In June 2012, the sixtieth anniversary of the queen’s accession was seized on by Buckingham Palace as another opportunity to promote the monarchy. There were concerts, military parades, fly-pasts and a documentary tribute. The TV programme, narrated by Charles, showed the heir and the queen animatedly watching private film of him and his sister Princess Anne as children on the beach in Norfolk and on the royal yacht. Charles had good reason to involve himself in such a positive record of sentimental family moments. Bathing in the glow of his mother’s popularity would ease his succession.
The following day, the oldest monarch in Britain’s history stood with her husband for four hours in the rain on a boat proceeding along the Thames. Despite the BBC’s poor production, the spectacle of two elderly people, devoted to duty and service, united the nation. Eighty per cent of Britons, according to the polls, trusted the monarchy. Twenty-four hours later, Philip fell sick as a result of his exposure to the weather. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ appealed Charles to a huge crowd in front of Buckingham Palace for a pop concert and fireworks, ‘if we shout loud enough he might just hear us in hospital.’ The queen was visibly moved by the roar of ‘Philip, Philip, Philip.’ Much more could have gone wrong, but the biggest celebration since the coronation appeared to have restored the monarchy to its previous high point, Charles and Diana’s wedding thirty years before. One rare blip was an exchange overheard inside the palace between Charles and his mother. ‘Have you tried my new strawberry jam?’ he asked. ‘Another time,’ she replied.
One noticeable difference for the public was the entourage around the queen on the palace’s balcony. With Philip in hospital, just five royals – Charles, Camilla, Harry, William and Kate – stood beside her. That reduction, so long orchestrated by Charles, had taken fifteen years to accomplish – which was, as Robin Janvrin told a colleague, ‘a short time in the life of the monarchy’. All six of the family were on their best behaviour. Discreet Kate was utterly supportive of William, a paradigm of virtue; Harry, on the eve of his second deployment to Afghanistan, was Britain’s popular ‘lad’; while Charles and Camilla seemed to have overcome their worst moments.
Anne, Andrew and Edward and their families were not invited. Andrew was particularly angry at the snub. Denied even an invitation to the queen’s lunch for the livery companies in Westminster Hall, he stayed at home in Windsor Great Park fuming about his elder brother. Charles, however, had general support. ‘Andrew is a menace and a rudderless wreck,’ growled one of the queen’s confidants.
Andrew’s rake’s progress had started in 2010. The release by WikiLeaks of a stash of American diplomatic cables included a report by the US ambassador in Kyrgyzstan of the prince’s ‘rude’ and ‘cocky’ remarks about the French and the Americans during brunch in 2008 with British businessmen in the capital, Bishkek. The ambassador’s most damaging comment mentioned Andrew’s tolerant attitude towards corruption.
The WikiLeaks release appeared at the same time as more revelations about Andrew’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, by then jailed for sexual offences involving underage girls. Andrew’s reputation sank further after he was accused of a relationship with a young girl he had met through Epstein. Although there was no actual evidence of guilt, Buckingham Palace urged newspaper and TV editors to ignore the allegations, pleading, ‘This is about the monarchy.’ Andrew would later admit, ‘You don’t get it right all the time. You just have to get on with it. It doesn’t bother me really. It’s just part of life’s rich tapestry.’
Andrew was not only compelled to give up his post as trade ambassador, but also to resolve the latest scandals surrounding his former wife Sarah Ferguson. Plagued by debt, she had been recorded asking an undercover journalist employed by the News of the World for £500,000 for access to Andrew. In a separate incident, she accepted yet another free holiday, this time on Richard Branson’s Caribbean island Necker, to celebrate the tycoon’s sixtieth birthday. Such indulgence in unearned privileges, especially by ‘freebie Fergie’, always frayed the public’s sympathy for the royals, and suggested some ulterior motive on the part of whoever the host might be. Despite Andrew’s protests, at Charles’s request his daughters Beatrice and Eugenie were removed from official duties and lost their police protection officers.
Andrew’s enforced departure from public life was matched by Charles’s increasing prominence. Every week he took another step to build support. He and Camilla travelled down The Mall with the queen in an open carriage during a state visit, and at the next opening of Parliament, the two would sit next to her. In a gradual shift of duties, Charles awarded honours, met diplomats and chaired the Privy Council.
