When one reads something by a person termed a “royal expert” or “royal insider”, one normally expects to be served 80 per cent speculation by someone the Princess Royal once told to “naff off”. This is not so with Robert Hardman. For a quarter of a century, he has earned the respect of the Royal family and their household by telling the truth, exercising discretion, avoiding sensationalism and acquiring a deep understanding of the institution and its history. His books and television programmes on the functioning of our monarchy are therefore highly authoritative and laden with insight, and this latest, Charles III, is no exception.
Hardman never over-sells himself or his work. Beginning this book on our King, the author says that “I have not sought to write a full-life biography. This is a contemporary portrait of our new monarch, and his new court.” And he proceeds to do exactly that, in Rolls-Royce fashion. He has on-the-record interviews with, among others, the Princess Royal and Annabel Elliott, our new Queen’s sister; other friends and staff of the King and Queen have spoken to him extensively, but privately.
The trust these people put in Hardman did not just secure him access to superb interviewees, but also allowed him to go behind the scenes in royal palaces and houses, to get close to “Operation London Bridge” – seeing the late Queen’s funeral in detail hitherto denied to the rest of us – and to be at some rehearsals for the Coronation. Hardman’s encyclopaedic knowledge of events and personalities at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House, and of the key moments in the transition in his subject’s life from Prince of Wales to King, means he can spot the difference between a rumour and a cast-iron fact at about 5,000 yards. He is never a sycophant, and is always scrupulously fair. As a situation report on the monarchy today, this book will attain the status of a historical document.
Our King does not make himself accessible to the point where to use Bagehot’s phrase, he “lets daylight in upon the magic”, but he takes a generationally different attitude to the operation of what his late father called “the Firm”. Some time-honoured necessities of Royal life, such as the stony silence when asked repeatedly by tabloids to comment on sensationalist matters, are sensibly maintained: but deep engagement with people such as the beneficiaries of the Prince’s Trust, or those who share the King’s interests in architecture, trees or classical music, contrasts with Queen Elizabeth II’s more remote style.
Hardman emphasises that the King knows the constitutional boundaries, yet this book makes no pretence that personal interests have been consigned to the past. Our Sovereign remains deeply invested in Poundbury, his humane housing development in Dorset, while his decision to appoint himself Ranger of Windsor Great Park has redoubled his interest in the natural landscape.