Meddling and obsessed with secrecy – when Charles is king, his enemies will have his head

PRINCE Charles is in a pickle again. The republicans are baying for his head. On the main charge I think he is blameless — but there are other serious concerns about his addiction to secrecy.

The main charge is that he shouldn’t be allowed access to government secret papers, which have been sent to him for his perusal over more than two decades. They are said to be too sensitive even for the eyes of middleranking ministers.

But why shouldn’t our next monarch read such stuff? He’s hardly going to pass it on to President Putin. The Queen sees these papers and I can’t see why her loyal son and heir should not prepare himself properly for the role he is one day going to fulfil. Indeed, we have learnt, too, that Prince William is ‘occasionally’ shown some of these politically sensitive files.

No, republicans are missing the target when they squawk about this. The issue is what use as a lobbyist of government ministers Prince Charles makes of his highly privileged information. And the answer is that we don’t have the foggiest idea because, when it comes to secrecy, the heir to the throne could teach the North Korean leadership a trick or two.

Hounded

Readers may recall the ‘black spider’ memos ( so- called because they were penned by hand before being typed up) written by Prince Charles to Labour ministers between 2004 and 2005.

When they were eventually released earlier this year after the Government had mounted on the Prince’s behalf a prolonged and costly resistance to their publication under the Freedom of Information Act, they turned out to be as exciting as a semolina pudding.

The Prince revealed himself to be a decent small ‘ c’ conservative pursuing causes close to his heart such as overfishing of the Patagonian Toothfish, which in his view was putting the poor old albatross, which feeds on it, at risk.

Just occasionally he strayed into more important territory, as when he drew Tony Blair’s attention to the shortcomings of the Army’s Lynx helicopter in Iraq in high temperatures, which had been brought to his notice. Surely such concerns did the Prince great credit.

On the whole, though, the contents of the infamous memos were virtuous rather than earth- shattering. When the Guardian newspaper, which had hounded the Prince through the courts to enforce publication of the memos, got hold of a second cache, it quietly dropped them into the wastepaper basket.

Obsessions

What is not generally recognised is that the Prince wrote hundreds of letters to ministers, and is still writing them, which won’t be published in the foreseeable future by the Guardian or any newspaper.

The reason is that the Prince persuaded the last Labour government in its dying days to exempt all his communications with any public body from Freedom of Information requests, even if the public interest is invoked.

The ‘ black spider’ memos were eventually published only because a request had been submitted before the exemption was agreed. From that moment, all of the other Prince’s missives, even those written before the exemption, became inviolable and not for the eyes of us ordinary mortals.

Does this matter? Some may reasonably argue that to judge from the memos we know about, it hardly matters whether the rest of his output remains under lock and key. Such people will say we may safely assume that the Prince is quietly pursuing his obsessions without harming anyone.

But of course we can’t know this for sure. It is possible — though personally I rather doubt it — that he is abusing his position by pressuring ministers, and that in the process he is drawing on the secret government papers that have been shown to him (and not to the middle- ranking ministers whom he might possibly be brow-beating).

My point is the Prince is bending constitutional convention by badgering ministers on his pet subjects. That much is bearable, even welcome, because he is impressively knowledgeable about all manner of things and wishes to do good for mostly selfless reasons. The objection is that he wants to cover his tracks. We are not allowed to know what he is up to, far less hold him to account, and that is worrying.

In short, the Prince is behaving like a politician with a political agenda. Only the other day he was lecturing delegates at the Paris summit about the perils of climate change, which he had a few days earlier (and rather bizarrely) cited as a root cause of the civil war in Syria. And yet, unlike other public figures in a democracy, he expects to be allowed to operate in complete secrecy.

His love of such secretness must not be judged just by the long fight the Government put up on his behalf to prevent the publication of his ‘black spider’ memos. This week’s revelation that he is shown ultrasensitive official papers came only after a three-year Freedom of Information battle between the anti-monarchist group Republic and the Cabinet Office, which was fighting the Prince’s corner.

The fact is that he is generally averse to publicity except on his own terms. For example, a couple of weeks ago it emerged that he insists on draconian preconditions before television interviews, including advance knowledge of questions, the right to oversee editing and even to block a broadcast if he does not approve of the final product.

Clarence House has produced a 15- page contract, whose many coercive conditions have to be signed by any broadcaster that wishes to interview our coy and rather high-andmighty Prince.

Channel 4 News found these terms so burdensome that — absolutely rightly in my view — it pulled out of an interview with the Prince on the eve of the climate change talks.

If an elected leader behaved so imperiously, he would be torn to pieces by the media and ridiculed by political opponents. Yet our heir to the throne, despite engaging in controversial issues and not infrequently taking extreme positions, will not submit himself to proper examination and interrogation.

Readers will see that I admire Prince Charles for taking up causes that professional politicians often don’t bother about. In many ways we are fortunate to have him.

But his insistence that all his exchanges with ministers should remain private, and his disinclination to open himself up to public scrutiny, are deeply disquieting to those of us who care about the monarchy and its future.

Extreme

He could, of course, have simply behaved like the Queen, whose views on most subjects we can only guess at, and never opened his mouth on any substantial matter. The monarchy has survived and prospered in the 21st century because the Queen has steered clear of politics.

Prince Charles’s interfering and interventionist approach carries risks to the monarchy’s reputation, and this is bound to increase if accompanied by obsessive secrecy and lack of candour. I believe that even people well- disposed to him will grow annoyed by his trying to have his cake and eat it.

I fear the Prince will continue to play the role of a public figure without accepting the democratic duties that should accompany it. He may get away with it as long as he does not wear the crown. But if he does so when he is King, the republicans will have his head.