Charlotte Grimshaw writes about the forces behind her new novel: “Trump, Putin, Kim Jong-un. The posturing. The bizarre hairstyles, the violence and cruelty. The narcissism…”

May 2016, London

We were staying in a small flat with a roof terrace. I typed sitting outside at a picnic table.

I’d written pieces about Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante, whose books I admired, and on novelists’ abandonment of plot in favour of “selfie fiction”. I’d been consulting a psychotherapist, and it had been a revelation. Was this the moment to launch into some autobiographical writing of my own?

But my mind kept turning to the time – “the Time.” That “President Trump” was even a possibility seemed to require a focus outwards, towards the disaster. Time to forget the self and embrace the representative. I’d had the sense anyway that the “cutting edge” of autobiographical fiction, taken to extremes (everything I do has meaning) could lead the writer into a place where the sun don’t shine. Paralysing solipsism.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth – Doris Lessing.

Wanting to write about “the Time”, I invented a family subtly ruled by narcissists, whose false narrative preserved the status quo. In this group, you were either an acolyte or you were fired. To live in this way meant that “you”, your true self, wasn’t permitted to exist.

My novel Mazarine, I realised, was all about fake news. About not being allowed to be “selfie”. About false narrative. Loss of the self. The fragmented self. Authoritarian rule.

May, Paris

The Time: war, exodus, terrorism, riots. Europe awash with refugees. We were sitting at an outside café table when an army truck drew up. Soldiers climbed out, conferring briefly. An American said into his phone, “Donna, don’t go. Not today.”

The day before, I’d bumped into a soldier, a tall youth with a tough, impassive face, his hair cut in the Hitler Youth style that reflected the Zeitgeist, the rise of far right groups, xenophobia. I recoiled, raising my hands (don’t shoot!) and he stepped back, making a slight gesture with his gun: after you.

He had words tattooed on his trigger finger, which I couldn’t read.

After the terror attacks, the government had declared a state of emergency, and in Paris all sensitive areas were guarded by the soldiers of Operation Sentinelle.

We were walking by the river when sirens started and police vehicles began to stream past. By the time we’d caught up, another violent protest against labour laws was underway. The riot police, being French, looked stylish in their gear, a fascist-chic ensemble of Robocop body armour, high boots, shields.

*

Away from the rioting, in Boulevard Voltaire, the Bataclan Theatre was boarded up, the pavement piled with tributes. Terrorists slaughtered 90 people here, during an Eagles of Death Metal concert. In the alley, where people had escaped from windows, bullets had gouged holes in the walls, each circled with chalk and numbered as forensic evidence.

*

That night, after drinking too much wine, we ended up in a nightclub where cigars were offered for 60 euros and the clientele were mostly Russian, and the smoking area was an indoor garden where even the walls and ceiling were covered with plastic plants and flowers. In the bar, a spotlight revealed a woman wearing a bikini made of white sequins and feathers. She began to dance, twirling and flipping the white fans in her hands. Her expression was rapt, mesmerised. The Russian men looked on, narrow-eyed.

*

Trump was playing everywhere, in airport lounges, in hotel lobbies. I took to predicting his win. I kept saying it, “President Trump. President Trump.” This was crazy talk, because Hillary could not lose.

May, Amsterdam

An attic hotel room with a giant wheel in the ceiling, part of the mechanism by which goods were once cranked up the outside of the building from the canal.

In the hotel lobby, historic audio of Trump musing about his daughter’s “voluptuous” figure. “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her!”

Narrow cobbled streets, the smell of dope, the red light district, diminished since its pre-internet days, but still displaying real women on sale in lit windows. Behind the dusty glass, a girl in a bikini sat scratching her elbow and gazing at the dull canal. Raw skin, hugely augmented breasts, dead eyes.

Shops with racks of sex toys: dildos, whips, leather, masks. An faded old poster advertising DVDs: Bad Date, Babysitter, Anal Incest, Daddy.

*

I walked in the Dam Square, past the Krasnapolsky Hotel. A man was telling me about one of the people running in the US election. This person, the man told me, has a secret health problem. If anyone found out and wanted to kill this candidate, they could do so easily, without even getting close. If anyone found out and wanted to use blackmail, they could…

How did he know this, I asked? He told me. It was a plausible explanation. He asked, did I believe him? I said, sure, why not. Why not?

