Prince Charles is finally, happy at last

Agony to the left of him, angst to the right of him; folly and blunder. For many years the Prince of Wales has delivered a decent impression of a tortured soul, wracked with worries over the realm he will inherit, and all too easily misunderstood. If it was ever really this bad, it isn't now. As his 65th birthday approaches, this most conscientious and qualified of heirs is in the prime of life.

As his successful current tour of India suggests, Charles has reached the level of contentment where he can meet up with a Hindu guru, to be garlanded with marigolds and roses and sprinkled with holy water, without fear of being pilloried back home as an oddball dithering, amid clouds of incense, over which of the paths to enlightenment to follow. Today the Prince follows his own path, and while he has a reasonable certainty that it will take him to the throne, he isn't overly concerned about when, how, or even if, it will happen. His time, he believes, is precious, and his work vital.

As Time magazine recently reported in a long pre-birthday interview: "Far from itching to assume the Crown, he is already feeling its weight and worrying about its impact on the job he has long been doing." This job, as the Prince portrays it, is primarily to worry on behalf of the rest of us. By which he means that his position allows him to be: "an amplifier of messages and a conductor of ideas". He understands that he is widely seen not merely as a pessimist but an alarmist, and is reconciled to the fact that his views will not always be taken seriously. To his aides he calls himself the "Worrier in Chief", a title that smacks perhaps of the confusion and doubt that plagued him for years. But his life has changed, and today he can worry from the unfamiliar vantage point of happiness. Central to the change has been his eight-year marriage to Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall.

For the first time in the nearly 40 years since they first fell for each other, Charles and Camilla can afford to be themselves. Their friends describe them as being not merely thankful for, but intoxicated by, the shift in public opinion that has allowed them to become the "nation's favourite oldies". The pretence, the evasion, the palls of obloquy and transgression that hung over them, have vanished. For the Prince - no born romantic - this is welcome enough, but for the Duchess it has been a licence to cut loose. She has an irrepressibly sociable nature.

She likes a drink, a cigarette, a dirty joke, and the kind of company she can relax in, and it is around her tastes and preferences that the couple have built their lives. Almost everyone in the their circle recalls their wedding as a gamble. One that could have easily and disastrously backfired. The omens were all bad - shambolic arrangements, a forced rescheduling to accommodate the Pope's funeral, ominous hints of disapproval from the Queen.

All were compounded by the understandable dismay of those admirers of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who will forever hold the Prince and his duchess responsible for the Princess's unhappiness. Today, argues royal author Penny Junor, a confidante of the Prince, he has never been in better shape.

"I think he has found personal happiness after many years of unhappiness and torment," she says. "And I think his career is going extremely well. People are beginning to understand what he has been banging on about all these years." The Duchess's is a double destiny. Above all she aspires to be the wife the Prince of Wales always needed; one who can understand him, play to his strengths and soothe the writhings of his soul. But on the other hand, she is out to be, as one Gloucestershire friend puts it, "an absolute ripsnorter of an aristocrat".

And in this respect, things have moved strongly in her favour. The Princess of Wales's saintly glow may never fade, but many of those who sneered and raged at the Duchess after the Princess's death now largely accept that the Prince's first marriage was a tragic error, essentially imposed by outside forces. And so, at last, the public appears ready to give the Prince and Duchess a break. The welcome they receive on official engagements is enthusiastic. No longer do Fleet Street picture editors search for the least flattering possible pictures of the Duchess.

No more does she appear haggard, worn and clumsy. All this is surely to be welcomed, for, as her friends have long argued, she is, at heart, a likeable, kindly and loyal English countrywoman. Yet the real beneficiary has been the Prince himself - a man of desperate good intent and prodigious effort, too easily seen as a piece of constitutional superfluity, with nothing really to do while his redoubtable mother reigns serenely on at the age of 87. The solidity of his marriage has given him a platform to address the issues he really cares about - the environment, architecture, the inner cities.

According to one of his key advisers, Lord Deben, the former Conservative minister John Gummer, he sees his role as: "upholding the virtues of continuity in a time of great change". The interview he gave to Time, in which he drew a mangled parallel between ascending to the throne and going to prison, was widely interpreted as meaning that he doesn't really want to be king. It isn't, insist those close to the Prince, that simple. What he fears is that he will have less scope to express his views, less time to devote the to work he does already. He readily admits to being "a meddling prince", and even if he didn't, the evidence is everywhere. Nowhere, perhaps, more explicitly than in Alastair Campbell's Downing Street diaries, which record Tony Blair "reeling" from the Prince's efforts to influence government policy, either in long, handwritten letters (complete with inky underlinings) or in the course of personal meetings.

One entry, of October 1999, reads: "TB said Charles had to understand there were limits to the extent to which [Prince Charles] could play politics with him." There is nothing to suggest his approach has changed since the Coalition came to power. There is much about the Prince, though, that has changed. And largely for the better. When he turns 65 on Thursday, he will become the oldest monarch-in-waiting in British history, overtaking William IV, who was 64 when he took the throne in 1860. It doesn't seem to bother him.

Indeed, age appears to suit the Prince, who has always shown a veneration for the knowledge and experience of older minds. It suits him, too, in the new role of grandfather to Prince George, and suits him above all in the comfortable, faintly-crusty, country life he enjoys with the Duchess. His birthday will find him in Sri Lanka, attending the opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. The engagement is one of a growing number that he has taken on in place of the Queen. And a timely reminder that the big job still lies ahead.