Prince Charles too dangerous to be king: This eccentric royal could imperil monarchy | Mail OnlineBy Max Hastings
Last updated at 11:19 AM on 18th December 2010
The engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton has given the British people a welcome fillip in a chilly season. Next April’s wedding will be a big success — even if we make a mess of some things, we’re jolly good at royal ceremonies.
The hard part comes afterwards: as the Queen gets older, growing attention and speculation is focusing on the monarchy’s future. Opinion polls show that most British people would like William to become heir to the throne, bypassing his father, the Prince of Wales.
But courtiers vigorously declare that’s not going to happen. When the Queen dies — as, like all of us, she eventually must — her son is determined to succeed her.
Charles and Camilla: Obsessively convinced of his own rightness, Charles views his critics with the weary resignation of an early Christian martyr
The Prince and his wife Camilla earned warm public sympathy last week when their car was assaulted by rioting student demonstrators in London. But many thoughtful people are alarmed by the prospect of a figure of such assertive eccentricity acceding to the British throne.
I heard one of the cleverest men in Britain, master of an Oxbridge college, quite calmly say the other night: ‘The best hope for the monarchy is that Prince Charles dies before the Queen.’
This seemed a brutal observation from a kindly and temperate man, but he went on to justify it: ‘We spend our lives here educating a new generation to understand that rational behaviour requires us to reach conclusions and make decisions by examining evidence.
‘Yet now we have the heir to the throne demanding — not in a throwaway remark, but in an entire book to which he has just put his name — that we should reject science and evidence in favour of following our instincts. This is surely disturbing.’
The Prince’s new book Harmony is indeed a startling piece of work. He begins it by writing: ‘This is a call to revolution. “Revolution” is a strong word, and I use it deliberately. For more than 30 years I have been working to identify the best solutions to the array of deeply entrenched problems we face.
The Queen: She has never said a word to raise a hackle for almost 60 years
‘Having considered these questions long and hard, my view is that our outlook in the Westernised world has become far too firmly framed by a mechanistic approach to science.’
He continues: ‘This approach is entirely based upon the gathering of the results that come from subjecting physical phenomena to scientific experiment.’
Though the Prince says he does not dismiss all science as bosh, his book is a call to arms against ‘the great juggernaut of industrialisation’ which he deplores.
Some of his phrases are messianic: ‘I would be failing in my duty to future generations and to the Earth itself if I did not attempt to point this out and indicate possible ways we can heal the world.’
Obsessively convinced of his own rightness, he views his critics with the weary resignation of an early Christian martyr: ‘It is probably inevitable that if you challenge the traditions of conventional thinking you will find yourself accused of naivety.’
Now, you may say it’s a fine thing we have an heir to the throne who cares passionately about the planet and is determined to do something about it. But what if his prescriptions are wrong?
At the heart of the Queen’s brilliant success for almost 60 years is that we have been denied the slightest clue as to what she thinks about anything but dogs and horses. Her passivity has been inspired, because her subjects can then attribute any sentiments they choose to her. She has never said a word to raise a hackle.
Prince Charles, by contrast, wears his heart on his sleeve. He outraged the medical profession by bullying the last government into providing NHS funding for his cherished homeopathic medicine. This, doctors pointed out, meant transferring tax payers’ money from proven remedies to quackery — panaceas for which there is no scientific evidence at all.
A leading breast cancer specialist, Professor Michael Baum, wrote an open letter to the British Medical Journal after the Prince suggested drinking carrot juice and taking coffee bean enemas might help to combat cancer.
The Professor furiously wrote that his own 40 years of study and 25 years’ involvement in cancer research might be thought to offer at least as solid a basis for addressing this issue as the Prince’s ‘power and authority, which rest on an accident of birth’.
Charles makes many enemies with his views and his influence on government decisions
The Government is committed to trialling genetically modified crops, which many agriculturalists think offer the best hope of feeding the people of the world. But the Prince repeatedly condemns GM as the devil’s work — just as he opposes nuclear power and much modern architecture.
Constitutionally, it’s irrelevant whether his views are right or wrong: by wading into high- profile controversies and using his status to influence government decisions, he may please green enthusiasts, but he also makes many enemies — some of them much more clever people than himself, who reject his ideas about how to better humanity.
In this way, he compromises the Royal Family.
A courtier recently said to me: ‘You shouldn’t worry about this. Charles knows that from the day he becomes King, he must keep his mouth shut.’ But in the same week, one of the Prince’s intimate circle privately said: ‘The nation is ready for a visionary monarchy.’
I believe that if the Prince and those around him think any such thing, Charles would hit trouble as fast and hard as a truck crashing into a wall when he’s the occupant of the throne.
Nobody doubts that he is an honourable man who wants to do good. His Prince’s Trust has made a remarkable contribution to helping the young get started in trades and businesses.
kate and Prince William: Polls want him to be the next king, bypassing his father
But Charles insists upon addressing a range of issues wider and deeper than any mortal man — unless he has a mind of genius, as the Prince certainly does not — can sensibly encompass. Some of his book reads like the ravings of a Buddhist mystic.
I once incurred princely wrath by suggesting to him that he would be judged by what he is rather than by what he does — that being heir to the throne is not a government office.