In the hotel I wrote it all down, then on second thoughts, deleted it.

On the train from Amsterdam to London via Belgium. Soldiers patrolling, army trucks in the square. In Brussels is the district of Molenbeek, where the Bataclan terror attackers came from: a Muslim enclave, a centre of jihadism, a “hotbed”.

October, London

There’s a golden Ferrari parked outside the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane. In the lobby, Arab children hang out with a certain louche ease. They play on their phones and climb over the furniture and squabble.

Nearby is the Millennium Hotel where Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned, his cup of tea laced with polonium. Anyone who’s read the accounts would surely avoid staying there. The Russian assassins tipped radioactive material down a sink, contaminating the plumbing. The hotel is right across the square from the US Embassy, in which there’s supposedly a CIA station. So was it a deliberate fuck you to poison him there?

That night, Trump on Hillary’s emails: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you’ll probably be rewarded mightily by our press!”

January 2017, Buenos Aires

The hotel in Buenos Aires has a large iron gate manned by staff, to keep out muggers and thieves. In the rubbish-strewn street outside there’s poverty, toughness. It’s a harsh city. Driving in on the highway, past the slums and shanty towns and ramshackle buildings, the sense of Europe’s orderliness left behind. The city rises out of the flat plain; the lack of hills is oddly claustrophobic.

Buenos Aires is often described as “vibrant”. It is, in a way, but there’s something cruel and melancholy in the air. Perhaps it’s the memory of authoritarian rule.

*

I am struck by the number, size and quality of the city’s bookshops. I don’t know whether to be depressed or heartened by the comparison with home. At least books are still valued somewhere.

*

In the Avenue Manuel Quintana, outside the Ecuadorian Embassy, a woman stumbled and fell. Immediately we were there, pulling her up. She looked at us with fear then relief as we picked up her shopping. I handed her the bag. “Don’t forget this,” I said.

*

A young Russian couple enter the hotel breakfast room. The woman is blonde and glamorous and wearing shorts that outrageously showcase her buttocks. As she and her companion murmur over the hot plates, all eyes are on her bare bum. The men stare, unsmiling, but the women, young and old, do a double take and laugh. I do too. I wonder about this. Do we women laugh because it’s comical, or out of some atavistic uneasiness?

*

In the hotel room, I read the Steele dossier on Buzzfeed. The kompromat on President Trump. When I get to the part about Trump asking prostitutes to urinate on a hotel bed in Moscow, I remember how, during a debate with Hillary Clinton, he made comments about her bathroom break. “It’s disgusting,” he said, grinning weirdly. Perhaps it was just the misogynistic dog-whistle. But it fits. Most men would be neutral on the subject. This is a guy who has a thing about peeing. It’s “disgusting” if Hillary does it. But a young woman…

*

Republican election pins: DON’T BE A PUSSY. TRUMP THAT BITCH. LIFE’S A BITCH, DON’T VOTE FOR ONE. KFC HILLARY SPECIAL: 2 FAT THIGHS, 2 SMALL BREASTS, LEFT WING. TRUMP: FINALLY SOMEONE WITH BALLS.

*

When Trump won, I told an elderly member of my family I thought misogyny had played a part. He denied it. “Hillary wasn’t charming,” he said. When I argued he got angry and told me, “Get fucked.”

January, Punta del Este, Uruguay

On the way to Uruguay, a storm blows up and there’s talk of a diversion to Montevideo. The tiny plane shudders its way down through the clouds, landing at Punta del Este.

The taxi driver says one of the Trump sons is in town, checking on construction. “Lots of rich people, British love it here, royal families, rich Russians.” He points out the many private jets parked up, among them a striking sleek black one.

Along the coastal strip: mansions, sand dunes, the vast expanse of the Rio de la Plata. The Trump Tower is being built on the waterfront, not far from a hotel that’s fallen into ruin, derelict.

In the lobby, young staff are watching footage of Trump on TV. When I ask, they reply with uninhibited contempt. “Jerk. That fuck. Asshole.”

May, New York

In glitzy Trump Tower, near the classy steak restaurant (plush booths, faux antiques) there’s gilded merchandise that celebrates the greatness of the man and his brand.