But just as everything seemed to be under control, a website showed a video of Harry, drunk and undressed, playing strip poker with naked young women in a Las Vegas hotel. Shortly afterwards, a French magazine published photos of Kate topless on holiday in France. The royal family was reeling. Then Prince Philip delivered another blow.
In a snub to his elder son, he assigned the shooting rights at Sandringham to Princess Anne and her husband Tim Laurence, and the shooting at Balmoral to Edward. For Charles, an excellent shot despite handicapping himself with a pair of less powerful twenty-eight-bore guns, to be shunted off the royal estates was an embarrassment. He resolved the insult by renting the challenging Invercauld estate grouse moor near Birkhall, and friends’ estates, for pheasant shoots. The emotional warfare with his father never abated.
As he approached his sixty-fifth birthday – his £500,000 party at Buckingham Palace would be financed by the Indian businessman Cyrus Vandrevala – Charles despaired that while every royal mishap was given widespread coverage, there was little interest in his official activities. ‘He bangs on about the same issues,’ said a senior BBC editor who regularly rebuffed invitations to film the prince. ‘He’s repetitive, dull, tedious and worthy.’
To improve his image, Charles hired Kristina Kyriacou, formerly the spokeswoman for the singer Cheryl Cole. Kyriacou’s task was to stifle the myths, in all their glorious variety: that he demanded seven boiled eggs lined up for breakfast, talked to his plants, did not like a single modern building, and relied on untested herbal potions rather than orthodox medicines. More importantly, his staff sought to tone down his public speeches about architecture, alternative medicine and the environment, and to reduce his public appearances in a black tie.
Their efforts were undermined by Charles himself. In a video broadcast in 2013, he again extolled the countryside’s ‘spiritual’ dimension, waxing lyrical about ‘the tractors in the fields, the skilled workers, the livestock, the growing crops and the landscape’s biodiversity, now so much under threat from climate change, diseases and insensitive development’. Shortly afterwards, he allowed the Duchy of Cornwall to sell fifty-five acres of prime farming land in the Tregurra Valley, east of Truro, for a housing development, a Waitrose supermarket and a huge car park. ‘Prince Charles must have the skin of a rhinoceros not to recognise the hypocrisy of it,’ complained the farmers who grew winter feed and grazed their cattle on that land.
Readers of Country Life magazine were also puzzled. In the November issue, guest edited by Charles, he wrote about the ‘folly’ of losing agricultural land to developers, and condemned supermarket chains for squeezing the incomes of farmers. In Truro, Waitrose ranked among the accused; but ever since the company had saved Duchy Originals from bankruptcy, it had joined the prince’s angelic choir. Self-interest appeared to overrule any sympathy he might have felt for the farmers.
In another video message, recorded for Earth Day (on 22 April) and delivered on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund, he urged people to turn off their lights for the sake of the environment. At the same time, he flew eighty miles from Highgrove to Ascot in a helicopter based at Farnborough, a round distance of 250 miles. In mitigation, to show his concern about social deprivation, he invited the three party leaders, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, to Buckingham Palace to help launch a programme to encourage volunteering and provide work and activities for two million young people characterised as the ‘lost generation’; and in a second campaign, to help families whose children had been killed on the streets. ‘I simply can’t see what I see and do nothing about it,’ he said. ‘I could not live with myself.’
Few could disapprove of that sentiment, but there was a marked change in the public attitude to Charles after Jonathan Dimbleby predicted in November 2013 that, as king, ‘he will not shy away from issues that are contentious or controversial’. Dimbleby’s authoritative echo of Charles’s own refusal to ‘see purdah as a likely option’ contradicted Michael Peat’s statement to the High Court in 2005, when he challenged the Mail on Sunday’s publication of Charles’s Chinese journal. The prince, Peat told the judge, ‘does not campaign on contentious issues’. Eight years later, Charles was still casting himself as a politician. His lifestyle, trenchant campaigns, contradictions and absence of transparency made him a target for MPs who resented his outspokenness.