Jeremy Paxman makes the same point in his book on royalty: ‘The Prince had consistently misunderstood or ignored a basic truth at the heart of the relationship between royalty and the people.
‘He seemed to believe his significance lay in what he believed and did. The truth was simply that his significance lay in who he was.’
An acquaintance of the Prince argued to me recently that we should not worry about his behaviour because anybody who spends time with him quickly sees that he is potty, and thus harmless.
I would agree — if his eccentricities were confined to collecting matchboxes or dressing up as Napoleon.
But he is so set in his ways, so accustomed to not being contradicted — because those who argue with him are swiftly expelled from his counsels — that I am convinced that if he becomes King he will persist in trying to save the world, and thus precipitate a crisis.
He craves the return of what he thinks was a happier, simpler, more ‘natural’ world — for instance, he deplores inter ference with primitive tribes.
A person who knows him well says: ‘I used to think Camilla could sort him out, but it’s too late. He’s a spoilt baby.’
He writes: ‘If we continue to engineer the extinction of the last remaining indigenous, traditional societies, we eliminate one of the last remaining sources of wisdom.’
He does not stop to ask what happens if the peoples of those indigenous societies want TVs and mobile phones, or even medicines to save them from some of the horrible diseases to which primitive man fell victim.
Rural grandees such as himself may have enjoyed times past, but peasants certainly did not.
The industrial growth which he hates has brought huge benefits to mankind. He seems oblivious to the tension between his grand vision about how others should live and his personal financial profligacy; his enthusiasm for using helicopters and keeping every light blazing in Clarence House at all hours.
Now, he is not a bad man, but I think he is a very dangerous one for the monarchy, if allowed to ascend the throne.
I remain apprehensive that his eagerness to become King derives from hopes of using the position to promote his dotty causes. A person who knows him well says: ‘I used to think Camilla could sort him out, but it’s too late. He’s a spoilt baby.’
The Queen’s triumph — and that of Prince Philip, whose achievement is often underrated — has been rooted in a discipline that Charles utterly lacks.
For they recognise that being royal, far from allowing crowned heads to do as they choose, makes it essential to exercise iron control over one’s every word and deed.
Prince Philip has occasionally committed indiscretions, but these are trifling in a lifetime as consort. Some unkind things are said about the royal couple’s failure as parents. Yet their contribution to our nation far outweighs any domestic shortcomings.
The argument in royal circles now concerns whether the Queen’s passive style of monarchy will suffice for a new age.
When she ascended to the throne in 1952, Britain was a homogeneous white country with a culture symbolised by beer, country churches, cricket, the Radio Times and Miss Marple. Today, however, the ethnic and cultural make-up of the nation is changing fast.
According to one projection, by 2051 the ‘white British’ proportion of the population will fall to 67 per cent, then decline to only 50 per cent by the end of the century. A significant proportion of the children of minorities will, meanwhile, become assimilated and adopt our traditional values, perhaps including respect for the monarchy.
But it seems rash to expect too much, when the ‘white British’ are diminishingly confident about what our values are.
They are scarcely churchgoing Christians. Even the Church of England is racked with doubts about its own beliefs. That other great British institution, the BBC, often seems more concerned with providing a platform for minorities than with articulating the views of the majority.
If I was advising Prince William and Kate Middleton, I would urge they confine their public remarks to politeness and platitudes.
Even fish and chips are history. Tea is not the national opiate it once was — if you asked for a ‘cuppa char’ in many fast-food places, the Polish girl staring blankly across the counter might think you were making an indecent suggestion.
Some younger courtiers argue that a ‘more relevant’ monarchy will be necessary, to engage with the new Britain. I suggest that they are wrong.
The best hope for the future is to maintain the Queen’s great tradition, of being all things to all her subjects by remaining a smiling, but silent, monarch.
In the days when royal advisers occasionally sought my opinions as a newspaper editor, my counsel was always the same: ‘Say nothing, say nothing, say nothing.’ I thought the various confessional interviews by the Prince and Princess of Wales were suicidal. Charles’ book Harmony can promote only disharmony around the throne.
If I was advising Prince William and Kate Middleton, I would urge they confine their public remarks to politeness and platitudes. At all costs, I would forswear interviews and documentaries designed to reveal ‘the real William’ and ‘the real Kate’. For our sakes, as well as theirs, we should not go there.
Modern kings and queens must remain distant symbols of glamour, beauty and decency — or they become nothing. In the mid-21st century, as ever, once the public knows too much, the magic will be gone.
Happily for us all, there is every reason to suppose that the Queen will reign on for at least another decade. By then, it should be obvious that it would be madness to allow a quirky, stubbornly opinionated and contentious old man to assume the throne — that the best hope for Britain’s monarchy lies with William and Kate.
The most important task, meanwhile, is to prevent the media’s obsession with the young royals from tarnishing or destroying the couple.
I remain optimistic that the monarchy will survive. While many British people are indifferent to it today, few are actively hostile — a state of affairs which reflects the Queen’s achievement.
But anyone who reads the Prince of Wales’ new book will have little doubt that the chief peril to our royal institution in the decades ahead lies within his well-meaning, muddled, woolly head.
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