is Villa Masséna, an ornate Belle Époque-era art museum, where a memorial to the 86 victims of the 2016 Bastille Day attack on the Promenade des Anglais has been erected. Payne jumps out of a car. “The first rule of royal tours is don’t get left behind!” he cautions me as he sprints ahead.

T.R.H. have come to meet survivors, their families, first responders, and other Nice citizens in the villa’s garden. They lay a bouquet composed of Camassia leichtlinii (Caerulea Group), Narcissi ‘Actaea,’ Viburnum x carlcephalum, and lilies of the valley, all gathered from the Prince of Wales’s garden at Highgrove, his country house.

Next, the convoy speeds off to Èze, perched in the hills outside Nice, for a walkabout through the narrow, winding cobblestone streets. Citizens and tourists pour out of shops, cafés, nooks, and crannies, treating Charles and Camilla as impeccably suited rock stars, which is how it goes all week.

While their agenda includes many stately private events at palaces, embassies, and such, the action unfolds in open streets and squares, where they shake hundreds of hands. (No germophobes here: I never saw any hand sanitizer deployed.) These walkabouts are often mapped out in advance by the Prince’s security detail, but can be unexpectedly fluid. The plan for a visit to Nice’s bustling flower market, for example, calls for “three designated points” for T.R.H. to visit, but allows for “some off-piste walking.” Meaning: Charles goes wherever he wants.

“He has complete confidence in his protection officers,” says a staff member, “so he dives right into the crowds.”

At a food market in Lyon, an urgent, almost alarming cry—“Your Highness! Please!”—stops the Prince in his tracks, resulting in a pileup of trailing entourage. A butcher in a white apron is desperate for him to sample his sausages.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” Charles inquires, and is quickly passed a bit of saucisson. A hush descends; the butcher is on tenterhooks before the royal opinion is issued: “Excellent! Incroyable!” says the future King. The butcher’s face registers ecstasy. Charles beckons the Duchess from the cheese aisle. “Try this, darling,” he coos, as onlookers smile and photographers click.

“The people in the crowds are usually great, it’s just the press who can get too pushy sometimes,” one of the P.P.O.’s tells me. “We guard Cabinet ministers, too. They’re never a problem because they don’t want to go out into the public. But Prince Charles really wants to.”

Charles assiduously reads the lengthy briefings that are prepared in advance of all engagements. “So, if he’s meeting an elderly veteran he can say, ‘I know you flew Spitfires in the war,’” a former staff member tells me. “They’re like, ‘Holy shit, how did he know that?’” (“The bullet points I remember,” the Duchess says.)

In Greece, there are visits to the presidential palace, a battleship, a monastery, and the Yacht Club, for swanky cocktails with shipping magnates. On Aiolou Street, Athens’s busiest shopping thoroughfare, the royal couple sample koulouri, traditional Greek pretzels, then repair to an outdoor café—a planned photo op, of course. But when the Prince declines the plastic straw that comes with his freddo cappuccino—a cause célèbre for the likes of Adrian Grenier, Brooklyn Decker, and Neil deGrasse Tyson—the rejection becomes front-page news in Greece, where sipping your cold coffee from a plastic straw is de rigueur. (A few weeks later, McDonald’s will announce plans to phase out plastic straws across its 1,361 restaurants in Britain.)

During the foreign tour, I travel in an anonymous black van with about a dozen of the British photographers and correspondents who are dedicated to covering the royals at their nearly every turn. (Some are salaried employees of news organizations and some are independent operators; the British government does not pay any of their travel expenses.) There is fierce competition among these fellows—and most are men. But they are great mates, addressing one another often by nickname, and with salty language. (Which some of them requested I refrain from printing, indicating that royals are not the only people sensitive about their coverage.) “We sometimes have our elbows out, but we’re like brothers,” says Shutterstock photographer Tim Rooke, who has been on the beat for 28 years. “We’ve spent more time with each other than we have with our wives,” says Chris Jackson, who has the clout that comes with being the royal photographer for Getty Images.

A week before Harry and Meghan’s wedding, everybody is champing at the bit for a sound bite from T.R.H. about the event. Word goes around that there will be a brush-by—a quick, pre-arranged moment, often when a royal is about to get in a car, when they answer seemingly spontaneous questions lobbed at them. But this brush-by keeps getting delayed, leading to frazzled nerves and vociferous complaints among the pack. “This is arse backwards, tits up!” carps one passenger on the van, whatever that means.

