I’m a royal expert – Charles will be an excellent King who cares about people and duty more than anything else
BEING a member of the Royal Family is an accident of birth.
But the man we now call King Charles has done such a brilliant job of showing that with a life of privilege comes an awful lot of duty.
He could easily have spent his time playing backgammon, drinking champagne, smoking cigars and going to all the London shows.
But he is not that sort of a man.
He has used the influence and power of his position for the benefit of others. Never for himself.
As Prince of Wales he raised hundreds of millions of pounds and each year gives millions to charity.
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Of course he is enormously wealthy but you’d never know it. True, he has smart suits and shoes, but some of them are 40 years old — he just has them repaired and repaired.
Once we were visiting the Doctor Who set in Cardiff and I noticed the pocket on his suit looked like it had been stitched up by Frankenstein.
Charles didn’t care but, of course, his tailor went berserk when he saw it and got someone to make a proper job of fixing the tear.
He can have any car he wants, yet his pride and joy is the one his mother gave him for his 21st birthday.
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He has since had his Aston Martin converted to run on cooking oil because he does not want to pollute the planet.
I have said this for a long while now: Charles is a visionary who has often been pilloried — but he does not complain. I remember once he made a film where whenever he planted a tree, he gave it a little shake and said: “Good luck, tree.”
He was shown the film before broadcast and everyone advised him to have that bit cut out, but he said: “No, it is true — a plant is a living thing, isn’t it?”
He does not say one thing and do another, unlike some politicians we know.
Charles has been banging on about the environment from the very early days.
Even before he had children he has wanted to save the planet — and it was not just talk.
He visited places to raise awareness. I remember flying in a light plane to a rainforest in Cameroon, where he clambered across a rope bridge that made a really nice picture.
Back then I did not know where Cameroon was, let alone that it had a rainforest.
In Indonesia, where the rainforest had been dug up and replaced with palm oil trees, he started a reforestation project.
I have been with him to Brazil’s rainforest three times and saw him in Brasilia pleading with the president to stop destroying the precious trees.
Similarly, he has been campaigning about plastic in the sea for years. When I see these Johnny-come-lately politicians now climbing on the environmental bandwagon I think this man has been going on about it for 40 years.
He sometimes gets very frustrated. I have been in places where he has almost been pleading with people to change their attitude to the climate.
Now he is King, all that stops because he can no longer be involved in politics.
When he looks back on what he has done as Prince of Wales, he can be very proud.
He got people thinking and gained massive coverage for it.
Because of him, over the years we carried many articles in The Sun about saving trees.
In my view, Netflix drama The Crown and recent TV biographies got Charles wrong.
They portrayed him as the man who was awful to Diana. Not true. Who never loved Diana. Not true. Who was a cold father. Completely untrue. But you never hear him complain. He just says: “History will judge me”. Like his mother, Charles is very spiritual. He goes to church, he cares.
He believes in God. He will be Defender of the Faith, the faith that Henry VIII created, but he is very well versed in Catholicism as well as Islam and Sikhism.
I remember him praying in a Sikh temple in India and, during Ramadan, feasting with Muslims at sundown. He embraces every religion and culture.
I have seen him in the rainforest dancing with the indigenous population there.
On a walkabout in Regina, Saskatchewan in Canada, the Prince danced in the street with a First Nation chief.
He cares about downtrodden people and he is incredibly kind — even to the photographers who cover his engagements.
Up at Sandringham once, I was taking pictures of then MP Nicholas Soames, one of his shooting party guests, when the Prince of Wales started screaming at me hysterically.
I queried: “Mr Windsor?”
He hit back: “You are disturbing . . .” I said: “Look, there’s an MP shooting in that field and I’m photographing him. I’m not chasing your wife round Harrods now, am I? I’m trying to do a job here.”
He suddenly calmed down, put his arm round me and said: “You know, we must have these talks more often.”
On the eve of his 50th birthday in November 1998, Charles was in the Sheffield Jobcentre where they filmed 1997 British comedy The Full Monty.
Hugo Speer, who appeared in the film, taught the Prince and some of the Press pack the moves for the cast’s dance to Donna Summer’s Hot Stuff in the movie.
Prince Charles got in line and we all had great fun.
We then gave him a birthday present. It was a big garden gnome in the shape of a paparazzi cameraman, complete with a long lens and Press ticket in his hat.
We took a picture of him with it and he invited us all to Highgrove with our partners for tea and to spot the gnome in his garden.
He did not have to do that. And in 2018, when he turned 70, he celebrated his birthday with 70 Sun readers who were the same age as him.
With Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, at his side, he made a very generous speech about our readers and made some reference to me as well, which was nice.
I covered the couple’s wedding in 2005 and thought at the time it would be difficult for Camilla, but she has just slotted in perfectly.
She is now much loved, certainly by me.
To many of the Press who cover the Royal Family, she has become a favourite because she knows we have got a job to do and helps all she can.
When I first started taking Prince Charles’s picture for The Sun in the mid-1970s, I was delighted to see my photos published of him pulling faces after falling off his polo pony. Some of those photos were not very pleasant.
Then, over the years, I began watching how he behaved and listening closely to his speeches. He converted me to thinking about the future of our planet.
Because of him, I don’t eat a lot of meat, I have solar panels on the roof of my home, and I drive a hybrid car, which I will switch to fully electric when charging gets up to speed.
No one knows how much time he will have on the throne but if he lives as long as his mother, it could be 20 years.
What I do know is that he will carry on working, never stopping to continue what his mother achieved in her lifetime, which was to make every one of her subjects feel that little bit more secure.
King Charles III will make the royals more accessible to the public.
He will obviously slim down the Royal Family, make it more efficient.
I am told he will turn Buckingham Palace into a 365-days-a-year tourist venue where he will probably have an office but move to smaller quarters.
He says he is going to take less from the taxpayer, relying more on the farms of the Duchy of Lancaster to finance the royals.
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With Charles, the Royal Family is in a very good position. We have got an excellent King — a man who cares about the people and who cares about duty more than anything.
I have been promised a seat at his Coronation and it will be the greatest honour to be there in Westminster Abbey to see the man I have known for 40 years crowned our King.
