Charles III

A frisky, wet-nosed springer spaniel snif­fer dog ap­peared under my desk and be­tween my knees. Men with pre­ci­sion hair­cuts, razor focus and more than a scent of mil­i­tary train­ing were sud­denly every­where, pok­ing about, seek­ing ter­ror­ism in the news­room chaos. Step lad­ders clat­tered and torches beamed above the poly­styrene ceil­ing tiles that masked a man­gle of wires, pipes and cen­time­tres of dust.

Amid the chaos the ed­i­tor called me into his of­fice. I was then his deputy, the one who put the daily news­pa­per to bed, a shift span­ning from mid­day to the early hours.

The Prince of Wales was mak­ing a pri­vate visit, he said.

Fine, can I go now? No. Four other ed­i­tors trooped in.

You lot, we were told, are going to have a meet­ing with Prince Charles. It was like some­body had flicked a switch. Every­one lost the abil­ity to be nor­mal. It was nearly 30 years ago, but is in­deli­ble.

We tried. Sit­ting in a horse­shoe fac­ing the fu­ture king for an hour we achieved noth­ing. He was earnestly seek­ing un­der­stand­ing but was ask­ing the wrong peo­ple. The tabloid media’s in­va­sion of his life as his mar­riage to Diana fell apart was a dire por­tent of what was to come and he wanted to grasp the de­ci­sion processes of a daily paper. Let’s just say we were in­de­pen­dent, non-sen­sa­tion­al­ist and un­able en­lighten him.

The British tabloid media has long treated roy­als like a soap opera. A foot or word wrong, let alone di­vorces and An­drew, and the ex­po­sure has been and will con­tinue to be mer­ci­less.

The late queen, to the vast ma­jor­ity a pil­lar to deco­rum, duty and grace, man­aged the media pack well. If baited she never showed it. And she eased British roy­alty for­ward just enough in an age of mas­sive changes. But the stark truth, un­com­fort­ably il­lus­trated through the an­ti­quated, as­ton­ish­ingly lav­ish processes of tran­si­tion to a new monarch, is that the func­tion­ing of roy­alty rad­i­cally needs re-eval­u­at­ing. Can­dour on pro­found mat­ters of hid­den wealth, palaces, costs and hered­i­tary priv­i­leges, so glar­ing in a di­vided so­ci­ety, had been mostly sup­pressed in def­er­ence.

The deep-rooted British cul­tural be­lief in tra­di­tion, loy­alty and an ec­cen­tric sense of being dif­fer­ent is not frac­tured any­where near enough to bring im­me­di­ate change. But as the shock of loss passes the cracks will be­come all too clear.

The next months will be telling. Britain is al­ready at risk of break­ing due to ne­glect of the foun­da­tions of fair­ness, equal­ity, care, fam­ily and com­mu­nity, in con­trast with ob­scene wealth, sound bites and short-ter­mism.

King Charles III is a man dis­tanced from “his peo­ple” de­spite pub­lic roles and earnest en­deav­ours, on ac­count of the co­coon of es­tab­lish­ment and the chal­lenge of get­ting suf­fi­cient, real an­swers and a tan­gi­ble un­der­stand­ing of so­ci­ety. He has fronted up char­i­ties and led vital ini­tia­tives. Now he has vowed to up­hold his new role as his mother de­fined, hence­forth not out­spo­ken.

We will see. Dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter, in­creas­ingly im­pa­tient times. Hered­i­tary priv­i­lege and power will be re­viewed and all royal fam­i­lies know it will be con­se­quen­tial. The weighty British crown, set with 2,868 di­a­monds, 17 sap­phires, 11 emer­alds, 269 pearls, and 4 ru­bies, is now heav­ier than ever.

One im­per­a­tive is that Charles has pre­pared William to pick-up his pi­o­neer­ing port­fo­lio on eco­log­i­cal pro­tec­tions and cli­mate change: So too his fore­sight on nur­tur­ing re­spect in a multi-faith so­ci­ety.

But the king must also take his sword to the eye-wa­ter­ing Sov­er­eign Grant, fund­ing the roy­als and plethora of hang­ers on weaved into the ex­trav­a­gant, syco­phan­tic fringe of The Firm, as it has been dubbed.