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not an easy man to work for and was, his biographer admitted, demanding of his staff.
He frequently changed his mind and then was furious when his staff could not keep up
with new arrangements. ‘The Prince’s enthusiasm’, Dimbleby wrote, ‘too often bore the
imprint of the last person he had spoken to [his father apparently called him an
‘intellectual pillow’] and he had a tendency to reach instant conclusions on the basis of
insufficient thought’, relying too much on intuition rather than logic. The increasing
tension in his private life did not help his temper and there would be scenes in the office
when papers would be thrown round the room. The result of this was chaos:
In these circumstances, the impression of order and precision conveyed by the Prince’s entourage on public
occasions concealed a disarray in his private office that he found hard to comprehend and impossible to
rectify. Under pressure to meet the Prince’s ever-shifting needs, a team of four officials supported by a dozen
secretaries and typists found themselves reacting haphazardly to the flow of princely enthusiasms. No one
thought to complain but disorder was rife. Letters, which arrived each week in their hundreds, piled up,
unsorted and unanswered… Classified documents sent over from the Foreign Office were frequently left in
the office unread for days…
It was all a little too reminiscent of the Duke of Windsor in his early days as Edward
VIII. Unsurprisingly, the search for a successor to Adeane took six months; the Prince’s
Assistant Private Secretary, David Roycroft, seconded from the Foreign Office to induce
order to the chaos, Hacked rapport with the Prince’ and left. The Prince was unwilling
to have an ‘insider’ foisted upon him by his mother’s entourage, but eventually lighted
upon Sir John Riddell, who, as a baronet and a merchant banker, fitted in perfectly well
with Buckingham Palace where the senior staff, who had been fearing that the candidate
would have been bearded and possibly even wearing sandals, were relieved to recognize
the familiar dark pin-striped suit.
The lack of communication between Prince and Palace was embarrassingly revealed
on a visit to Italy by the Prince and Princess of Wales in the spring of 1985. The Prince
of Wales had always been an advocate of ecumenism and had eagerly accepted an
invitation from the Archibishop of Canterbury to an ecumenical service in Canterbury
Cathedral on the occasion of the Pope’s visit in 1982, an occasion which had aroused the
suspicion and opposition of the extreme wings of the Protestant Church. In Italy in 1985
he planned to further the movement towards reconciliation between the two Christian
churches by not only visiting the Pope, a standard courtesy to a head of state, but also
by attending a religious service. Adeane had consulted both the Archbishop of
Canterbury and the Home Office (the government department responsible for advising
Buckingham Palace on the consitutional implications of inter-faith relations). It was
agreed that the best way of accomplishing this would be if the Prince and Princess
attended a mass in the Pope’s private chapel but did not take Communion. There would
therefore be no breach of the heir to the throne’s position as supreme governordesignate
of the Established Church, avoiding criticism by all but the ‘lunatic fringe’. The
suggestion was conveyed to the Pope and a date agreed for the morning of 30 April, the
day after the Waleses’ audience with the Pope.