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ceremonial functions as the heir to the throne. He was twenty-eight and had somewhat
unwisely publicly set a limit for getting married ‘by the time I’m thirty’. The precedents
for the role of Prince of Wales were not encouraging; the Duke of Windsor, after a brave
stint in France during the First World War and then a series of punishing Empire tours,
had become increasingly spoiled, selfish and dissolute; Charles’s great-grandfather,
George V, an altogether more placid and pliable young man, had spent his seventeen
years as Prince of Wales doing nothing but ‘killing animals and sticking in stamps’, to
quote his official biographer; Edward VII’s conduct as Prince of Wales had been a
byword for self-indulgence.
Elizabeth, busy and successful in her public role as monarch, had given her son little
help in his search. There was, after all, no role marked out for the heir to the throne
until he succeeded and with the Queen a healthy fifty-year-old that eventuality was
going to be a long way away. She gave him his own office in St James’s Palace and his
own advisers, among whom David Checketts still featured, and expected him to get on
with his life. There were desultory discussions between Buckingham Palace, Downing
Street and the Prince’s staff about finding him a ‘proper job’. Checketts suggested the
possibility of the Governor-Generalship of Australia, but the bitter row which took place
in 1975 over the sacking of the Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, by the
Queen’s official representative, the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, put paid to that
plan. Lord Carrington and Sir Christopher Soames suggested he might be appointed
Ambassador to Paris, an idea which was quickly shot down. Later, when James
Callaghan succeeded Harold Wilson as Labour Prime Minister in 1976, he suggested a
programme of instruction in Government, but was disappointed by the Prince’s lack of
enthusiasm. ‘Jim Callaghan was obsessed with the idea of getting Prince Charles a job,’
a fellow Minister said. ‘We put him on the board of the CDC [Colonial Development
Corporation] and the idea was that he would be chairman, but he didn’t bother to turn
up and wouldn’t take it seriously. He wasn’t interested – he wanted to be a dabbler…’
Checketts endeavoured to interest the Prince in the running of his Duchy of Cornwall
without success. There was concern at the Palace about the apparent lack of focus to the
Prince’s life and public comment about the fact that he seemed to spend much of his
time in high-profile elitist sports such as polo, shooting and skiing. The hero prince
seemed to be turning into a playboy.
The Prince resented Buckingham Palace’s efforts to control him; difficulties between
them over the Trust to be established to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977
marked the beginnings of a rift between the two households which was to become more
marked over the years. In the summer of 1974 Martin Charteris warned the Prince’s
Private Secretary, Checketts, that the Trust, which the Prince was in the process of
establishing to help inner-city projects, might conflict with the already established
George V Jubilee Trust (set up under the chairmanship of Charles’s predecessor as Prince
of Wales) and the proposed Trust for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, particularly as the
Queen was intending to ask her son to be chairman of both Jubilee Trusts. ‘I think’,
Charteris wrote on 26 June 1974, ‘the message is go steady on the Trust Prince Charles