At last, the brush-by transpires in Nice. “Obviously . . . it’s going to be marvelous,” says His Royal Highness. “I’m sure it will be a special day for everyone.” “It’s all very exciting. Can’t wait,” Her Royal Highness adds. The press corps are always eager for a quote from Camilla.

Occasional grumbling aside, these royal-watchers esteem Charles and Camilla. “She’s my favorite royal, by a country mile,” I’m told by one correspondent. “She knows all our names, she fosters a sense that we’re all in this together. She always gives you a little gleam in her eye and will find a moment to look at our cameras,” says another. William and Kate, by comparison, go out of their way not to look at the “fixed point” where photographers gather. In general, this correspondent goes on, the younger generation of royals are “control freaks” about their coverage, whereas Charles is “far more relaxed.” As is Camilla.

“We think the world of her, we adore her. She’s an amazing woman,” says Sun photographer Arthur Edwards. “She always shows up with a great smile and is never, ever, grumpy.”

Edwards, 78, speaks with authority. The dean of the royal camera corps, he’s been shooting the Windsors for 41 years. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth bestowed an M.B.E. on him at Buckingham Palace. (“It means ‘much bigger expenses,’” he jokes in his Cockney accent.)

Edwards shot one of the most iconic, and prophetic, royal images ever, in February of 1992: the so-called lonely princess photo of Diana sitting alone on a bench in front of the Taj Mahal, in India.

“All right, Arthur, where do you want me?” he recalls her asking him when she arrived at the site. But the location was hardly as empty as it appears in the photo. “There were 50 people around—we said, ‘Get out of the way!’” recalls a correspondent, who was also there. Diana, they agree, was far savvier than the public gave her credit for. “‘It’s very healing,’” Edwards remembers the Princess commenting after the shot. “We were all trying to work out what she meant.” “She and Charles did separate 10 months later—so we weren’t wrong,” says Edwards.

“Everything that is too political he is transitioning out of.”

Among this troop, there is unanimous agreement that since Camilla has come aboard, “the boss” is a helluva lot easier and happier. “She’s made a massive difference in him,” a longtime correspondent observes. “He’s much more relaxed now. They are always laughing and chatting, they have great affection and humor between them.”

Photographer Alexi Lubomirski, who shot Harry and Meghan’s official engagement and wedding pictures, says as much, when Charles and Camilla greet him in the morning room at Clarence House to pose for the portraits in this story. “As soon as they looked at each other, there was a sparkle in their eyes—that’s when the magic happened,” he says. “You feel like they are a young couple in love.”

THE FUTURE QUEEN

Friends agree that, 13 years on from their wedding, Charles and Camilla have never been in a better place. “They’re a rock,” says a longtime friend of the couple’s.

Their saga, told by every tabloid, is well known: They met in the summer of 1971 and were smitten with each other. But according to the customs of the time, Camilla Shand wasn’t considered a royal-bride candidate, having been the on-and-off girlfriend of Andrew Parker Bowles for more than six years. Camilla married him and they had two children before they divorced. Meanwhile, the public fairy tale of the royal romance between Charles and Lady Diana Spencer was privately in tatters from the start.

Though they were pilloried in the press, Charles and Camilla just couldn’t quit each other. And on April 9, 2005, almost nine years after the dissolution of Charles’s marriage to Diana, he and Camilla were married in a civil ceremony at Windsor Guildhall. At the time, it was announced that when Charles does accede to the throne she will be given the title princess consort. In subsequent years, public opinion of her has turned around. According to recent reports, she will eventually become queen consort, the customary title for the wife of a reigning king.

“They’re in a very good place right now,” says Mark Bolland. As deputy private secretary to the Prince of Wales from 1997 to 2002, Bolland masterminded the campaign to win public acceptance for Camilla and rehabilitate Charles’s reputation.

“We have a prime minister and government distracted by the horror of Brexit,” says Bolland. “It makes the monarchy stronger, as it is a beacon of stability and hope.” Meanwhile, Camilla has brought to the House of Windsor refreshingly natural warmth and taste. The Duchess’s father was a wine expert and her son is a food writer, Bolland points out, so when Charles becomes King “the flowers at Buckingham Palace will be a lot better, and the food and wine too.”

Camilla seems constitutionally suited to being Queen. “She never complains, she never explains,” says a London man-about-town who socializes with the royals. “She’s not an intellectual, but there’s nothing lightweight about her. She’s not a bullshitter and she doesn’t take any bullshit.”