I select choice Trump deodorants for my sons, one called Empire, the other Success.

May, Washington DC

I read that the hotel in Georgetown was once a giant municipal incinerator. After that I can’t relax. A waiter talks about his family: “I came here as a kid. My daughter works crazy hours for the FBI. I have to look after her dogs.” He hates Trump.

May, Miami

On Memorial Day, fighter jets roar in formation over Miami; perhaps they’ll do a loop over Mar-a-Lago. The Commander-in-Chief loves a spectacle. That night on the teeming streets of South Beach, hardly anyone is white. We stroll among the glamorous, young African-American crowd, feeling middle-aged and benign, unbothered.

Outside a gay bar I watch a performer in makeup and a ball gown take up a mike and humiliate the only woman among the men at the tables. She starts out loving it, high-fiving. Gradually her smile fades as the jokes darken and he unleashes it on her: hate, contempt.

July, Dubai – London

On an Emirates flight, we hit a massive storm. It was night, most people were asleep and I talked to an English barrister. His wife worked for a London law firm whose clients were Russian oligarchs. They’d acted for Berezovsky in his lawsuit against Roman Abramovich before they’d had to pull out of the case. He explained why they’d pulled out, something to do with someone’s girlfriend, possibly Berezovsky’s – but the turbulence intensified, a series of lurching impacts, as though we were in a speed boat hitting high waves, and I couldn’t follow the thread. When I started to focus again he was saying that Berezovsky had lost the case and then killed himself.

“Or was Berezovsky murdered?” I said. “By another oligarch perhaps?”

“No, Putin doesn’t allow the oligarchs to kill each other. Only Putin can do that.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Have you read Wolf Hall? Putin’s like Henry VIII.”

He said that Putin had ordered the murder of Litvinenko, of course. It was funny, he said, at one stage Litvinenko’s assassins had travelled on a BA plane from Moscow to London and had left a trail of polonium on board that authorities found months after the murder.

*

CNN footage of weird, repressive, authoritarian men: Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un. The posturing. The bizarre hairstyles, the violence and cruelty. The narcissism.

*

I browse through an old paperback: People of the Lie by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck. I skate over his Christianity, but he has an interesting idea. Writing about the My Lai massacre, he calls nationalism collective narcissism. He draws a line of narcissism, from lack of empathy in families (with hair-raising examples of covert parental cruelty) all the way to atrocity on a grand scale.

July, London

At Northwick Park NHS Hospital, I sat beside a friend who’d undergone a minor procedure. The nurse was rude and I grumbled, but my friend stopped me. “She’s been incredibly kind. She has 50 patients and she’s been on shift for 14 hours.” The hospital building was so ugly, squalid and run-down that I’d kept exclaiming in consternation.

From our Uber, driving home on the Westway, we took in the horrifying black ruin of the Grenfell Tower.

July, Athens

In the birthplace of democracy an anarchist group had rampaged through the shopping area in the night, smashing windows. Broken glass was strewn across pavements. I found footage: masked figures running, armed with sledgehammers and crowbars.

July, Reykjavik

Iceland is richly green in the summer. Here you can walk in the rift between two tectonic plates, and find the site of the first parliament ever established.

Walking through Reykjavik, up into the residential streets, past the embassies, I succumbed to a coughing fit so serious I thought I would choke.

I stayed in my room for a day, writing Mazarine.

The whole year, I’d thought about the family I grew up in, trying to define my true self. Writing plot-driven fiction, I was reaching for the universal; I wanted to mirror “the Time”. A “global” experience: ruled by a narcissist, gas-lighted when we protested, bamboozled by false narrative and confused by fake news.

If “fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth,” then fiction could trump real lies. All this time travelling, I was following the line of my story. The further away I went, I hoped, the closer I was getting to home.

Mazarine by Charlotte Grimshaw (Vintage, $38) is available at Unity Books.

Steve Braunias reviews a new biography of Prince Charles by way of wondering when a full account will ever be given about New Zealand’s royal family and the kiingitanga.

