Charles gifts former valet ANOTHER charity job

PUT in charge of Prince Charles’s charity empire earlier this year, controversial former valet Michael Fawcett has been handed yet another honour.

Fawcett, who reputedly squeezed the royal toothpaste on to Charles’s brush, has been appointed as a director of the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts.

Based in fashionable Shoreditch in London’s East End, the school was founded in 2005 ‘to continue the living traditions of the world’s sacred and traditional art forms’.

The appointment of Fawcett, who twice had to quit the Royal Household, comes as 16 school trustees stepped down from the charity during July and August.

A spokesman at the school, which had an annual income of £1.7 million according to its last set of accounts, tells me: ‘The Prince’s Foundation was created by merging four previously independent charities.

‘As a result, the total number of trustees was reduced.

‘The new board maintains three trustees from the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts.’

But the changes emphasise the increasing influence of the 55-yearold, of whom Charles once admitted: ‘I can manage without just about anyone, except for Michael.’

Fawcett is paid £95,000 a year as chief executive of the Prince’s Foundation. That’s in addition to the £276,158 which Fawcett’s business, Premier Mode Ltd, was paid last year by the Dumfries House Trust, which until this year ran Charles’s Scottish pile.

A spokesman said a ‘significant portion’ of the payments went to ‘third-party suppliers of services, rather than to any one individual’.

Fawcett’s appointment as head of Charles’s charity empire provoked astonishment.

He first resigned from the Royal Household in 1998, after a number of staff complained to the Prince of his aide’s bullying attitude.

Within a week, though, he was not only reinstated, but promoted.

Then in 2003, Fawcett was forced out when an inquiry found that he had sold off gifts on Charles’s orders.