His latest refusal to be accountable attracted the attention of Margaret Hodge, the feisty Labour chairman of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. Like her predecessor, the Tory Edward Leigh, she wondered about the duchy’s rise in value to £847 million, and the fact that while Charles’s income was nearly £20 million a year, his voluntary tax bill was just £4.4 million. At the outset of the committee’s public hearing, Hodge questioned William Nye, and called the duchy’s tax payment ‘shockingly wrong’. Austin Mitchell, another Labour MP, accused Charles of ‘dodging around’ to avoid paying capital gains and corporation tax. As the questioning progressed, Nye’s dry performance convinced other Labour MPs on the fifteen-strong committee that the duchy was concealing transactions. ‘It was a witch-hunt,’ said the Treasury official responsible for supervising Charles’s Cornish estate. ‘They wanted blood on the carpet. They wanted to find us guilty of something.’ But the MPs’ suspicions about Charles’s secrecy proved justified. Soon afterwards, he used the Human Rights Act to prevent access to his tax returns. For Labour MPs, that inconsistency devalued his leadership. His authority depended upon virtue and talent, and that, in their opinion, was lacking.
To mitigate this latest humiliation, Charles invited a group of opinion-formers for a weekend in Sandringham. As usual, each guest was assigned a servant. The principal worry for the visitors was that they should have the appropriate clothes for lunch, tea, breakfast, church on Sunday morning, and the afternoon outings. Dinner was naturally black tie.
During their Saturday walk, Charles spoke about a sustainable environment. As in all such conversations, his guests were careful to avoid debate: their host, they had been cautioned, was easily offended. ‘People think I’m bonkers, crackers,’ he suddenly groaned in the middle of a field. ‘Do you think I’m mad?’ he asked, in a manner that forbade a positive reply. The writers and journalists refrained from any challenge to his beliefs and inconsistencies. In the silence, some of his guests understood that the prospect of being an impartial rather than a meddling prince appalled him. ‘I have no power, but I have influence,’ he announced. The group then set off back towards the house.
Charles’s old-fashioned courtesy convinced some of his guests that any final barriers to his smooth succession had been overcome. William and Kate’s wedding, the birth of their son George, and Charles’s own marriage seemed to have dried up the public appetite for scandal. The dynasty was stabilised. Finally, Charles could present the code of principles that he hoped would act as a compass to bind the nation. His misfortune, his guests knew, was time. As each day passed, the length of his future reign decreased, and his significance diminished. In the public’s mind he was not a hero, and for too many he was defined by his flaws.
The two-hour walk ended back at the house for tea. ‘Right, we’re off,’ Charles announced, striding out of the house after a quick cup. Jumping into his Aston Martin, he drove at breakneck speed down narrow, twisting lanes, reassured that police motorcyclists had cleared other traffic. His guests followed in a fleet of gleaming Land Rovers. They arrived at Charles’s local church in time to hear a short concert. After that, instead of visiting a number of other churches, as Charles would normally do on such weekends, he headed for a village fête. Clearly enjoying himself, he shook endless hands before judging the biggest turnip and best bottled onions competitions.
The villagers’ flattery was gratifying, but Charles’s quirks undermined the public image. One guest, an occasional visitor to Balmoral for grouse-shooting, recounted Charles’s irritation when one of the small metal peg numbers taken by each gun to show where he should stand was dropped in the heather. Instead of abandoning the worthless object, Charles ordered his aides to riffle through the thick vegetation, then demanded that a metal detector be brought from the castle. The search for a small disc costing a few pence inevitably drew comparison with the large group dinner that night, at a table covered with rose petals and lit by candelabras brought from Highgrove. The conversation was strained. Although the guests had been summoned to contribute their opinions about the arts and culture, Charles did not encourage debate.
Friday after dinner was listed as a cinema night. The chosen film was Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, depicting upstairs/downstairs life to an audience who were surrounded by the reality of that social order. The film became a regular feature of Charles’s culture weekends. By coincidence, that evening his neighbours at Holkham Hall, eighteen miles away, had invited the prince and his guests to watch Valery Gergiev, the artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg, conduct a private orchestral performance. ‘We can’t go,’ said Charles, allowing nothing to interfere with the schedule he had organised (Gergiev would be invited to visit Sandringham another year). Michael Fawcett supervised the placing of chairs in front of a screen in the ballroom. In the front row were two throne-like armchairs for Charles and Camilla. Soon everyone was seated, and servants entered with silver platters of ice cream. The film started. Charles and Camilla instantly fell asleep, and the ice cream slowly melted away.
