The King & I: the day I went for tea with Charles

Good humour: with the Queen in 2009. Picture: Getty Images

Once upon a time, I asked the future king if he could do an Australian accent. “Oh, a little bit,” he replied, in pitch-perfect Aussie. “You forget I went to school in Australia.” He talked about getting food poisoning in Alice Springs and being sick on the plane all the way home to England – “I thought I was going to die” – and even though we were in his residence in London, with snow flurries outside, he joked, “I suspect it will be raining in Melbourne.”

This man who would be king knew his Aussie in-jokes. He also had a great memory for our land, explaining that when he was at school here there was only one girl, the headmaster’s daughter. Then a beat. “Poor thing.” With a twinkle in his eye. He’d be great company at a dinner party, I thought – the guest you’d invite to sparkle things up. This was not the HRH of my expectation, raised as I was on a steady media diet of princely angst and agitation; that furrowed brow, that bewildered cadence.

But no, not here, a gathering of Aussies at Clarence House who seemed uniformly chuffed to be in attendance despite many republicans, I’m sure, in our midst. The gilt-edged summons had worked its magic; cynicism royal-washed by enchantment. A compatriot had informed his English colleagues that he was off to an Australian cultural reception at the Prince’s house. “That’ll be a small gathering then,” was the reply. Boom. Yet Charles had none of that condescension about him, not one jot.

What we got, instead, was a genuine fondness for our country, an affection that bodes well for his tenure as King of this land. The headwinds of republicanism are strong and largely out of his control; certainties are being challenged, uncomfortable questions about colonisation getting louder. Yet Charles struck me as an attentive listener, a man whose edges have been softened by adversity in a deeply compassionate way – all qualities that will stand him in good stead as monarch.

His residence seemed like a museum where someone happened to live. Carefully. He touched the place lightly, more caretaker than owner. The royal bookshelf held Ted Hughes, Dick Francis, P.G. Wodehouse and Edith Sitwell, and there was a Monet on the wall, but family photos were the most striking aspect of the reception room; they were everywhere, in ill-matched frames. The effect was disarming and endearing: this was a man deeply attached to family.

Prince Charles at Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop campus

Sartre said an essential freedom is the ability to say no, yet for so long Charles has been unable to say that word, gripped as he is by the stronghold of familial, national and Commonwealth expectation. “All my life people have been telling me what to do,” he declared to a journalist decades ago. Yet he’s finally stepping into his destiny-decreed role with great confidence and elan, with his rock, Camilla, by his side.

She was also at the reception. A source of great strength for Charles; quietly all-calming, the ballast for his agitation. It’s a story of a complex, messy but deeply enduring love – love as rescue, which Diana never offered. “It’s not calf-love, it hooks into the heart,” interior designer Nicky Haslam – a man who has known Camilla for decades – once explained. “It’s like a rope attached to her … it’s a great need, this love.”

After that perception-altering reception I wrote in my notes, “Ironically (for a republican) after meeting Charles I think he’d make a very good king – compassionate, affable, grounded, wise. But I suspect that for countries like Australia and New Zealand, it’s too late.” History will be the judge, but in the meantime I think we’ll see the magnificent, empathetic best of the man now he’s free to do what he’s been in training for his entire life.