Restive Prince Charles begins to speak out

Press, 16 December 1985, Page 12

Restive Prince Charles begins to speak out

From ‘The Economist,’ London

The Prince of Wales was recently reported to have told a confidant that he believed that inner-city decay was in danger of dividing Britain. Now, Prince Charles has delivered a public warning that Britain might “end up as a fourth-rate country” if it did not work harder, and rekindle the spirit of enterprise which the Prince had noted during his visit to America. “I long to know,” he told an audience of Scottish businessmen, “why, for example, it does not pay to do in this country what they do in the United States, where each company can put aside a certain percentage of its pre-tax profits for community enterprise.”

The speech seemed charged with princely impatience at what might appear to be Government complacency. It is the latest in a series of pronouncements from the Prince of an increasingly political nature. Last year, he dipped his toe into controversy with an attack on modern architecture and town planning, including flagrant and highly effective interventions in two celebrated London causes, the National Gallery extension and a skyscraper in the City. Neither is< now to be built >

Emboldened, the Prince made covert visits to slum districts and consulted radical urban conservationists, being only mildly embarrassed when news of his interest duly leaked. He is determined to continue this royalist incursion into the political arena, freely departing from prepared scripts and deliberately testing the purist constitutionalists who say the heir to the throne should be above such matters.

He is motivated by two concerns. The first is that the public may come to regard his function as increasingly irrelevant if all it hears is news of his sporting and social activities. The second, more delicate, is his aversion to what he sees as a particularly divisive period in British politics. He shares with his father a desire to call a spade a spade, and cannot resist reacting when he thinks things are wrong. Last month, . stung by press comment on his supposed wimpishness and his wife’s cantankerousness, Prince Charles and Princess Diana gave a television interview to the television newsreader, Sir Alastair Burnet, intended to rebut the criticism.

The event suffered from an excess of deference. There was disappointment in palace circles that the couple were not more rigorously tested, so as to present themselves in a less defensive, more positive light. This Prince Charles is now seeking to do.

With the assistance of his new personal secretary, Sir John Riddell, he is catholic in his taste in advice. Lunches and dinners are held at Kensington Palace with conversation ranging beyond architecture and urban renewal to young people, education, unemployment, the north/south divide and the condition of Britain generally. Not surprisingly, not all the contributions are supportive of the Government. The Prince is regarded as stronger on analysis than on policj’ prescription, where he tends to lapse into the bland expressions of worry that characterise his public speeches. He may not be bland for ever though. The Prince has become increasingly restive at the constraints placed on him by his role, and determined to propagate his own views through his access to publicity. He does not, after all, have a vote. Copyright — The Economist.