One of the great forbidden stories of New Zealand journalism is a portrait of the court of King Tūheitia Paki. It’s not exactly open government at Tūrangawaewae, the kiingitanga seat at Ngāruawāhia. “It’s got nothing to do with you. We’re working through it ourselves,” Waikato-Tainui chief executive Donna Flavell scolded Herald reporter Matt Nippert in September last year, when he began following the King’s money. Nippert tracked down a report by the Charities Services which investigated possible mismanagement of funds. He wrote, “That report, obtained by the Weekend Herald, detailed the King’s $350,000 annual salary and raised concerns about 114 transactions between 2012 and 2014 totalling $120,691, relating to the purchase of jewellery, clothing and beauty treatments and almost $90,000 in cash withdrawals.”

There was a follow-up story published in the Herald on Sunday at Easter. “This took a long time, and a lot of legwork, to get over the line,” Nippert noted on his Twitter account, linking to his story about a “mysterious $46,000 invoice for weight-loss surgery”. From his front-page scoop: “Exactly who had the expensive procedure done privately at Auckland’s MercyAscot hospital, paid for out of a Tainui Group Holdings fund dedicated to the healthcare of King Tūheitia Paki, is unknown.” Who, exactly, was The Thin Man? Helpfully, there was film of Nippert and his famous brown suit at Auckland airport’s domestic arrivals gate, interviewing the King’s principal secretary, Rangi Whakaruru, described as “trim-looking”. Yes, said Whakaruru, he had gastric band surgery. No, he said, he knew nothing about a “mysterious $46,000 invoice”. Nippert wrote, “Whakaruru, who is paid an annual salary of more than $200,000 from the charity handling the King’s affairs, denied it related to his own treatment.”

The key line in the story: “Whakaruru has been a close confidante to King Tūheitia since 2009.” Close confidante, principal secretary, advisor – now we’re talking. In almost every monarchy, it’s the king or queen’s courtiers who are the ones to watch. They are the powers behind the throne, the influencers, with their urgings and promptings and various assorted maneuverings. In New Zealand, their activities are as covert as the royal family. King Tūheitia Paki operates behind a veil of silence; the media is rarely granted access. We know that his health is bad. He keeps a low profile. This pithy assessment in a 2011 Herald story may or may not be an accurate measure of his stature: “A former truck driver who is a rugby league lover and kapa haka fan, he mows his own lawns.” His eldest son Whatumoana Paki takes on many of his father’s duties. His younger son Korotangi is invisible, a preferable state of affairs to his shabby media appearances in 2014, best summarised in this haunting sentence from Stuff: “Paki, supported in court by his heavily pregnant girlfriend, pleaded guilty to all charges arising from the theft of two surfboards from Waikanae Motor Camp.”

But that was four years ago. Leave the “Prince” to get on with his private life. King Tūheitia’s advisers are fair game for scrutiny, especially considering the quality of some of their advice. Their decision to say thanks but no thanks to a visit from Prince William and Princess Kate during the 2014 royal visit was widely viewed as ungracious. On the other hand, that view was widely promoted by John Key. Newspaper report, London’s Daily Telegraph: “Mr Key said King Tūheitia’s advisors told officials at Kensington Palace that ‘if you can’t make it longer than 90 minutes, then don’t come.’ Mr Key said, ‘It’s a matter for them to decide their own thing, but in the end [Prince William] has a fairly tight timetable. I would have thought [90 minutes] was quite generous.’”

He might have had a point there. At any rate, the royal visit was a minor and innocuous matter. More seriously, the King spurned Labour at last year’s election and backed the Māori Party. King Tūheitia signalled his intentions at a speech in Tūrangawaewae in August 2016. The eternally hapless Labour leader Andrew Little didn’t see it coming. Jo Moir, Stuff: “On Sunday at Tūheitia’s speech Little was sat only metres away from where the King delivered his attack on the party. However a last minute heads-up about what was about to go down meant Little got thrown in a golf cart before the grenades started flying.” King Tūheitia later went on to endorse Māori Party candidate, Rahui Papa, in the Hauraki-Waikato seat over his own niece, Nanaia Mahuta. It didn’t work out too well. Outside of the Waikato, kiingitanga is often seen as an obscure construct, a historic curio, with limited influence. Ngāpuhi leader David Rankin scorned Tūheitia when he said, “As far as the Government is concerned, they have no right to use the term ‘Māori King’. Tūheitia could be called the King of Huntly, perhaps. I could live with that.” The 2017 election results suggested that kīngitanga has limited influence within the Waikato: Mahuta gave Papa a hiding at the polls, and increased her majority.