On Sunday, female guests had been instructed to wear appropriate hats and gloves for the local Anglican church, St Mary the Virgin and St Mary Magdalen. The two who chose to go to mass at a nearby Catholic church felt Charles’s displeasure. By Sunday dinner, some of the guests had become puzzled about their host. His habit of commandeering a small bowl of olive oil just for himself provoked one visitor to recount a story of Charles during a recent trip to India. The prince had invited Jacob Rothschild, and asked that other billionaires be rounded up to accompany him. During the tour, a sumptuous lunch was held in a maharaja’s palace. Unexpectedly, a loaf of Italian bread was placed on the table. As an American billionaire reached out to take a piece, Charles shouted, ‘No, that’s mine! Only for me!’ In reply to that story, another visitor recalled that on a previous weekend at Sandringham, a guest had brought Charles a truffle as a gift. To everyone’s envy, Charles did not share the delicacy at dinner but kept it to himself. Once those stories were completed, Charles’s guests did not laugh; there was merely bewilderment.
At the end of the Sandringham weekend – the guests were asked not to leave until the Monday morning – some were told to leave £150 in cash for the staff, or to visit the estate’s souvenir shop. Most would tell their friends that Charles seemed genuine, but that the weekend was surreal.
The benefit to Charles was unquantifiable but his campaign to win public affection could not stop. ‘He wants it to be relaxed and normal,’ his equerry briefed another set of guests before a private dinner in a restaurant in Cornwall. ‘There’s no need to say “Your Majesty”. The occasional “sir” will suffice.’
The first course was a boiled egg, freshly laid that day. Charles explained its healthy properties. The next course was organic meat. The guests struggled for conversation, waiting for their host to speak. His thoughts, it dawned, were somewhere else. ‘Did you notice the problems of Cornish nationalism on your way down here?’ asked one guest. Charles looked puzzled. ‘Many signposts have been daubed with Cornish names,’ another guest explained.
‘One travels by helicopter,’ Charles replied.
Some guests reported that Charles needed protection from himself, but the barriers he erected seemed impenetrable. Seeking to cultivate his image as an ascetic man of principle, he lived in a world of his own. Unwilling to explain to the public how he balanced duty and pleasure, he appeared unable to consistently strike the right trade-off with employees, professional guests, friends or family. One sign of his awkwardness was his fraught relationship with William. He would regularly agonise about the young prince’s lack of interest in culture, his reluctance to undertake public duties (including Ascot, which relied on royal patronage) or to take over the Prince’s Trust. Instead, William and Kate chose to retreat to Norfolk, where they could preserve their privacy. Some interpreted the move as confirmation that William was somewhat lazy and spoilt.
The distance between Highgrove and Norfolk isolated Charles from his grandchildren, and allowed Kate’s mother Carole Middleton to take charge. Charles was aware of the gossip that Carole had plotted Kate’s marriage to William. When her daughter had joined the prince at St Andrews University, she had urged Kate to be patient when William saw other girls, and similarly to remain serene in London during a break in their relationship. Once they were reconciled, and after they were married, William preferred to spend Christmas with the Middletons rather than at Sandringham. Charles’s fears about being usurped had persuaded several of the queen’s courtiers to ignore Carole Middleton at social occasions. To counter such gossip, at William’s request the queen made a point of inviting a TV cameraman to film her driving her fellow in-law around the Balmoral estate. Similarly, the TV presenters Ant and Dec were invited to interview Charles, William and Harry together, to help show them as a united family; but in private Charles and his sons struggled to overcome the barriers of the past: Diana, Camilla and their starkly different interests.
Few outsiders knew Charles better than Jonathan Dimbleby, whose latest description of the prince as a ‘prophet in his own land’ and a ‘national treasure’ seemed hyperbolic to many. A Time magazine writer depicted Charles as introspective, permanently unhappy, and joyless at the prospect of becoming king – not because he had waited so long, but because he no longer wanted the position. The magazine portrayed a man who feared ‘prison shades’ once he was crowned, meaning that he regretted how little time remained for him to fulfil his ambitions before he was crowned.
Clarence House, in a letter to The Times, dismissed the magazine’s article with the assertion that King Charles would continue to champion his controversial causes. ‘There has been ill-informed speculation recently in your columns and elsewhere,’ wrote William Nye, ‘about the attitude of the Prince of Wales to the role of sovereign.’ Charles, he continued, was ‘inspired by the examples of his mother and grandfather while drawing also on his own experience of a lifetime [sic] service’. He understood the ‘necessary and proper limitations’ on the constitutional monarch. Charles’s staff were told to put an end to the controversy. Dismissing any hint of the future king as a dissenter had become a priority.
