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Prince Charles takes over Buckingham Palace for party fit for a king

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Choosing how to celebrate a landmark birthday is always tricky. For the Prince of Wales, the answer was a lavish party in the palace that will become his home, to the music of Richard Wagner.

The celebration took place in Buckingham Palace last Thursday, with 400 guests including George Osborne, the Chancellor, and his wife, Frances, and some of the wealthiest people in Britain.

“It was an exquisite evening,” one of the invitees tells Mandrake. “It started with a champagne reception and then there was a concert performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra.”

The event, which cost £500,000, was paid for Cyrus Vandrevala, the Indian private equity tycoon and philanthropist, and his wife, Priya. She was seated at the head of the table next to Prince Charles, while her husband was placed next to Charles’s wife, the Duchess of Cornwall.

The couple have become close to Charles and Camilla through their financial support of the Elephant Family conservation charity, which was founded by Mark Shand, the Duchess’s brother.

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“We are lucky that His Royal Highness has chosen to celebrate his birthday with us,” they said on the invitation. “But even tonight, as with so much of his life, he is on duty on behalf of the country. Indeed, this whole wonderful celebration evening will help bring benefit to so many.”

As well as marking the heir to the throne’s birthday, the party celebrated the 35th anniversary of his patronage of the Philharmonia, and the bicentenary of Wagner.

The Prince chose the music for the concert, at which parts of the German composer’s Ring Cycle were performed. The event took 12 months to plan.

“We have long enjoyed supporting His Royal Highness with all of his great works and we should all be grateful that there is someone like him leading the way in so many fields of philanthropy, partticularly in the arts, where so much support is needed.”

They add: “It is not elitist, and we are honoured to support such excellence, In our book, His Royal Highness represents excellence and achievement of the highest order.”

Among the guests at the party were Lakshmi Mittal, Britain’s fourth richest man, and his wife, Usha, along with the Hinduja brothers, Sri and Gopi, who are the country’s third wealthiest, with their spouses.

The Prince’s close friend Nicholas Soames, the Conservative MP, was there with his wife, Serena. Gert-Rudolph Flick, the heir to the Daimler-Benz fortune, and his wife, Corinne, attended, as well as the new American ambassador, Matthew Barzun.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were conspicuous by their absence. By convention, the heir to the throne can host parties at Buckingham Palace only when the monarch is not resident. The Queen is believed to have been at Windsor Castle.

Charles’s birthday was seven days earlier, on November 14, but he and the Duchess were in the Indian state of Kerala, on a visit before they attended the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Sri Lanka.

Read more from Mandrake here

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Prince Charles shows he's got what it takes to be king

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Why Prince Charles's Duchy Originals takes the biscuit

By Sarah Rainey

11:30AM GMT 12 Nov 2013

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When Prince Charles first entered the world of retail, he was nearly laughed straight out of it. “A shop-soiled Royal!” jeered the headlines, branding the new business a “vanity project” with no hope of success.

Two decades later, it is Charles who has the last laugh. Duchy Originals, his organic food range, has grown to encompass 230 products, sold in 30 countries from Australia to Japan. Sales of traditional oaten biscuits - the first item in the Duchy brand, made from oats harvested on his Highgrove estate - have reached 70 million in total.

It was no coincidence that Charles’s first business venture focused on organic food: his devotion to farming and the natural world stems from a childhood spent among the rolling green estates of Sandringham and Balmoral. He has always said that had he not been a prince he would have been a farmer.

“Right from the start,” he explained at a celebration of Duchy Originals in September, “preserving our heritage, upholding traditional skills and supporting our local communities were of fundamental importance to the brand.”

But as well as indulging a passion, founding Duchy Originals represented a savvy business move. As custodian of the Duchy of Cornwall, 53,154 hectares of land in south-west England, Charles had already embarked on a number of programmes to reverse what he saw as the destructive trend of modern agriculture and stop the disintegration of its countryside communities.

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Producing foodstuffs from the crops growing on the estate seemed the next logical step - and the ideal money-spinner for his charities, for which the brand has now raised £11 million from its profits. When Duchy Originals launched in 1992, earthy potatoes were plucked from the fields, butter churned in its creameries and flour milled from its golden grain.

The timing of the range couldn’t have been better. In the early Nineties, organic food was far from the supermarket staple it is today. Duchy Originals, a brand founded entirely on the principles of food that “is good, does good, tastes good”, was somewhat ahead of its time.

“We didn’t make organic products back then,” says Jim Walker, joint managing director of Walkers Shortbread, the Scottish company behind the famous oaten biscuit. “The Prince encouraged us to start and it’s been a happy partnership ever since.”

The decade marked a surge in interest in organic produce, underpinned by research that showed food made sustainably and without artificial fertilisers tasted better and was healthier than ordinary produce. Sales soared: between 1994 and 2004, the organic food market rose in value from £100 million to £1.21 billion.

Now, 86 per cent of British households buy organic dairy, fruit and veg in their weekly shop. And, as artisan bakeries, butchers and delicatessens multiplied on our high streets, it was Duchy Originals products that stocked the shelves.

From creamy Stilton to fruity chutneys, sparkling apple cider to fragrant smoked salmon, the brand today comprises a small but carefully-selected range of products. Each one is approved by Prince Charles, who regularly tastes ingredients and recipes.

For the oaten biscuit, he sampled over 100 different products before agreeing on the right combination of crumbly and buttery, savoury but sweet. “He works much harder than most people realise,” explains Walker. “At the start he ate a lot of biscuits.”

It hasn’t all been straightforward, however. His critics have remained, with some seizing on controversial products - such as a herbal remedy launched in 2008 - as evidence that the Prince is letting personal passions obscure his business nous. Others have questioned his apparent double standards: a bottle of Royal Deeside mineral water travels 6,000 miles to luxury Gulf supermarkets, despite the group’s commitment to “the smallest environmental footprint”.

Though the brand was doing well, with an annual turnover of around £1 million in the late Nineties, it struggled to expand its market reach, with products mostly stocked in farm shops and independent delicatessens. Duchy started making a loss, and was badly hit by the recession in 2007, bumping balance sheets into the red to the tune of £3.3 million.

The turning point came in 2009, when Charles licensed the brand to Waitrose. The supermarket promised to invest in the company and pay a royalty fee, and, in return, was granted the exclusive right to sell its products. Now, annual profits top £2.8 million, and, thanks in part to its tie-up with Duchy, Waitrose holds a 22.6 per cent share of the UK organic market (up from 5.9 per cent in previous years).

“We have always shared similar values to the brand,” says Graham Cassie of Waitrose. “Duchy Originals enables customers to identify the best organic foods. The brand is continually innovating and the Prince of Wales remains very close to it.”

Key to its enduring success is Charles’s sustained relationship with the farmers who form the backbone of Duchy Originals. “He is concerned about all types of agriculture, which makes him a great champion for people like me,” says John Tuft, who raises free-range chickens for the brand from his 240-acre farm in the village of Ballinderry, County Antrim. When Charles visited in 2011, Tuft says he was “very passionate; he sat down in my dining room and had a cup of tea with the whole family”.

Guy Tullberg, managing director of Tracklements in Wiltshire, which has made Duchy Originals chutneys and preserves for 12 years, says the relationship has helped the company “nurture

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Do you have what it takes to be godparent to the future king?

"dated 23/07/13 of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge leaving the Lindo Wing of St Mary's Hospital in London, with their newborn son, Prince George of Cambridge" itemprop

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