Was the whole thing King Tūheitia’s idea, his own doing, or was he acting on advice? Both Labour and New Zealand First pointed the finger at that brown eminence, Tukoroirangi Morgan, the former Māori Party president, who was forever described as “one of Tūheitia’s closest advisors”. Morgan has since stepped down. Tuariki Delamere replaced Morgan as the King’s “political advisor” in January, and pledged that the kiingitanga would give its “unconditional support” to Jacinda Ardern’s Labour-led government. Advisors, principal secretaries, close confidantes….From whence do they come from? Who are all the King’s men? Is it entirely a formal arrangement, within the King’s 12-person council, Tekau-mā-rua, or is it sometimes informal? What goes on behind the scenes?

There was a fascinating glimpse inside the King’s “inner circle” on Native Affairs in 2015. The show’s reporter Maiki Sherman spoke with Morgan, and Te Kaumaru leader Te Kahautu Maxwell, a very thoughtful man who shared interesting views on the King’s apparent divinity. You have to wonder what else he thinks and what he brings to the table. But the programme was less than 12 minutes in length. A full picture of New Zealand’s royal family and its attendant courtiers awaits.

Strange to even think that we have an existing monarchy; it’s been around for 160 years, and has become an evidently wealthy enterprise, with its salary of $350,000 for King Tūheitia and $200,000 for his principal secretary. Matt Nippert’s instincts to follow the money have parted the curtain. Not everything that goes on in a royal court, though, is scandalous or mendacious. Auckland historian Paul Moon isn’t exactly seen as a friend to Māoridom – his 2008 book on cannibalism went down badly, and fellow AUT lecturer Hēmi Kelly attacked Moon’s 2018 book Killing Te Reo as “ridiculous” in the Spinoff – but he made valuable comments about kiingitanga in an interview with Elton Smallman, the excellent Māori affairs reporter at the Waikato Times. Moon said kiingitanga had a long and proud history and a “crucial role” to play in modern society: “This thing has a pedigree that goes back a long way… There is an accumulation of experience, there is an accumulation of wisdom and a lot of very, very committed people behind the king.”

There are a lot of people behind Prince Charles, too, advisors and confidantes of all stripes, padding noiselessly along the corridors at Balmoral and Clarence House and St James Palace, sycophants of empire, “people of power and influence employed in or with access to the inner sanctum of the rival royal courts”, as described on the back cover of Tom Bowers’s new book Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles. Its 350 pages are based on the low-hanging fruit of interviews with 120 such “people of power and influence”. When it comes to detailed information about the secret goings-on within the court of King Tūheitia Paki, the cupboard is pretty much bare; Rebel Prince is merely the latest vast outpouring of revelations about the way Charles conducts his affairs.

Much of the book is thick with the various assorted maneuverings of advisers. Bowers’s thesis is that Charles does things his own muddled and disastrous way, and ignores every single piece of good advice. He operates by caprice, whim, and arrogance. “Embraced today, a favourite can be cast out tomorrow. Like some feudal lord, he presides at the centre of a court with no place for democracy or dissenting views…He has refused to engage in debate. Advisers know that to say ‘No’ will simply prompt his search for a replacement who will say ‘Yes.’ Every decision is his and his alone.”

It seems plain that one of Bowers’s sources is Don McKinnon. In exchange for giving Bowers a one-sided version of his dealings with Charles when he served as Commonwealth secretary, he comes across as a man of vision and courage, and given the heroic soubriquet “the combative New Zealander”. McKinnon claims that he urged Charles’s advisers over and over that the Prince had to go out and actually visit Commonwealth countries other than Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. “The Commonwealth’s existence was in jeopardy,” Bowers states, blindly going along with McKinnon’s version. Charles went as far as meeting the high commissioners of Pacific countries at New Zealand House in London: “McKinnon was unimpressed by reports of the encounter.”

