He was born in November 1948, exactly halfway between my older brother Michael, born in 1942, and me, born in August 1953.
True, Charles lived in a bigger house than ours, which was in Petts Wood, Southeast London. But we loved playing on the floor with the same Tri-ang 00 train sets and hated being dressed up in horrid 50s crochet jerseys with silly animal patterns. In his Hill House school blazer, short trousers and cap, Charles looked just like my big brother, who set off each morning to catch the suburban train (numbered 70) to Dulwich College Prep School.
I loved gazing at photos of the prince in newspapers. His ears stuck out and mine did, too. My friend Simon had his pinned back, but the future monarch taught me to wear my flappy appendages with pride. Michael and my other brother Peter said my ears stopped me winning races at school because of wind resistance.
I always thought they stuck out so much because my siblings regularly pulled them. But I never told them I didn’t like it.
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Cambridge University student Charles pictured browsing a newsstand in 1969. Writer Anthony Seldon says he saw the royal as a brother
I confided in Charles, though. Charles was lonely and sensitive as a small boy, and so was I. Teddy bears figured largely in both our lives. So too did nannies (is there a connection?).
They understood me and they never let me down. Unlike my brothers. When driving to our annual holiday – a farm in South Devon – along the A30, the canvas roof on my parents’ old Rover began to leak. So Michael and Peter seized my favourite teddy and rammed it up into the hole to stop the rain. It later dried out but I was wet from tears at their heartlessness.
Charles went off to board at Gordonstoun in Scotland in 1962, when he was 13. He was not happy or very good at school, and neither was I at my boarding school – Tonbridge, in Kent. I longed for exeats when we could come home, and then counted the hours till it was time to go back to school again on Sunday evenings. I still get empty feelings in the pit of my stomach on Sunday afternoons.
Bullied at school, Charles had his ears pulled and pinched in rugby scrums. Thanks bro. I learned from you and opted to play at scrum half at the back of the pack where my ears remained a tweak-free zone.
The prince came of age in the 60s, and so did I. It was a remorselessly grey decade with smog, snow and slush. But in 1966, he went off to the sun, to the Australian outback for six golden months at Timbertop, the remote offshoot of Geelong Grammar School where the boys were given a prolonged exposure to nature. The experience was the making of him. Many of Charles’s lifelong passions crystallised at that time, above all those for the sacredness of the environment and a rounded education.
When, many years later, I became a headmaster, I was influenced by those same ideals. Education had to be about so much more, I reasoned, than merely the passing of tests and exams: the development of the whole person with all their varied talents, no less. Because if it doesn’t happen to a child while at school, it might never occur.
My own Timbertop experience came from my encounters with an intellectually brilliant headmaster, Robert Ogilvie, who in 1970 replaced the austere and forbidding Michael McCrum at Tonbridge School. McCrum went off to run Eton College. Iconoclastic and wildly irreverent, his successor taught me it was all right not to conform in a regime in which I never felt comfortable.
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Charles wearing a huge bearskin and the uniform of Colonel of the Welsh Guards – taking part in Trooping the Colour in 1978
Every Wednesday afternoon, he shot me off at breakneck speed in his white Rover V8 to play golf at nearby Knole Park, where he cheated shamelessly, as he did when I stayed with him in school holidays at his family retreat near Fort William. From him, I learned how to become my own person, to be a teacher and a book-writing headmaster.
Back to the 60s though. I trundled on, keeping a low profile at school, and avoiding unwelcome attention till Jimi Hendrix went ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and Charles and I walked our separate ways.
Back from Australia, and off to Cambridge, he discovered hunting, shooting, fishing and playing polo. Pah! Not for me. I had discovered cigarettes, gatherings and W B Yeats. I painted the inside of my parents’ garage with the names of my favourite rock bands and organised a demonstration at my school to end the Vietnam War and the school cadet force. The latter continued but the former ended soon after: so a half victory.
I fell properly out of love with Charles in the 70s. At Oxford, I rebelled against a world new to me of upper-class toffs who wore striped shirts, blazers with polished metal buttons and paisley cravats, went beagling down South and shot grouse up North.
The last time I saw him he seemed relaxed. He was totally in his element
They pretended to know Charles, but probably didn’t. Why did they care? Charles just seemed so boring, irrelevant and peculiar. He and his set cut no ice with me, nothing to inspire or uplift. His milieu of country house parties and aristocratic bloodsports was a world apart from the harsh economic and industrial turmoil of the 70s presided over by Harold Wilson, Ted Heath and James Callaghan. But Diana was another matter altogether.