In November 2013, to Buckingham Palace’s relief, Charles opened his first Commonwealth conference, in Sri Lanka. ‘Nine years’ work paid off,’ said a relieved Simon Gimson of the Commonwealth Secretariat. ‘McKinnon’s stomping foot had worked. Charles was invited without anyone batting an eyelid.’
To celebrate, Michael Fawcett supervised a banquet, Charles wooed fifty-one Commonwealth leaders, and Camilla smiled beneath a sparkling tiara last worn by the queen mother. On official advice, Charles did not mention climate change – ‘The prime ministers of Australia and Canada will either tell you to shut up or walk out if you do,’ Gimson had warned. Even so, the Canadian and Indian prime ministers boycotted the conference in protest at Sri Lanka’s abuse of human rights. At its end, the officials concluded that the conference had not been a success, and that Charles had little feel for this historic grouping of nations. Two years later, the Commonwealth Secretariat decided that only the queen could salvage Charles’s bid for the organisation’s leadership. Contrary to her original plan, she flew to the conference in Malta and urged the leaders to accept him. Charles’s performance during the conference was an improvement, but Camilla, obviously bored during the opening speeches, talked animatedly to her neighbour. People noticed; Charles’s succession to the leadership remained in doubt.
A more urgent problem was Charles’s heartfelt sympathy for Islam. Ever since his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, he had not been critical of the global aggression of political Islam. Speaking at the World Islamic Forum in London in October 2013, he blamed Syria’s civil war on President Bashar al-Assad’s destruction of the nation’s rural economy. Seven years of drought, he said, had driven farmers and their families from the land, and as they fled to the cities tensions had boiled over. Blaming Assad’s brutality solely on the depletion of ‘nature’s capital reserves, like water and soils’ was consistent with Charles’s belief in ‘harmony’, but seemed to ignore the context of the Syrian conflict within the 1,350-year war between Shia and Sunni Muslims. A subsequent study debunked Charles’s claim as ‘exaggerated … when the evidence is so thin’.
Two months after that speech, Muslims began to murder Christians in Syria, Iraq and Egypt. Churches were destroyed and their priests killed. Finally, Charles acknowledged the threat posed by fundamentalist Islamic militants throughout the Middle East to ‘my own Christian faith’.
After reading briefs provided by British intelligence that Saudi and Qatari nationals were financing terrorism across Europe, Charles admitted that the world was ‘descending into the Dark Ages of public executions’. Nevertheless, he still equivocated about Islam’s ambitions. Unlike many politicians, he understood that only worse would follow if the House of Saud collapsed, or Qatar’s rulers were removed.
Finally, in early 2015 his views changed. After a hurried flight to Riyadh to pay homage on the death of King Abdullah, Charles began to reassess the popular anger about Saudi Arabia’s abuse of human rights and its challenge to Western liberal values. The ‘alarming’ radicalisation of Muslims, he admitted, was ‘heartbreaking’. He had spent twenty years, he said, trying to build bridges between faiths, and now realised the danger that ‘very, very few Christians could be left in the Middle East’. He expressed genuine hurt about the fractured relationship between Muslims and Christians in the region. ‘What doesn’t bear thinking about,’ he lamented, ‘is that people of one faith, you know, a believer, could kill another believer. That’s the totally bewildering aspect.’ Shocked by the mass murder of Yazidis and other Christians by Islamic State after the American withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, he told an Islamic audience, ‘The tragedy is even greater because Christians have been in the Middle East for two thousand years, before Islam came in the eighth century. We were in the Middle East before you.’
The Church of England, he said, would protect all faiths, and he himself would particularly defend ‘Christian values – the values we hold dear’. Echoing the widespread anti-immigration sentiments that would galvanise the British vote to leave the EU in June 2016, Charles told Muslims who had either been born in or migrated to Britain that they ought to ‘abide by Christian values and outlook’. One more impediment to his smooth succession had been removed. That change of heart was followed by another belated epiphany. Twenty-one years after he had first articulated his desire to be the defender of ‘faiths’, and so jeopardised his future role as head of the Anglican Church, he finally accepted the full meaning of the coronation oath, acknowledging that he would be the defender of the faith, namely Anglicanism, which would protect the freedom of other religions in Britain.
