Luke Harding in Durban
There was a certain wry symbolism as Prince Harry watched his father greet the crowds from the 12th-floor balcony of the Royal Hotel in Durban. As Charles shook hands in the civic square with British expatriates, Harry waved at his dad. Charles waved back at the diminutive red-haired figure above him.
But this is not the picture that people will remember from the prince’s tour of Southern Africa. Instead, the defining image is of a much tackier encounter with the Spice Girls.
On Saturday, Prince Charles met them for the second time, with President Nelson Mandela, at his home in Pretoria. It was as if the jigsaw pieces of history had somehow been mischievously re-assembled by a surreal practical joker. In the middle, Mandela. Around him, the Spice Girls, tottering on their platforms. And to the side, Prince Charles (or Royal Spice, as he should perhaps now be known) looking a trifle awkward, but grinning gamely.
As Prince Charles’s first overseas trip since the death of his ex-wife ended, one perplexing question remains: what exactly is Royal Spice up to? He has certainly had a good time. At the Spice Girls concert in Johannesburg, Charles was even seen swinging his hips.
It is agreed that the tour has been a success. There have certainly been a few pitfalls: in Swaziland, there is only one red carpet and it followed Charles wherever he went, borne by 50 men carrying several hoovers. But, generally, things have gone well.
Even before he set off for Johannesburg on a British Airways flight last Tuesday, aides had signalled that things were going to be a little different. They had taken the unprecedented, and somewhat risky, step of inviting the press to travel with the prince on his charter plane.
The style was clearly designed to appear presidential. And, with Diana gone, the media came in large numbers for a “Charles tour”. Only one untouchable was excluded – the royal writer Anthony Holden, who has never been forgiven for revealing Charles and Diana’s marriage difficulties. He was told the plane “was full”.
The rapprochement between Prince Charles and his one-time persecutors in the media began exactly a week ago.
The backdrop was Swaziland, a tiny mountainous kingdom presided over by a polygamous Anglophile monarch. The diplomatic mission was straightforward: to try and “nudge” Swaziland further towards democracy. But there was another, more delicate task ahead.
As the plane carrying Charles taxied to a halt near the capital of Mbabane, the curtain separating the royal party from the journalists travelling at the rear of the plane was pulled back. A relaxed, almost insouciant Charles then emerged. There was a moment of stunned silence. Then, for several minutes, the prince chatted with reporters.
The appearance had been carefully stage- managed. Nothing had been left to chance. Friendly tabloid reporters had been deliberately seated towards the front of the plane.
Three days later as flight SA 2000 took off from Lesotho and flew to Pretoria for the third leg of the trip, the prince made another carefully scripted visit to the rear. There was more streetwise banter. Had he enjoyed the coronation of King Letsie III earlier that morning in Lesotho’s impoverished capital, Maseru? “I will keep my coronation short,” he quipped.
After several minutes, the prince retreated to his seat. Another story was duly filed, about another media charm offensive. “I do wish he would stop bothering us,” one hack joked. “Why can’t he leave us alone?”
The importance of such clumsily choreographed exchanges is easy to overstate. But these overtures do signal a willingness on the part of the prince to give the press another go.
The shutters came down a decade ago, after an embassy party for journalists in Spain, when Charles found his remarks that he was more afraid of the Irish Republican Army than the Basque separatist movement ETA were reported by British newspapers. He decided not to talk again.
Relations sank to an all-time low last year when, on a tour of the central Asian republics, he failed to say even “good morning” to the small, disconsolate band of hacks.
And then Diana died. The campaign to rehabilitate Charles in the public mind had already begun in the months following the royal divorce. A small group of modernisers met to discuss ways of improving his sorry public image.
Central to this strategy was press relations – and how to rebuild them. Charles had long been advised to try and talk to the media, but had been reluctant to forgive.
After the death of the princess, Charles now finds himself strangely liberated. There is no one to upstage him. Veteran royal correspondents compare the Charles on the Southern Africa tour to the larky young bachelor of the Seventies, who would obligingly clown around on the ski slopes with a Groucho Marx moustache and a false nose.
Mutual suspicion, though, still remains. “He is thrilled by all the attention he is getting,” one old hand said. “But make no mistake: deep down, he still hates our guts.”
And yet this modernising strategy, designed to Blairise Charles into a People’s Prince, can be desperately crude. The risk is that Charles – who is 49 next week – is being transformed by his advisers into a grinning tabloid construct.
The prince once declared: “I am not a performing monkey.” And yet, on Saturday night, he came dangerously close to being exactly that. The photocall with the Spice Girls was a cynical exercise in tacky tabloid hype.
The group had flown to South Africa to perform free at a concert raising money for the Nations Trust. There was, then, a worthy motive for Royal Spice’s presence. But the photocall was essentially a global marketing stunt.
Tight backstage pooling arrangements – and the presence of 13-year-old Prince Harry – gave the encounter an air of frenzy. When Charles entered the VIP area the girls tottered and greeted him like a fond, doting old uncle.
No one can blame the Spice Girls for their exhibitionist ways – they seem to realise their grip on fame is gloriously ephemeral. But what exactly was Royal Spice doing there again?
The script was simple. Charles, so often aloof and undemonstrative at Diana’s side, was actually quite a groovy chap. No, really. He had taken his son to his first ever rock concert.
Lurking behind the arras, meanwhile, is Sir Robert Fellowes, the queen’s private secretary. While the heir to the throne was cavorting with Sporty and Posh, Sir Robert, it was reported, was busy devising ways of throwing newspaper editors into jail. The veteran courtier is widely blamed for the royal family’s slow response to Diana’s death two months ago.
An arch-conservative, Fellowes’s retirement has apparently now been postponed by a year, dealing a blow to the reformist camp.
Fellowes’s latest proposal is to make use of the European Convention on Human Rights, soon to be incorporated into British law, to protect the privacy of the royal family. Tabloid editors who print intrusive stories about the royals would be punished by the courts.
Such sabre-rattling is at odds with the long-term mission to turn Prince Charles into a hero. Nor is it likely to create the kind of mildly supportive press climate the royal family needs if it is to survive into the next century.
And what, one wonders, is there left to tell? There can be few secrets left. The sorry irony, as Fellowes must know, is that the greatest invader of the royal family’s privacy has often been the royal family itself.
It is all a far cry from the visit the queen made to South Africa half a century ago, when the monarchy was still invested with a mystical invulnerability.
It was Elizabeth’s first trip abroad; she was just 20. There was a chilling seriousness of purpose to the future queen, which is conspicuously lacking from the new generation of royals. Princess Elizabeth made the most famous broadcast of her life, pledging to devote herself to the “great imperial family”.
On Monday, as the prince waved at his son, the huge media pack was looking elsewhere. So, when future biographers sum up this watershed tour, the enduring image will be of a sixth Spice Girl, Royal Spice, fooling around with his friends.