not to take responsibility. Loyal to the monarchy, he agreed to be led by his new deputy; after all, Bolland was acting on Charles’s behalf with Camilla’s approval. Whenever Patrick Jephson complained that Bolland was ‘monstering the media’, Lamport would reply: ‘I can find no evidence.’ His sharpest reproach to Bolland was ‘We don’t do that sort of thing.’ Both men understood their terms of employment – with Charles, only unquestioning obedience was acceptable.
3
On 1 May 1997, ‘spin’ won New Labour’s landslide victory. Charles, like every powerbroker, was in awe of the conjurer of those arts, Tony Blair.
The two men had first met at a dinner in 1995 at St James’s Palace. Blair was hardly a passionate royalist. Only the previous year, he had advocated a smaller, Scandinavian-type monarchy, curbing the rights of the royal family to engage in public controversy. The queen, he suggested, needed to decide whether the monarchy should ‘retreat into isolation and the old hierarchical order, or seek to become more like a normal family’. His ideas, popular in the Labour Party, had been criticised by Charles for seeking to transform the family into something ‘more pompous and harder to approach’.
Despite their differences, Charles and Blair soon arranged further meetings. Familiarity had not lessened the prince’s cynicism about those in government. Concerned for his two passions, the environment and education, he believed politicians to be dishonest, especially about young people’s supposed inability to read and enjoy Shakespeare. ‘I don’t see why politicians and others should think they have the monopoly of wisdom,’ he said. Unintentionally, he aspired to emulate the status which Samuel Johnson had attributed in 1783 to his unconventional predecessor, the future George IV: ‘the situation of the Prince of Wales was the happiest of any person’s in the kingdom, even beyond that of the Sovereign … the enjoyment of hope – the high superiority of rank without the anxious cares of government, – and a great degree of power, both from natural influence wisely used, and from the sanguine expectations of those who look forward to the chance of future favour’.
Charles had travelled a long way since his first serious encounter with senior functionaries, in 1970. ‘I pointed out,’ he wrote after an extended meeting with President Nixon in Washington that year, ‘that one must not become controversial too often, otherwise people don’t take you seriously.’ But he added, ‘To be just a presence would be fatal.’ He refined that thought after flying with Ted Heath and three former prime ministers to the funeral of Charles de Gaulle later the same year. ‘Perhaps the most important lesson,’ Dimbleby concluded from his conversations with Charles, ‘was that his future would be frustratingly circumscribed unless he chose to make more of his role than precedent strictly required – or observers expected.’ Twenty-three years later, Charles told an aide, ‘I have always wanted to roll back some of the more ludicrous frontiers of the Sixties in terms of education, architecture, art, music and literature, not to mention agriculture.’ In middle age, he felt underused and under-appreciated by successive governments. Instead of ceremonial duties, he wanted to promote British culture and industry.
Tony Blair had no interest in Charles’s ambitions. Outside the prince’s hearing, he did not conceal his feelings about the royal family. At best, he gave the impression to his senior staff that he would ‘wing it’ with the royals, while officials at St James’s Palace concluded that Blair preferred to keep away from those he did not know or particularly like. Nevertheless, he played the part, and was not immune to being impressed. After his first royal audience, he recounted with awe how the queen was ‘clued up on current affairs’.
On his first visit to Balmoral, Blair wore a tweed suit and instructed Cherie, although anti-royalist, to be on her best behaviour. He judged the heir to the throne to be a mix of traditional and radical: both princely and insecure, nervous about the public’s reaction towards him and uneasy about informality. He had been spared Charles’s pained response to his letter which started ‘Dear Prince Charles’ and was signed ‘Yours ever, Tony.’ Lamport called Downing Street to stipulate that in future Charles wanted Blair’s letters to start ‘Sir’ and to end ‘Your obedient servant’. The prime minister’s private secretary replied that he refused to ask his master to change his style. Blair’s ignorance of the required etiquette extended to an invitation from Downing Street for Diana and her sons to spend a day at Chequers. Charles was not informed, which he complained was a breach of protocol.
When on 1 July 1997 Charles met Blair in Hong Kong for the former British colony’s handover to China, he put such lapses to one side. Instead, in a journal he wrote soon after, he praised Blair as ‘a most enjoyable person to talk to – perhaps partly due to his being younger than me!’ The prince found it ‘astounding’ that the prime minister listened to him, but he was critical of Blair’s ‘introspection, cynicism and criticism [which] seem to be the order of the day. Clearly he recognised the need to find ways of overcoming the apathy and loss of self-belief, to find a fresh national direction.’ As a traditionalist, Charles also disliked New Labour’s use of focus groups and reliance on untested advisers: ‘They take decisions based on market research or focus groups, or papers produced by political advisers or civil servants, none of whom will ever have experienced what it is they are taking decisions about.’ Charles did not consider that the same could be said about him.
He had arrived in Hong Kong in a bad mood, having been forced to fly Club Class in the chartered British Airways plane because government ministers had grabbed all the first-class seats. ‘It took me some time to realise,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘that this was not first class (!) although it puzzled me as to why the seat seemed so uncomfortable. Such is the end of Empire, I sighed to myself.’ He added a lament about his family’s last use of the royal yacht Britannia before it was scrapped. Without those perks and privileges, he feared, his status was diminished.
Blighted by monsoon rain, the ceremony in Hong Kong was dire. In his private journal, headed ‘The Handover of Hong Kong or The Great Chinese Takeaway’, Charles was scathing about the Chinese leaders, in his view ‘appalling old waxworks’. Sympathetic to the Tibetans, he regarded Beijing’s rulers as ‘corrupt’, and ridiculed the People’s Liberation Army for an ‘awful Soviet-style display’ of goose-stepping. Wind generators, he noticed, were employed to enable the Chinese flags to ‘flutter enticingly’. Charles appeared unaware that his host, President Jiang Zemin, was the architect of the phenomenal economic growth that had tripled China’s average wages in fifteen years and was transforming the country into a global power.
Blair would have sympathised with Charles’s mockery. His own meetings with the Communist Party chiefs were disappointing. By contrast with the prime minister’s tactful concealment of his true feelings, his pugnacious spokesman Alastair Campbell was uncharacteristically generous towards Charles during the visit, summing him up as ‘a fairly decent bloke, surrounded by a lot of nonsense and people best described as from another age’. Campbell astutely added that there was ‘something sad about him. All his life, even on the big issues, he had to make small talk, surrounded by luxury, as here, people fawning on him, and yet somehow obviously unfulfilled,’ and with his ‘private life a mess’.
Campbell was unaware of the full scope of Charles’s arrangements during the visit. The prince never travelled without Michael Fawcett. Dressed as a perfect gentleman in an Anderson & Sheppard suit with a silk handkerchief in the breast pocket, a Turnbull & Asser shirt and a silk tie, Fawcett flattered his employer by adopting his style and mannerisms, fashioning himself as Charles’s doppelganger, even furnishing his home with items purchased from the prince’s suppliers.
With a love of grandeur and extravagance similar to his master’s, he was skilled at satisfying Charles’s expectations, and set himself
