Anyway, as this thread is shortly going off into the archives, I'll add this bit, which is somewhat of a review of a book, and rather long:
I’ve just finished reading “Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life” by Sally Bedell Smith. I have no idea who the author is or whether she has any good insights into the Royal Family.
She recounted the well-known story of Charles’ early life. There’s not much focus on Diana, and what there is, is mostly negative. However, she included a lot of detail of Charles’ various charitable ventures.
What struck me is how many of his more minor ventures wouldn’t have got anywhere except for his contacts with the rich and famous who coughed up large amounts of donations. He’s also apparently quite disorganised, which makes working for him rather difficult.
As I got into the second half of the book, so from his 40s onwards, I got the impression that he never knew what his job was supposed to be. And it appears that he didn’t get any guidance on that. The author describes the Royal Family as living in silos, each doing whatever, and no real connection between any of them. There was a short-lived attempt to amalgamate the BP and PC offices but that didn’t last very long because the two teams’ principals operated in very different ways – QE&P’s office works on a hierarchical organised fashion while PC’s office works in a more haphazard way.
Over time, he became enamoured of a lot of Eastern mysticism, thought Islam had a better connection to real life, rejected a lot of the Enlightenment for its focus on science and the rational. Really seemed to think the world’s problems would be solved if we could only just get back to our roots and live a natural, i.e. pre-Industrial Revolution, life.
A couple of snippets: Prince George’s first birthday - there was a party "including the Queen, the Middletons, and assorted godparents and royal relatives but Charles was touring a red squirrel sanctuary in Scotland".
He persuaded the Duchy of Cornwall to buy ($1.5 million) a house and land in southwestern Wales and made much of the fact that the new insulation in the house was sheep’s wool, i.e. natural; but “in fact it was a magnet for moths unless treated with the sort of strong chemical that Charles wanted to avoid and had a larger carbon footprint than standard polystyrene insulation”.
Handy hint: I didn’t buy the book, I downloaded it via my county library’s online digital thingy. So, if you want to have a read of whatever, google your county library website. A lot of county libraries have gone over to downloads of ebooks and audiobooks as that makes more space in the physical library for other things.