Firing off 1,000 letters a year, the obsessions of Disgusted of Highgrove
views which the government did not like, he ‘got very cross’ and asked the prince to stop.
Charles did the very opposite. In short order, there were serious rows over his letters of protest at Government policy.
Vehemently opposing the ban on foxhunting, he is said to have written to Blair that the government ‘would not attack blacks and ethnic minorities’ in the way that those who supported foxhunting were being persecuted.
THE leak of this titbit was accompanied by a further quote from the prince to a senior politician that if the Labour government did ban foxhunting, ‘I might as well leave this country and spend the rest of my life skiing.’
To many, this was a deliberate attempt to discredit Prince Charles, and at the same time make the legislation easier to pass, by focusing on the royal ‘toff’.
Then there was China. In a letter to the Foreign Office the Prince, a good friend of the Dalai Lama, complained about China’s occupation of Tibet, an issue he first took to heart many years earlier.
When Chinese president Jiang Zemin was in London on a State visit in 1999, Charles did not attend a banquet given by the visiting head of state. This was seen as a deliberate and highly embarrassing snub by the Queen’s heir.
Blair described his action as ‘silly’. But the prince wrote him a letter in which he said: ‘I feel very strongly about it.’ According to Alastair Campbell, Blair was so furious about these princely interventions that he took it up with the Queen.
Campbell complained that the prince ‘screwed us up’ and had written ‘menacingly’ to some government departments.
One of Charles’s most extraordinary letters was to the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, who had already been grumbling about being ‘bombarded’ with letters from the prince.
Charles drafted it in April, soon after the death of the Queen Mother in 2002, when he was at Birkhall in Scotland.
Somehow the lengthy letter was leaked, and found to contain fierce views on all sorts of explosive political issues.
Chief among the prince’s concerns was the growth of the ‘compensation culture’, and some of Labour’s high-profile legislation including the Human Rights Act.
‘I, and countless others, dread the very real and growing prospect of an American-style personal injury culture becoming ever more prevalent in this country,’ he wrote.
‘Such a culture can only lead ultimately to an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion, let alone the real fear of taking decisions that might lead to legal action.’
As for human rights legislation, he wrote to the Lord Chancellor saying that it was ‘only about the rights of individuals (I am unable to find a list of social responsibilities attached to it) and this betrays a fundamental distortion in social and legal thinking’.
He poured scorn on new hygiene legislation that forbade volunteer workers from cooking meals in their own homes and taking them to resi- dential homes for the elderly and to hospices to be re- heated and served.
‘Many of these sorts of volunteers are middle-aged ladies who have cooked for their families for 40 years without killing anyone,’ he wrote.
He also launched an attack on the growing health and safety ‘blame culture’. ‘The more I talk to people, the more convinced I am that this cumulative effect has the potential to be deeply corrosive to the fabric of our society,’ he wrote.
And he complained about new rules and regulations which stifled initiative and, he said, made people so over-cautious that even the quality of Army training was being affected.
He wrote that a military exercise using live ammunition was now so rare because ‘modern safety precautions are so strict’ that he feared for the effectiveness of the training when the soldiers had to face the real thing.
Almost a decade later, millions of ordinary people will recognise the common sense to be found in so much that Charles has written to government ministers. As one of his closest friends says: ‘If there hadn’t been any leaks, nobody would worry that his views might cause problems when he is king.’
But surely the prince has been around long enough to know that he could never guarantee the confidentiality of such an endless stream of correspondence. (So powerful is Charles’s need to put down his thoughts on paper that he is known to send ‘round robin’ letters of his ideas and views to up to 30 of his closest friends.)
ON other occasions, he has obviously gone out of his way to ensure that his views are anything but private, for example his loathing of much modern architecture.
One such letter was dispatched royal-to-royal to Sheik Hamad bin Jasim, Qatar’s prime minister, whose family was financing the £3billion redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks. Charles told him how much he detested the ‘ brutalist’ glass and steel design of Lord Rogers, adding that his ‘heart sank’ at the prospect.