Later, Bowers writes, “Most Commonwealth countries, including New Zealand, disliked the prospect of Queen Camilla.” Again, is this McKinnon, whispering sweet nothings into Bowers’s ear? Anyone who trotted along on the royal tour of New Zealand in 2012 would have seen that their reception was warm, genuine, excited. True, there was only one family to meet them when they arrived in the country, at Whenuapai airport. Elisabeth Uele was watching the news at her home in West Harbour when she saw that Charles was about to arrive. She gathered her sister, visiting from America, and six of her nine children, and jumped in the car. Her kids posed for photos on police motorcycles. They were outnumbered by the diplomatic protection squad, who parked up in front of two cows in a yard, and threw invisible rugby balls at each other…But two days later, on Queen St, crowds lined up six-deep to welcome Charles and Camilla. It was a public ecstasy, something genuine and fond.

But this doesn’t fit the narrative as suggested by “the combative New Zealander”. One story in Rebel Prince, possibly real, possibly fabricated and self-serving, has McKinnon, that wild colonial, bold and true, telling it like it is to Charles’s lackeys: “Charles must do his bit!”

They meet him less than half-way. “We’ve been thinking,” they airily instruct McKinnon, “that he might visit Malta.”

The fools! Didn’t they know what was at stake? And who did they think they were talking to, anyway? McKinnon wasn’t the type to tug his forelock and back out of the room. McKinnon, according to Bowers, “snapped” at the lackeys: “Malta’s down the street. He needs to go further!”

Sadly, the response is the same as when McKinnon was deputy prime minister under Bolger: no one listened to him.

If only Prince Charles would heed the wise counsel of those like McKinnon, sighs Bowers, who affects to wring his hands with frustration. “As a committed monarchist, I want Charles to become king,” he writes. But: “His popularity, as I write in early 2018, remains disconcertingly low.” Well, it can always plummet lower, and Bowers does his best to present Charles in the worst possible light. There is fresh gossip and stale gossip and discredited gossip; Bowers drags out the old lie told by a valet of Princess Diana that he once saw Charles and his personal assistant Michael Fawcett “in the midst of a sexual act”. For balance, or something, he also drags out the one by a cop who wrote in his tawdry memoirs that Diana possessed a vibrator.

Rebel Prince, like any tell-all or tell-some, operates like one of those “You Won’t Believe What Tiger Woods’s Wife Looks Like Now” clickbait fillers that we consider ourselves too lofty to look at but find ourselves driving the arrows relentlessly forward in search of the next unpleasant image. Prince Charles is seen as a hothead and a cold fish, most often as a crackpot. “He sits for hours, and sometimes for a whole day, dressed in eccentric clothes in the garden.” He smashes dinner plates in a rage. He puts down his siblings: “I’m the Prince of Wales, and they’re not.” He puts down his sons. He communicates with his father by letter. He has Stephen Fry over to dinner; the appeal of that old phoney is that he’s “clever, funny, and endlessly flattering.” He has a man to squeeze the royal toothpaste and a man who carries his own personal lavatory seat on all his travels so that it may please his royal bum.

But it’s all the same thing. There’s no light and shade in Rebel Prince, only vindictive and embarrassing little leaves of gossip that swirl around Prince Charles but fail to illuminate the man inside. One of the few times he comes alive in the book is when Bowers presents two pieces of dialogue between Charles and Camilla.

The first reported exchange is during their affair.

Charles: “I need you several times a week.”

Camilla: “I need you all the week, all the time.”

The second reported exchange is more recently, and the setting has Charles at the bottom of the stairs, shouting up to Camilla, on their way to an official engagement.

Charles: “Come on, get a move on!”

Camilla: “Where are we going?”

Charles: “Haven’t you read the brief?”

The first, driven by lust and desire (although the “several” estimate is less than crazed); the second, a banal scene from a marriage. “Get a move on” – the appeal of husbands everywhere, impatient on the doorstep, looking at their watch, needing to go out somewhere when they’d probably rather stay in with the woman they love. For all his supposed eccentricities, there is an appealing ordinariness about Charles. Shy, awkward, funny, not especially clever, endlessly flattered…There can hardly be any mystery why he’s mad as a snake. When he was a toddler, he once paraded up and down the red carpet in the nursery corridor, wearing a red velvet Santa Claus cloak, and chanting, “I’m the King!” Not yet; his whole life he’s been waiting for his mother to die.

Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles by Tom Bowers (Harper Collins, $54) is available at Unity Books.