The shadiest comment comes from an aristocratic dowager, who says that “she’s a bossy woman.” But this source hastens to add that “she’s been very good for him. She gives him all the love and support he needs.” Payne seconds that. “She can change his mind in a way nobody else can,” says the communications secretary. “Every so often, I can go to the Duchess, cap in hand. She’s your last card. If she thinks it’s the right thing, she’ll say, ‘Leave it with me. . ..’”

“They are both clearly great on their own. But two and two makes five in a big way here,” says Camilla’s nephew, Ben Elliot, a co-founder of the Quintessentially Group. “You can see it when they are together. They enjoy each other’s company so much. You can see it best when they are dancing together—such genuine, deep-down affection and love. They both get the giggles—she first, then he tries to hold it together.

“She knows that he is the boss, the star. She does everything she can possibly do to support him. At the same time, he’s very proud of her. She’s very sharp and perceptive,” Elliot adds. And no need to worry that the future King and Queen won’t be able to keep up with their duties, notwithstanding their septuagenarian status: “They are both—he particularly—unbelievably physically fit. I’ve never seen a man his age who is as strong as he is. I’ve gone stalking with him in Scotland. He walks soldiers off the Highlands.”

The Duchess has retained her old house, Ray Mill, to which she escapes periodically. “She doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking about what her title will be,” Elliot adds in jest. Instead, she likes to cook simple English fare, keep her bees, and enjoy visits from her five grandchildren. Charles and Camilla’s happy place, though, is Birkhall, the Scottish estate formerly owned by the Queen Mother. “It’s a lodge—not particularly grand. It has a wonderful, warm coziness,” where the couple can indulge in the “relentless” reading they enjoy, and watch some TV, Elliot elaborates. He begs off the million-pound question as to whether they watch The Crown. But the chatty London man-about-town quoted earlier says Camilla has privately confessed to having enjoyed the program, though she hastened to add that she “wasn’t looking forward to the bits to come.” The young Camilla will be introduced in Season Three, which covers the royals from 1964 to the early 70s.

Elliot was an adolescent when wall-to-wall coverage of “Camillagate” made his aunt the most unpopular woman in Britain. “Her children are like brother and sister to me—we’re all very close,” he says. “It was bloody hard. She was a prisoner in her own house. For everyone involved it was not a happy time. In the breakdown of any marriage, you want privacy to deal with it, but they didn’t have any of that.”

WORK, WORK, WORK, WORK

Camilla’s popularity turnaround may have been strategic, but it would have fallen flat without a genuine personality underneath. Maintaining the dignity of the royals while trying to engender affection for them, and keeping them dutifully engaged—that’s the tightrope on which Palace staff walk.

Not only did the Duchess burn rubber, but she also delivered a winning message during the event, at Hampton Court Palace, where awards were given to schoolchildren for short stories they had written. Another day found the Duchess at the Royal Mews, Buckingham Palace, with none other than Her Majesty. Any joint engagement between the Queen and another royal signifies that the other royal is in her good books, and also that she approves of the cause. Read into that everything you want about the Duchess of Sussex’s giggle-filled jaunt with Her Majesty to Cheshire in June.

The sovereign and the Duchess of Cornwall have teamed up for an event to mark the 10th anniversary of Medical Detection Dogs. The organization has been at the forefront of a nascent field that trains dogs to recognize the odors of various diseases. The theory holds that dogs are such extraordinary biosensors, they have the ability to detect diseases at very early stages, which could aid treatment options.

A day later, T.R.H. visited the Royal Cornwall Show, which is something of a Coachella of British country life: heifers, horses, sheepshearing, tractors, chainsaw-carving, flowers, Cornish wrestling, blacksmithing, bees and honey, ferret racing, a pig-of-the-year contest, fly-fishing. T.R.H. worked their way through jam-packed crowds for about three hours, and there wasn’t a man or woman who didn’t appear to be hugely admiring. A fearsome-looking big guy of around 30, covered in tattoos and holding a baby, beamed when the Prince shook his hand and the baby’s. The mass affection for Charles isn’t just a product of public-relations efforts. His vast charitable endeavors have personally touched a huge portion of the British population.

Charles has long been a champion of traditional craftsmanship and rural values. “Traditional crafts have always defined the character and beauty of a civilization’s particular culture. They underpin the rich tapestry of cultures that make up the world,” he says. “So if you think them irrelevant and worth abandoning, then you abandon the richness of human civilization. You submit to the dehumanized, reductive approach of the lifeless machine. . .. What a sorry world that would be!” As for the charities, last March, Charles created a new umbrella entity, the Prince’s Foundation, to oversee and streamline his vast empire of them. Since it was set up in 1976, the Prince’s Trust has helped more than 870,000 disadvantaged people aged 11 to 30 move into work, education, or job training. In the past decade, the Prince of Wales Charitable Foundation has given away more than £52 million in grants. “As he nears his 70th, it’s all to do with making things leaner, neater. . .. The tidying-up process has started,” says his cousin David Linley, the Earl of Snowdon, who is vice president of the Prince’s Foundation.

