Charles, too, has mellowed his well-known views on issues such as climate change and housing, at least in public, as part of the strict convention of neutrality that comes with being king.
His style in the past was far from laid back. One former minister recalled Charles, as prince of Wales, inviting them for tea at St James’s Palace, where they found themselves discussing policy for more than an hour. A second ex-minister recalled the future king questioning ministers on the detail of green finance — though never in a way that would lobby for a policy, they insisted. While he would occasionally “raise eyebrows” in private, they said, “what he will do is come up with ideas or offers. He will say, ‘This group of people deserve a pat on the back — would it be helpful to you, minister, if I did an event with them or I send you something on that?’”
‘He pulled me to one side’
George Brandis, Australia’s former high commissioner to the U.K., recalls how the then-prince of Wales was “very eager to see” Australia commit to a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. When Canberra did — days before the COP26 climate summit in 2021 — “Charles was delighted about that. He had made it pretty clear on a number of occasions that he was very much hoping that Australia would do that. In fact, as I read it, [he] was a bit impatient that we hadn’t done so until relatively late in the piece.”
Brandis added: “He is obviously very conscious of the constitutional limitations of his role as king, and I’m sure that his public or private advocacy of causes will be much less in evidence now that he is on the throne. But nevertheless … I found him very determined to make his views known and to be an advocate for the causes he deeply cares about, particularly environmental ones.”
That does not make the king humorless; like Starmer, he is said to be warm and cracks jokes in private. Charles also shows “strong emotions,” more than his late mother, said Dimbleby: “He can get very frustrated, and those around him sometimes see that. They also see his total commitment to issues that matter and his ability to speak in a very informed way about them, and in private he feels perfectly free to do that.”
In September 2023, a year almost to the day after his own mother’s death, the king wrote a deeply personal letter to then-Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, who had recently lost his father. Shapps told POLITICO: “He left it on my bed at Dumfries House [a royal residence in Scotland]. It was a beautifully written, hand-annotated letter from the king. Later, when I went downstairs for dinner, he pulled me to one side and said, ‘I know that there are no words that can match losing a parent, but I do hope you found my letter.’ … He is an unbelievably thoughtful man, and it was a heartfelt thing for him to do.”
