Like many bridegrooms, Prince Charles spent the run-up to his wedding in male company, saying things he might regret the next day. But, far from being a stag party, this was the sober annual ritual in which the prince and his two sons break their winter holiday in Klosters to take questions from the media. Through welded teeth, Charles offered his squeak of anger at his interlocutors and, in particular, the BBC's royal correspondent, Nicholas Witchell. 'Bloody people,' he said. 'I can't bear that man. I mean, he is so awful. He really is.' The media took a largely dim view. There was much commentary about the gaffes of a spoilt and petulant prince, and Mr Witchell reported the affair as gravely as if the heir to the throne had commissioned a Swiss stripogram, or proposed parcelling his mother and her corgis off on a one-way ticket to the Sunshine Rest Home for the Elderly, Skegness. Most viewers watching the prince's outburst would have taken a less astringent view, for several reasons.  Mr Witchell, apparently known as the 'Poison Carrot' at work because of the acerbic nature of his postbag, does not hold national treasure status. The prince, with his arms round his sons, cut a lonely but protective figure. There was a demotic element to his rant against the high-flown BBC, just after William had apparently confided his own wedding plans, or lack of them, to the  Sun. And besides, it was all oddly hilarious. But not to Charles, who could not, in the end, endure a saccharine encounter with representatives of media that, in his opinion, have reported his forthcoming marriage in a manner vile beyond belief.  'He loathes us,' says James Whitaker, a veteran of Klosters and the royal ratpack. 'He regards us all as scum. Although he's been able to bottle it up well, we got the true Charles in that moment.' Who, though, is the real Charles? Last week, he made headlines by losing his temper on the ski slopes. This week, he makes history when he and Camilla Parker Bowles, the divorced and 'non-negotiable' mistress whom he has loved for most of his life, marry on Friday at the sort of unpretentious register office that also does dog licences.  The Guildhall, Windsor, was chosen only because obtaining a licence for Windsor Castle would have allowed ordinary couples to marry there. But its prosaic setting is a perfect illustration of the contradictions that define the Prince of Wales. He is an austere eater who breakfasts off wheatgerm, lunches off dry bread and dines like the Emperor Nero, sometimes with a Spice Girl in attendance (he likes Geri Halliwell because she is 'so non-PC'). Charles is the social improver who grumbled, on hearing that a black secretary wanted promotion: 'What is wrong with everybody these days? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their technical capabilities?' He is the spartan who cannot travel without seven bedrooms for his vast retinue of staff, the narrow thinker who wants to be a Platonic philosopher king. He is, in his view, constantly misunderstood, and it makes him furious.  Long before Klosters, rage defined the Prince of Wales. Irascibility is hard-wired in his Hanoverian genes (or ingrained by his formal upbringing) and he is said to have inherited the 'gnashes' of his grandfather, George VI. The king used to kick furniture so hard that his hosts hid their antiques when he came to stay, replacing them with a prewar Ikea equivalent. When I visited his grandson at Highgrove, I watched him do it too. 'I have had to battle and battle and battle against a complete wall of opposition,' he said, and his oxblood loafer pulsed a drumbeat of frustration against the velvet sofa.  Sarah Bradford, the Queen's biographer, quotes a former servant's claims that Charles, in the stress of his failing marriage to Diana, wrenched a handbasin from a wall and wrote terse notes to staff: 'This sponge is dry. Please see that it is watered immediately.' On matters pertaining to areas outside his bathroom, he corresponds with ministers, urging them to bend policies on his key interests, such as farming, non-carbuncular architecture or science, to his wishes. Why should the Prince of Wales, a man with modest duties, an endless cash cow in the Duchy of Cornwall and an understanding partner, be so enraged, so pessimistic, so importunate? Why would he be so sad?  In part, because he has been fawned on too much by those who love him least. And, in part, because he is right in thinking that he has had a rough deal. At his worst, he is extravagant, intemperate and too receptive to bad advice. At his best, he is concerned, dutiful and engaging - traits largely invisible, especially as filtered through media that veer between presenting him as a joke figure, or, alternatively, as a callous solipsist who ruined the brief life of his virgin bride. To counter, or ignore, such portrayals would take a man of guile and toughness. The prince possesses neither attribute, and, with the exception of his best image-maker, Mark Bolland, has proved incapable even of buying in the only weapons beyond the reach of status or money.  Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor was marginalised from the start. As the fountains in Trafalgar Square ran blue to herald the birth of a male heir, his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, was playing squash with his mother's private secretary. The next day, in November 1948, Winston Churchill commended to the Commons a serene monarchy and 'a little prince, now born into this world of storm and strife'. The first part of the analysis was awry, the second accurate.  But the prince is a victim not of geopolitical or even national turmoil. The first of his two nemeses was a family that required him to behave like an infant courtier and sent him to Gordonstoun, the tough Scottish boarding school he detested, to iron out his 'weakness'. His second downfall was a modern media, whose prurience was never going to accommodate a prince who naively thought it was still all right, in the tradition of royal males, to have both a mistress and a wife. His first marriage was disastrous, his job condemns him to wait forever in the wings, and the press seeks, often shamelessly, to destroy him and install his older son in a post that Charles has trained for all his life and would do more reliably. It would be tempting to feel sorry for the Prince of Wales, were he not so saturated in self-pity.  But the fourth post-holder since the Prince Regent has not settled for victim status either. Instead, he has carved out a role, notably in setting up the Prince's Trust, that has helped thousands of disadvantaged young people. His genuine interest in, and understanding of, deprivation is not an example of noblesse oblige or social spin. For all his privilege, Charles, the outsider, knows how exclusion feels.  In other areas, the prince has been less successful. He has failed to curb his extravagance and been slow to investigate stories of bad behaviour within his household (including allegations of a male rape and the selling of unwanted gifts). But his real missed chance has been to neglect the necessity for reform. He has been too keen to intervene in politics, which are none of his business, and too hesitant - or more probably unwilling - to press the Queen and Prime Minister for an agenda for a modern, accountable and pared-down monarchy. The changes, at the start, could be incremental ones, such as repealing the Act of Settlement, which debars those outside the Protestant faith from reigning, and ending primogeniture.  Charles is not, however, a natural moderniser. A self-styled 'historian', he regards the past as a refuge from a present that he cannot comprehend and a future he mistrusts. His suits and kilts - even his Klosters ski-suit - have a museum cut, and his idea of Britain resides in an ancient dream. A re-bottler of genies, the prince looks out of his palace windows and surveys a world that is forever Middlemarch, only now with fewer foxhounds. Charles could have been little more than a man grown prematurely ancient in a Britain where, on his chronometer, time stands still. The events of this week will change all that.  By the greatest of ironies, a prince metaphorically wedded to the past will crush tradition in his second marriage. For a divorced heir to the throne to marry a middle-aged mother of two, herself divorced, in a simple civil ceremony boycotted by his mother would, until recently, have been unthinkable. For his bride, a jolly Gloucestershire matron with a voice that could trigger a Klosters avalanche, to become the next queen would once have seemed even weirder. But that, in law, if not in intent, is Camilla's destiny.  This wedding fulfils the dreams that a large part of the British population harbours, through sentimentalism or generosity, for its royals. Unlike the posh ceremonies with glass coaches and fairytale brides in too much silk, the conjoining of the Daily Star's 'two old gits' offers the most elusive quality in royal partnerships.  At last, Britain has a genuine royal romance. It has, in Charles, an heir to the throne who has finally contrived, if by accident, to put himself in touch with how real people live. It has, in Camilla, a woman who would be a perfectly serviceable queen, if the nation decides that it needs such a figurehead.  There is something here to engage most citizens, from diehard royalists to 'those bloody people' focusing long lenses on the slopes of Klosters. A king-in-waiting is marrying on Friday. Curse the monarchy, by all means, but wish him well.    <B>Prince Charles</B><BR><B>DoB:</B> 14 November, 1948<BR>  <B>Education:</B> Hill House school, West London; Cheam School, Berkshire; Gordonstoun; Timbertop, Australia; Trinity College, Cambridge; Aberystwyth University<BR>  <B>Status:</B> Single father-of-two<BR>  <B>Job:</B> None; heir to throne