Prince Charles, the man who waits, clicks over into another year in his peculiar life, and into history today.
He turns 65, and no matter whether he succeeds his mother soon or years from now, he becomes a historic, singular figure for the United Kingdom.
Not that Charles is making a big deal of it. He’s too busy wrapping up a successful nine-day tour of India. Plus, he’s about to represent the Queen at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting that begins Friday in Sri Lanka.
(Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is boycotting the meeting to protest Sri Lanka’s dismal record on human rights.)
But attention should be paid: Charles is the longest-serving heir-apparent (61 years) to the British throne in its 1,000-year history. If he becomes King Charles III, after his mother, now 87, he will be the oldest monarch to ever take the throne, surpassing William IV, who was just short of his 65th birthday when he became king in 1830.
Things are looking up for the man once widely despised after his marriage to the beloved Diana, Princess of Wales, fell apart in the 1990s.
Now he’s widely respected for his good works and good intentions, if not beloved.
“Happy at last,” read the headline in the Telegraph recently about Charles’ birthday.
Charles told Time magazine, “I feel more than anything else it’s my duty to worry about everybody and their lives in this country, to try to find a way of improving things if I possibly can.”
Charles’s standing has already improved. He has raised two sons, William, 31, and Harry, 29, who are hugely popular, well-adjusted, charming and public-spirited. They clearly adore him, “and the credit for that has to go to Charles,” says Charles’s confidante and biographer, Penny Junor. “It is partly through his sons that he has redeemed his reputation and his popularity,” she says.
He’s loosened up, moving away from his image as a stuffed shirt to someone more informal, whether it’s delivering the weather report in Scotland, cuddling koalas in Australia or getting his picture taken with a couple of Daleks from Doctor Who in Wales.
Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, were warmly welcomed to Victoria and CFBEsquimalt in November 2009, before he qualified for all seniors’ discounts.
