By 1996, besides the Prince’s Trust, Charles had created charities for education, the environment, architecture, complementary medicine, animals, the sick, the poor and rural communities. But he was careless about their governance. He gave the impression that the trustees of each charity – with its own niche focus, independent board, trustees and funds – acted free of his interference, since by law he was denied any role in their management. The reality was different. The Charity Commission complained that Charles was playing an unauthorised role in the running of the charities. The solution was to appoint new chairmen.
Finance presented a more pressing problem. Charles was an excellent fundraiser, and all the charities relied on him, competing for his appearances at receptions and dinners. Each charity chairman would assure each corporate chief executive that Charles would be present at a reception and would meet the charity’s beneficiaries. Charles encouraged such promises without considering the impossibility of fulfilling all of them, or the folly of repeatedly targeting the same donors. ‘He can pursue different projects simultaneously,’ observed one adviser, ‘but in parallel rather than together.’
Even after a donation and an event had been agreed, those making the plans would encounter ‘the nightmare of Charles’s bureaucracy’, complained the long-serving director of one of the charities. His officials, either former civil servants or military officers, invoked his authority to block arrangements. ‘They were always negative that he should not do things,’ complained one charity executive, ‘but they hadn’t seen the real world, and got it wrong.’
In a pattern that repeated itself over the next twenty-five years, Charles’s good intentions were often derailed. Because he spread himself so thinly, some of his charities failed to raise sufficient funds, while the Prince’s Trust, which employed three hundred staff in a splendid Nash house opposite Regent’s Park, spent an excessive amount on administration.
Unspoken at his charities’ meetings was the fact that Charles’s work had been tarnished by duplication. For example, in 1987 he had launched Inner City Aid, a self-help project founded in partnership with the architect Rod Hackney. On the same day he had also founded the Prince’s Youth and Business Trust. Both charities targeted the same disadvantaged groups.
During those meetings, Charles would frequently say, ‘I have always thought it would be a jolly good idea if we could do something to help …’ Speaking in third-person messages rather than giving a clear directive, he watched as his audience – Shebbeare, his successive private secretaries, and Julia Cleverdon, an imaginative, energetic but occasionally chaotic campaigner renowned as a ‘whirlwind of activity’, recorded his wishes on A4 notepads. Sycophancy prevented anyone from challenging Charles to ask, ‘I wonder, sir, if that’s a good idea?’ They knew how sensitive the prince was to confrontation. The rare contradiction would be followed by a communal sharp intake of breath, then stony silence. Palace etiquette forbade any hint of rebuke. Cleverdon would wave aside questions about shaky finances with cryptic advice such as that to Peter Davis, her deputy: ‘Beware of tidy graveyards.’
Like Cleverdon, Shebbeare was both enthusiastic and deferential, but when faced with the necessity of giving unwelcome advice, he too preferred to stay silent. The most either would say was, ‘Yes, sir, but …’ before tailing off. Power did not want to hear the truth. ‘It was difficult to say “No,”’ Shebbeare admitted to a friend, ‘because the automatic punishment was that he would find someone else to say “Yes.”’
Persuading Charles to reverse a poor decision was best done by putting on an elaborate act. First, one had to be the last person to talk to him on a chosen subject, by remaining in the room after others had left. Then, graciously thanking His Royal Highness for the opportunity of a private moment, the adviser would preface his presentation with an offer to interpret His Royal Highness’s wishes with a wholly unthreatening offer of help: ‘Sir, might we just do the same by just a slightly different route?’ Such manoeuvres protected Charles from many mistakes.
One of the casualties of this system was Jeremy White, a successful British businessman based in Los Angeles who had been recruited in 1993 to manage the Prince’s Youth and Business Trust. Among the reasons he accepted the job was Charles’s successful negotiation with David Young, one of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite ministers, that the government would match all the money raised by Charles. With ample funds, the trust helped forty thousand young people to start micro-businesses. But this achievement, White discovered, was not admired by Shebbeare or Cleverdon. To impress the prince, both appeared to White to enjoy stamping on his fingers rather than cooperating to protect his success. The climax of the warfare arose in 1997, after the auction of a Lotus car, donated by the manufacturer, to help raise money for the trust. Lotus formally complained to Charles that White had failed to attend the event. ‘I would have been there if Shebbeare had told me about it,’ commented White, who immediately resigned and went on to earn his own fortune as a businessman. ‘He was from the commercial world,’ sniffed Shebbeare to an aide, ‘and didn’t get on with people.’
White’s departure did not trouble Charles. He believed that his saviour was to be Tony Blair, the new prime minister, who decided that Labour’s broad programme to help the disadvantaged was in synch with Charles’s ambitions. This meant that Shebbeare could attract more funds from the government.
For Charles to carve out a unique position in British public life would require more than just leading a large grouping of charities. He felt impelled to be noticed, admired, and considered relevant. His targets were vested interests: architecture, education and medicine. Over the years he had crafted a singular philosophy about the world, and his place at its apex, to justify his rebellion against modern society. His charities would provide a platform and justification for his campaigns.
He started with medicine. Few professions were more entrenched. The first hint of his coming campaign had been his 1982 address to the annual conference of the British Medical Association. To celebrate his election as the BMA’s new president, he used the invitation to criticise the profession’s rejection of alternative or complementary therapies.
Ever since he had been introduced to homeopathy by his grandmother and by Laurens van der Post, Charles had preached the virtues of unconventional treatments. Taking mixtures of plants, herbs and minerals, he believed, stimulated the body’s self-healing mechanism to treat serious illnesses. He also advocated acupuncture, chiropractic therapy and spine manipulation. Releasing the body’s vital forces, blocked by misaligned vertebrae, he was certain, was a verified therapy. Consistent with his belief in the power of God acting through the Divine Spirit, he was convinced that a sick person’s ‘inner awareness’ could enable them to ‘will’ their recovery ‘in relation to the cosmos’. A patient confident about ‘holism’ should welcome the simultaneous treatment of their illness and their spirit. Charles dismissed any doubts by referring to van der Post’s enthusiasm for the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, whose work on the ‘collective unconscious’, which unites mankind through a common vital force, advocated the power of such forms of healing.
Charles urged his audience at the conference to embrace alternative medicine, as ‘practised by folk healers who are guided by traditional wisdom’. For a thirty-four-year-old with a mediocre degree in history to preach the power of spiritualism, based on a jumble of ideas inherited from van der Post, Jung and the sixteenth-century Swiss healer and alchemist Paracelsus, and then to denounce, to an audience of doctors, the science that produced the drugs that had eradicated polio and tuberculosis, was as frightening as it was brazen – especially to a profession that was still struggling to cure heart disease, cancer and other fatal conditions.
His audience’s polite applause was welcome after the derision being heaped upon him every week for his eccentric beliefs in ITV’s satirical Spitting Image, and he would later admit that he had expected to be misunderstood and criticised by his audience. But the doctors were tolerant. They listened patiently as he lamented that it was his fate to ‘accept it is God’s