Free Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor by Catherine Mayer

 
    Conclusion
    Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils—nor the human race, as I believe—and then only will this our state have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.
    Republic , Plato
    In April 2014, A broadcaster asked me to participate in a surreal exercise, recording an interview as part of a preprepared obituary to run if the Prince should die without being so courteous as to give news organizations prior notice of the event. In an upstairs room of a London pub called the Peasant—the producers chose the location without intended irony—I answered questions posed by a journalist designed to help me sum up Charles and his impact. I found it tricky to do this in sound bites, and even at the luxury of book length, it has been a struggle to draw a balanced assessment. So much is written and said about the Prince, but so much is also distorted for one reason or another. This book should hopefully have highlighted those reasons and stripped away some of the distortions. I have no doubt its publication will also be taken as license to create fresh mischaracterizations and caricatures of its subject.
    That Charles is the victim of such distortions does not exonerate him and his extended court from a share of the responsibility for them. He is always making connections—between people and ideas, the past, present, and future, the material and the spiritual, golden threads that bind. This is one of his greatest talents. What he doesn’t always spot are key connections between what he does, or is done in his name, and how this impacts perceptions.
    One frequent charge against the Prince, that he does too little, is obviously untrue. Another—that if he were not doing the things he does, as activist and charitable entrepreneur, other such entrepreneurs would fill the breach—seemed increasingly dubious as I delved into the detail and scope of his activities. The Prince’s Trust and his other charities and initiatives are near-perfect reflections of the Prince. He has been misrepresented and misunderstood, in ways anatomized in this book. But not infrequently when Charles gets bad press, it’s because he deserves it or an aspect of his organization warrants it, or because people harbor legitimate disagreements that they cannot directly debate with him or easily voice except by attempting to make as much noise as he does.
    Courtiers too often tell him what they think he wants to hear rather than what he needs to hear. He isn’t always given the opportunity to understand the full dynamics of a situation. He is surrounded by individuals who will try to hearten him, and sometimes to gain favor by playing princely trigger points that everybody in palace circles knows how to locate. Charles has long been a Defender of Faith—faith in Nature and perennial wisdoms as well as Christianity—and thus will never accept alternative philosophies or movements such as Modernism that to him appear as kryptonite. He doesn’t grasp that many of the people he has run up against over the years are as passionate as he is, as driven and well meaning as he is.
    There is no point in arguing that he should jettison the belief system he has spent a lifetime constructing. He would no more be capable of doing that than I, an atheist, can subscribe to that belief system. I may not be fully in harmony with Harmony , but I have witnessed positive outcomes of the princely philosophy, the virtuous circles Charles is capable of creating. He sometimes sparks vicious cycles too, and in drawing to a conclusion, I will aim to highlight ways in which he might guard against that tendency in future, for his own benefit and the benefit of the institution he represents.
    I do so not as a