“He’s a great connector—the ultimate networker,” says Dame Julia Cleverdon, the former C.E.O. of one of Charles’s outreach initiatives. “He creatively swipes ideas from all over the world. Then he’ll say, for example, Why hasn’t this one been implemented in Dorset?”

“There’s a lack of dot-joining today,” Prince Charles says to a group of young people in Athens. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to join the dots.”

CHANGE AGENT

Charles puts a lot of elbow grease into connecting the dots. He adheres to a strict schedule: He’s at his desk at 8:30 A.M. and spends two hours on correspondence. Then it’s steady meetings until breaking for tea at five—he doesn’t eat lunch—followed by a walk. After dinner, he generally goes back to his study to write letters or read for a couple hours.

In years past, many of those letters might have been to harangue politicians or editors, venting his opinions or dispensing advice on his pet issues. “He’s been expressing his views less and less,” a former Clarence House courtier says. “Everything that is too political he is transitioning out of.” Nevertheless, in written correspondence to me, Charles elaborated on climate change and other crises that “keep me awake at night.”

“I don’t really see any value in saying, ‘I told you so,’” he wrote. “As a teenager, I remember feeling deeply about this appallingly excessive demolition job being done on every aspect of life. . .. In putting my head above the parapet on all these issues, and trying to remind people of their long-term, timeless relevance to our human experience—never mind trying to do something about them—I found myself in conflict with the conventional outlook which, as I discovered, is not exactly the most pleasant situation to find yourself.

“One of [my] duties has been to find solutions to the vast challenges we face over accelerating climate change. . . . However, it seems to take forever to alert people to the scale of the challenge. Over forty years ago I remember making a speech about the problems of plastic and other waste, but at that stage nobody was really interested and I was considered old-fashioned, out of touch and ‘anti-science’ for warning of such things,” the Prince wrote. “If we don’t engage with these issues, and many other related and critical problems that they inevitably compound, we will all be the victims. Nothing escapes.”

SUCCESSION

Charles has outspokenness in common with his new daughter-in-law. According to an attendee at the Sussexes’ wedding, Charles and Camilla’s presence was very much felt and appreciated: “He seemed like the settling hand on the whole day—he carried the thing together, while she seemed like she had been doing this forever.”

He escorted Meghan Markle’s mother, Doria Ragland, during the ceremony, and it was Charles who suggested that the phenomenal Kingdom Choir perform at the service. Meanwhile, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Duchess of Sussex get along “aces,” according to a close family friend. “They clearly really like each other. There is real warmth and support. Camilla has been very helpful to Meghan.”

It is verboten for the royal family or anyone who works for them to address what will happen when the Queen dies. But there is a meticulously detailed secret plan: Operation London Bridge will be activated to steer Britain for 10 days, down to the moment, following her passing. According to The Guardian, it takes effect when the Palace informs the prime minister: “London Bridge is down.” At the BBC, a cold-war-era alarm system, the “radio alert transmission system” (RATS), will be deployed, and its correspondents will don black suits. Meanwhile, blue “obit lights” will flash at radio stations, signaling them to begin playing solemn music and to switch to news. Charles will address the nation on the evening of his mother’s death and then will immediately tour the country, visiting Edinburgh, Belfast, and Cardiff to attend services and meet leaders.

Operation London Bridge will be followed by Operation Golden Orb, the top-secret plan for Charles’s coronation. Preparation for both stepped up after Christmas 2016, when the Queen did not appear for church services at Sandringham. “A heavy cold” was the reason given by Buckingham Palace, but according to a Palace insider, her condition was quite grave. As that source said, “It put everybody on notice that they have to be ready whenever it does happen.”

The Queen recovered, though, and enjoys robust health. “She’s absolutely marvelous—better than the two of us put together,” says a friend of the Queen’s who has been her guest in the past year at both Sandringham and Buckingham Palace. “She never sits down! Before dinner in the salon, she stands the whole time with a drink in her hand, while we’re collapsed on the sofa. And her mind still works so fast. At the table, she was listening to three different conversations going on—jumping back and forth between them.” This source also recalls the Queen saying after the Pope resigned, in 2013, something that may mean Charles has a long wait yet: “I would never do that.”