Eventually, the plans were scrapped and new ones drawn up – much more traditional – to the delight of most local residents.
For his part, David Blunkett, who was a Cabinet minister for eight years until 2005, says that he received many letters from Prince Charles – mainly when he was Education Secretary – but that ‘none of them hold any embarrassment either for His Royal Highness or myself’.
In light of all that we already know about Charles’s letter-writing, there must be something highly explosive somewhere in those 27 letters for Dominic Grieve to decree that they must remain secret.
Meanwhile, those ‘ black spider’ missives will continue to issue forth. For how long? Well, the Queen may be 86 but, happily, she is in good health. But when eventually Charles becomes King, will he really be able to content himself with the monarch’s traditional weekly chat with the Prime Minister?
HIS favourite government minister of the moment is Greg Barker, whose responsibilities at the Department of Energy include the divisive issue of climate change. His favourite current topic: the importance of green and renewable energy.
The Prince of Wales’s pen, scratching away in black ink, is as busy as ever. At peak periods, his passionate words have poured out at the rate of 1,000 letters a year to ministers and other public figures.
Until now, it has certainly never occurred to him that his oneman letter-writing factory might have to shut down because of the risk of sacrificing the crucial ‘political neutrality’ of his future role as king.
This is the reason put forward by Attorney General Dominic Grieve for overturning a decision of the High Court to allow the contents of 27 letters penned to ministers more than eight years ago to be made public.
Yesterday friends ridiculed the notion that Prince Charles, just a month short of his 64th birthday, should start keeping his opinions to himself. They know he’ll never do it.
As the prince himself has said: ‘The trouble is, I always feel that unless I rush about doing things and trying to help furiously, I will not (and the monarchy will not) be seen to be relevant and I will be considered a mere playboy.’
It is too easy to believe that had he come to the throne as a young man, and not still been waiting as heir apparent after 61 years, he would never have needed to justify his existence by constant intrusion into public and political issues.
But if we roll back the years to December 1985, when he was just 37, we find him gathering a group of influential parliamentary journalists in a private room at Rules, that so-English restaurant in Covent Garden.
His purpose: astonishingly, he wanted to know what would be the political reaction if he called for a referendum on the proposed Channel Tunnel between Britain and Europe.
The issue burned deep into his soul because, as he put it: ‘Britain will no longer be an island.’ Everyone at the table was aghast that the heir to the throne seemed hellbent on putting the Crown in direct conflict with the Government, provoking a major constitutional crisis.
Eventually, wiser counsels prevailed, and he was persuaded to make no such call. One can imagine how Margaret Thatcher reacted when news of the clandestine meeting reached her, as inevitably it did, given that the tunnel was her pet project in collaboration with the French.
The fact is, the Prince of Wales was a letter writer to government ministers even then. But her government managed to keep him at arm’s length, as later governments could not.
‘On the one hand he was clearly young and idealistic, but on the other he was seen as a troublemaker,’ says one figure from that period. ‘Mostly, they were able to contain his enthusiasms, and keep him at bay, by having a quiet word in the ear of the Queen’s private secretary.’
But Charles would not be silenced. His letters continued to flow, and at one stage an idea emerged for him to be sent to Hong Kong as governor to keep him out of harm’s way.
It was not until Tony Blair swept to power in 1997 that things changed. ‘The Blair Government indulged the prince as he never had been before,’ says one senior royal aide.
Until then, Charles’s letter rate had been roughly two a month. Now they increased dramatically, as he ignored warnings to be cautious from his own aides.
His letters sprayed out to rural affairs minister Margaret Beckett, to Home Secretary David Blunkett, Education Secretary Estelle Morris, and Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon.
All was fine until Charles passionately put pen to paper over the Government’s incendiary plans to have trials with genetically modified crops.
Suddenly, Whitehall’s apparently warm welcome to the prince’s thoughts was chilled. Blair was furious.
Peter Mandelson had obsequiously encouraged him in his letter-writing. But as soon as Charles began to have