I was so excited when she first came to public attention in 1980. Here at last was the person who could rehumanise Charles and remove him from his grisly set on Planet Zog. She was as natural and spontaneous as the Australian outback where he came of age.
I had fallen in love with her at once: she was the accessible version of breakfast TV’s regal Selina Scott. But I blew it. My one meeting with Diana, at an authors’ reception at London’s Banqueting House, backfired when it turned out I was talking to the actress making a mint as her double. But I couldn’t see it working out anyway. The real Diana was a good six inches taller than me, even without heels. The ground was clear for my would-be brother.
Like hundreds of thousands, I rose early on 29 July 1981 to cheer Charles and Diana on their way to St Paul’s Cathedral. I was thrilled to be a street guest at the wedding of the woman who would restore the man I had once identified so closely with. I was enraptured by the joy and optimism they brought to a country still torn apart by strikes and troubles in Northern Ireland.
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Charles playing polo in 1970. Anthony says he’ll be ‘cheering Charles on’ from the streets for the coronation
The week after I married my wife Joanna in July 1982, the IRA detonated a bomb in Hyde Park killing soldiers and horses wantonly. Against this background, Diana was modernising the monarchy for the new decade, helping it reach out across the nation’s deep divides.
Realisation that all was not well in the marriage dawned on me only slowly. The Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium in July 1985 was the moment the veil was lifted. That image of Charles sandwiched stiffly between Diana and Bob Geldof says it all. Geldof is tousled, Diana is bedecked in white while Charles looks awkward in a formal suit, striped shirt and dismal mauve tie. The end was inevitable. I was furious at the time for his heartlessness, his duplicity and lying.
How could he spurn the most famous and beautiful young woman in the world?
It took more than a decade for me to reconcile myself to Charles. Reluctantly, I came to accept that he and Diana would never have worked, and that in Camilla, he had found a soulmate who would bring out the best in him in a way that Diana never could have, however long she had lived. Camilla has helped Charles articulate and channel his beliefs in a way that makes
In 2010, he published a book, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, which brought together his ideas on the principles of harmony as they relate to climate change, agriculture and architecture.
Once upon a time his periodic pronouncements about monstrous architecture or talking to plants were disparaged for being otherworldly and bizarre. But like many, I have found them increasingly persuasive, not least coming from a monarch who, unlike come-and-go prime ministers, has a very different time horizon, namely the long-term future and beauty of the country.
I first met Charles in 2013, at the launch of the national youth volunteering initiative at Buckingham Palace. I was struck by his commitment to a cause with no possible gain for him. I am used to writing about prime ministers, who do everything for a reason.
He cares deeply about the arts, as I’ve witnessed as a governor at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where for many years he has been our president. He has been as happy to make guest appearances at special occasions as he has been to quote from Shakespeare in his landmark speeches.
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Charles and Diana after a match in 1985. Anthony says that ‘reluctantly’, he came to accept that he and Diana would never have worked
Some of his predecessors as monarch have been great patrons of the arts, but many have not. Charles’s commitment is genuine and deep.
The last time I saw him, in 2019, was when he was chairing a round table in Scotland on education. What impressed me was his total command of the subject, his forthrightness and humour. I had rarely seen him so relaxed. He was totally in his element.
Would that his understanding of education were shared by education ministers of any party. His philosophy, forged in Australia 60 years ago, was honed by the great educationalist Kurt Hahn, and has never been more needed.
Charles has been a longtime advocate of creativity, outdoor education and volunteering. The attitude, contempt even, that governments of today have for education is shown by the country having ten different education secretaries in the past ten years. It takes a good two or three years for each new education secretary to understand their job and to begin to make a difference. Having so many of them in quick succession has been barking mad. Charles would never say that, of course, but I’ll wager my teddy bear he thinks it.
Charles’s perspective is thus wiser and deeper than either Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer – whoever becomes prime minister next year. Their horizons will always be tribal and short term. Let’s hope the King won’t be reticent in expressing his views.
So, I’ll be cheering on Charles again from the streets as he makes his way to and from the coronation. He’s not the flawless character I imagined when I was young. But neither are my brothers. I have forgiven them, and I have forgiven Charles, ears and all.
