His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales

Lord Newby Excerpts

Wednesday 14th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, it is a particular pleasure for me to support the humble Address, which we are debating today. For 20 years from the early 1990s, I worked with the Prince’s Trust, first as a consultant and then as chair of its Football Initiative.

Started with the Prince’s severance pay when he left the Royal Navy in 1976, the trust has now helped more than 900,000 young people. Its turnover is more than £50 million a year. It turns around the lives of the vast bulk of the young people with whom it works.

This has been possible only because of the hands-on commitment of the Prince, who has devoted an enormous amount of his time and energy to promoting its work. In doing so, he has deployed in an extremely canny way the soft power he wields—and which he knows he wields.

One example sums this up. In the autumn of 1997, the trust had just launched an initiative to involve the Premier League football clubs in its work: to use the stardust of the clubs and their grounds to motivate participants in trust programmes. I had managed to persuade seven of the 20 Premier League clubs to become involved. To persuade the remainder, we held a tea party in St James’s Palace for the club chairmen. They all came. Prince Charles had tea with the ones who had signed up. The others had to suffer a lecture from me. At the end of my homily, double doors swung open and the Prince emerged, followed by seven grinning chairmen. The others were furious at their second-class treatment. One of them marched across the room and said in threatening tones, “You’ll be hearing from me in the morning”. Indeed, the next morning his club secretary rang and sheepishly asked to get involved, which the club then did. More than 20 years later this programme alone has raised more than £9 million from the Premier League and the Professional Footballers’ Association, and impacted on the lives of tens of thousands of young people.

None of this could have happened without the Prince’s personal involvement at the start and his continuing involvement ever since. It is one of countless cases where the Prince has used his influence for the good of the country of which he will eventually become monarch. It is a formidable record of achievement which I suggest has had a greater impact on the country than that of any Prince of Wales since the Black Prince some 650 years ago. The country is fortunate in having such a thoughtful, committed and energetic Prince of Wales. He fully deserves all our good wishes for his 70th birthday and for his future health and happiness.