Our complex new King: Charles a man of wicked humour and fine taste
The new King joked, when he was still a prince, about his affection for Australia, despite never having owned a pair of budgie smugglers.
I set out to write an authentic and honest portrayal of our King, Charles III. A deep-thinking, spiritual man, he is not only a worthy recipient of the Crown, but an anchored monarch we are blessed to have in these times of uncertainty.
He is not cynical but intuitive, instinctive, and perhaps a little sentimental and overemotional at times. Mostly, he is somebody who cares very deeply about those he serves: in Britain, the realms and the wider Commonwealth, and the planet on which we all live, today and for the future.
He may have been born into a family with huge wealth and privilege, but he has always tried his best to justify that good fortune by working tirelessly to improve the lot of others less fortunate than himself.
He would be the first to admit he is not perfect, far from it. He can be obsessive, a little eccentric, and he does have a short fuse, but his temper is invariably short-lived. Prince Harry writes in his controversial memoir Spare that when his father watched the BBC news on television, he would often end up throwing the remote control at the screen out of frustration.
A passionate, driven man, he has a great love of the arts, too – of books, Shakespeare (his favourite is Henry V), and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, of the Goons, the poetry of Dylan Thomas, the music of Bach, Hubert Parry and Leonard Cohen; of art, particularly the work of Johan Joseph Zoffany, and the classical architecture of Rome, Christopher Wren and, more recently, Quinlan Terry. He loves to wake up and literally smell the roses, due to his heightened sense of smell.
It seems to me a little absurd for an author to write a fair and contemporaneous biography about a living person without having met them, or at least watched them at close quarters. It is different for historians, for, short of inventing a time machine, what other options are open to them apart from digging deep and relying on the source material they unearth? But it is implausible for a biographer to claim to have some idea of a person’s real character from only second- or third-hand accounts.
I have been privileged to have had access to the King and several of those in his circle. I have been able to observe closely what he does now, as King, and what he did as heir to his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II.
During my work as a royal correspondent, I have met and chatted with the King on numerous occasions.More importantly, I have been granted interviews with the King twice, when he was the Prince of Wales, to discuss issues that he is clearly passionate about. On both occasions he was gracious and generous with his time, and candid in what turned out to be two meaningful and enlightening conversations.
The first interview was in April 2018, on a jet flying back to Australia from Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, the South Pacific nation made up of 80 islands. Everyone was in high spirits on the return flight from Vanuatu, where Charles had been photographed in a grass skirt and a garland after the local Council of Chiefs made him “Chief Mal Menaringmanu”. He had then drunk kava with them and met some of the tribal leaders of Tanna, where his father, Prince Philip, was revered as a god.
The especially configured Boeing 737 Business Jet was designed to fly the Australian prime minister and VVIPs. This time I was one of 25 people on board, including the Australian foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, and, of course, Charles and his team of advisers. The prince, referred to as “The Boss” by his staff, sat at the front of the luxury jet working though his correspondence in a sealed-off private section. Outside was an adjoining corridor leading to the pilots and crew at the front and the open area equipped with large, luxury, cream leather seats for the officials.
I was beckoned forward by his then communications secretary, Julian Payne, into the middle section of the plane where Charles’s staff were all seated. “The Boss”, he said, would be very happy to have a conversation with me for a few minutes.
Charles is complex. As he said in an interview with his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994, “I am one of those people who searches. I’m interested in pursuing the path, if I can find it, through the thickets”. It is Charles’s character — that of a man who admits to getting carried away by enthusiasm in his bid to try to improve things, not just his position in society and royal status – that makes him interesting to write about.
The prince was sitting at his desk in a comfortable, dark-grey leather chair surrounded by papers and his handwritten letters. We shook hands and I told him that I felt his visit to Vanuatu had been a “triumph”. Charles was immaculate, sitting in his seat with his lightweight-wool Anderson & Sheppard tailored suit and silk tie still on, and a silk pocket handkerchief.
He does not seem to take praise that well, but he smiled warmly and said, “Yes, I was very touched by the warmth of the welcome”. It had, he added, felt like something from “history, from another time”. He was right. The power of the energy created by the hundreds of dancers performing a traditional kastom dance (a pidgin word derived from the English pronunciation of “custom”) had seemed hypnotic and overwhelming to one watching it for the first time.
Our conversation was wide-ranging. One minute we were discussing the future of the Commonwealth and climate change, the next the built environment and Poundbury, his visionary traditionalist village in Dorset. This is so often unfairly mocked as a “feudal Disneyland”, but a growing and diverse community has settled there and developed over time, suggesting it has achieved its objective.
Had I been, Charles asked me. I nodded in the affirmative and expressed my genuine approval. I have, in fact, visited Poundbury three times on media days arranged by his Clarence House office and, essentially, I agree with the concept.
My conversation with the prince was not exclusively serious. There was humour, too – with Charles that is almost inevitable. He is a very funny man, with a quirky sense of humour formed from his love of Spike Milligan and the Goons. When I commended his amusing speech at a governor-general’s reception in Brisbane, where he had his audience in stitches, he was typically humble. He had joked that he would never again fit into a pair of skin-tight “budgie smugglers” and said, somewhat alarmingly, that his advancing years coincided with “bits falling off”.
“You’re very kind,” he said with a smile, before adding, “But I’ve never even owned a pair of budgie smugglers in my life,” with perfect comic timing. The way he put emphasis on the words “budgie smugglers” made me chuckle.
My five-minute “brush-by” had turned into 25 minutes of intriguing, enlightening and meaningful conversation with the future king.
I returned to my comfortable seat for the remainder of the 2½ -hour flight, sipped a perfectly chilled glass of Australian sauvignon blanc and made contemporaneous notes of our conversation. Charles continued with his work, prepping for his next engagement. He had short biographies to read on all the people he would meet. Nothing was left to chance.
My second one-on-one interview with the future king was on October 25, 2019 at the British ambassador’s residence in Tokyo. Charles has been in Japan, his fifth visit, for the enthronement of Emperor Naruhito, who had succeeded his father Akihito the previous May.
The following day Charles attended a garden party, hosted by the British ambassador to Japan, Paul Madden. He was keen to talk about a subject close to his heart, a sustainable economy. We exchanged pleasantries, and I told him I had just been on a visit to Pakistan with his son Prince William and before that with Prince Harry in South Africa. Then we got down to business. He immediately stressed the importance of financial institutions reducing their investments in sectors such as oil and gas and redirecting it towards schemes that deliver sustainable returns. He talked to me with great passion about the importance of sustainable investment into the regeneration of forests, the oceans, and agriculture for several more minutes, and then he was gone and off to his next engagement.
The first time I saw him after he had become King was on November 16, 2022, at a reception to promote small businesses that he hosted at Buckingham Palace, as he stepped out from the White Room, where he had been chatting to business leaders. He spotted me and I bowed my head and addressed him, “Your Majesty”, and he asked how I was. It was a nice touch.
Fundamentally, I believe the picture that emerges from my research, is of a thoroughly decent man, a person of integrity and honour who has always striven to do his best as a public servant and tried to put duty before himself.
This is my attempt to tell the true story of his remarkable journey from a shy prince to our first king of the twenty-first century.
This is an edited extract from King Charles III by Robert Jobson (Allen and Unwin, May 2023, RRP $34.99).
