The crowd loved it. They cried. They applauded. They shook his hand. As he made his way among them, they asked about William, 15, and Harry, just turned 13. ““I am unbelievably proud of the children,’’ he told them. ““They have handled an extraordinarily difficult time with quite enormous courage.’’ A woman who knows this side of Charles well and was with him in Manchester marveled not at the prince’s demeanor, but at the crowd’s response: ““He was hugged. He was kissed. People really do sympathize with him.''
It is sad, if not surprising, that it may take Diana’s death to rehabilitate the public image of the 48-year-old Charles. Those close to him say Charles was fully aware that he bore the brunt of the blame for Diana’s deep unhappiness during her marriage and for its ultimate failure. ““He could never, ever, get it out of his mind,’’ said a sympathetic acquaintance of the prince’s. Even if he had, the public wouldn’t let him forget. By 1996, when he and Diana divorced, the number of Britons who felt he would someday be a good king had plummeted to 41 percent, from 82 percent at the start of the decade. The numbers had just edged above the 50 percent mark this year–only to be shaken again, this time by Diana’s death.
Charles was never quite the klutz we thought we knew. He’s surprisingly good at the meet-and-greet chores he’s called upon to do, whether visiting a rehabilitated Welsh train station or making small talk with old people over dominoes at a day-care center. But he also found it hard to be at ease in what felt like enemy territory under Diana’s iconic sway. Manchester–an event scheduled long before the princess’s death, gave Charles a taste of how different it now could be. ““People saw a human being,’’ said the woman who knows him well. Charles actually began working on his image long before Diana died. Shattered by public rejection, Charles and his inner circle recognized last year that they needed to mount a campaign of rehabilitation. Charles himself set the effort in motion last fall. He summoned his private secretary of five years, Cmdr. Richard Aylard, and fired him. Aylard was replaced by his deputy, Stephen Lamport, a former Foreign Office official with good ties to the political establishment and the queen’s staff.
Lamport and other aides began to reshape Charles’s image. They tried to convince the public that he has a life beyond the tabloid embarrassments: an impressive if largely unsung record as a money raiser and a doer of good works. Their goal has been to elevate Charles the Good and to sublimate Charles the Flake and Charles the Cheat. The fact that this may now be easier to accomplish in the wake of Diana’s death is one of the excruciating ironies of her passing. Not only must he deal with his sons’ grief, but it looks increasingly as if he must do so without being able to give them a full accounting of the circumstances: last week the only survivor of the crash, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, said he could remember nothing about the fatal ride. ““How can we not open our arms to Charles as a widower and single parent who must raise his boys under such tragic circumstances?’’ asks an acquaintance of the prince.
Charles may also get a lift from Tony Blair, the most popular peacetime British prime minister of this century. Diana’s death hurtled these two unlikely partners–Charles the diffident royal, Tony the laser-sharp politician–into an accidental joint enterprise that has immense popular appeal. As clueless as he is sometimes portrayed, Charles is a street-smart homeboy compared with other Windsors. He and Blair immediately recognized the importance of giving the people’s princess a people’s funeral. Their behind-the-scenes campaign to make that happen, along with contretemps with the queen’s courtiers, has become the stuff of legend. ““Everybody knows that Charles was on the side of the angels,’’ says a source close to the prince.
The Charles and Tony partnership did not come out of the blue. They first met in 1990, after Charles asked to be introduced to a small group of leading Labour Party politicians, including Blair, who was then a rising star in the party. The meeting touched mostly on issues close to Charles’s heart and his powerful charitable trusts–youth unemployment and job training for young people. In 1993, according to John Rentoul, one of Blair’s biographers, when Charles warned of the ““lethal cocktail’’ of unemployment, crime and drugs in Britain’s inner cities in 1993, Blair backed him. They are by no means friends, but they share a desire to modernize the monarchy–by cutting public funds to the royal family and allowing daughters to succeed to the throne on the same terms as sons.
The warmth Charles basked in last week in Manchester won’t last forever. To maintain the public’s good will, he will have to earn it. The novice single parent won more plaudits by canceling an October swing through Wales that coincides with his sons’ school breaks. If all this leads to a rehabilitation, there is a sad logic to it. If Charles the husband broke Britain’s heart, Charles the father may help repair some of the damage.