And then the reconciliation programme was abruptly derailed. Since he had turned twenty-one, Charles had met eight British prime ministers and countless politicians. There was little respect from either side. The 2010 election of the coalition government led by David Cameron, an Old Etonian, might have improved relations between the prince and the incoming ministers, not least because Cameron appeared to be an enthusiastic protector of the environment. But Charles was suspicious.
In early 2014, floods engulfed Somerset. Long before any government ministers felt stirred to travel from London, the prince was standing in the waterlogged streets with irate locals. ‘The tragedy,’ he let journalists hear, ‘is that nothing has happened for so long.’ The government, he told the stranded families, had reduced spending on flood defences, including dredging rivers. He had trespassed on sensitive territory. Cameron’s irritation increased after Charles headed north to more floods in Cumbria. Standing near the new but breached riverbanks, the prince told the latest victims, ‘We have known for decades that we are heading towards catastrophic climate change and we’re at the point of no return – yet still we procrastinate.’ He damned critics of this for ignoring the imminent Armageddon – ‘Sceptics rubbish climate science and ignore the accumulating disaster’ – and refused to make any concessions to politicians. Once he had returned to London, he invited two hundred experts to a ‘summit’ at St James’s Palace. ‘I have said all this kind of thing before – endlessly,’ he told his audience, ‘and I sometimes feel I am just talking to myself. We have no time left in which to prevent dangerous climate change.’ Soon after, a flood washed away much of his own garden at Birkhall.
Cameron fumed about the criticism and the heated language. Charles’s opponents, particularly the climate change deniers, ridiculed his interpretation of the world’s likely future. Once again he was causing the political mischief he had so often been asked to avoid.
And once again he was going solo. He refused to attend the queen’s banquet at Buckingham Palace for Chinese president Xi Jinping, his third such Chinese boycott, agreeing only to meet him at his hotel in Knightsbridge, the same formula as with Hu Jintao in 2009. The public, he sensed, had swung behind him, and he looked around for other occasions on which he might advance his cause – not just his political or environmental agendas, but to reassert his independence from Buckingham Palace.
Seventeen years after Tony Blair negotiated the Good Friday Agreement to end the ongoing civil war in Northern Ireland, one gesture remained: the reconciliation between Charles and the murderers of Lord Mountbatten, his father’s uncle and his own early mentor, killed with his nephew and two others by an IRA bomb while fishing in Mullaghmore Bay in County Sligo in 1979. At the time Sinn Féin’s leader Gerry Adams had justified the murders.
Thirty-two years later, the queen made a historic visit to Dublin to cement the new agreement. Her visit included a meeting with Adams. The following year she shook hands with Martin McGuinness, the IRA’s godfather and a brutal murderer. After that meeting, McGuinness wore a white tie at a state banquet in Windsor. The symbolism of the royal family’s reconciliation would seal the peace – but Charles refused to follow his mother. Those close to the queen complained that he was putting off meeting Sinn Féin’s leaders unless it was on his terms. Officials condemned his behaviour as petulant. Eventually, in 2015, Charles met Adams in a university building in Galway, shook hands and spoke briefly about the lost lives.
The next day, he drove to the coast to meet the villagers who had lifted the dying Mountbatten out of the water. He was welcomed by Mountbatten’s boatkeeper, local fishermen, the coroner, and the people who had greeted the admiral of the fleet every August when he stayed at Classiebawn Castle. ‘Recent years have shown us,’ Charles told a tearful audience, ‘that healing is possible.’ Two days later he shook hands with McGuinness in a Belfast church. In his own way, he had drawn a historic line. That, however, was the limit of his power. The extent of his influence was proven to be much less than the sum of the parts.
Among the legacy of contentious issues was a legal battle in the supreme court. In 2005 the Guardian had applied under the Freedom of Information Act to see twenty-seven letters between Charles, government ministers and their private secretaries that had been sent in the previous year. Ten of those letters were from the royal hand. Charles had lobbied David Blunkett, the first of Tony Blair’s education ministers, to resurrect grammar schools; Michael Meacher, the environment minister, to ban GM crops; and Peter Hain, the new Welsh minister, to launch complementary medicine there after he had introduced it in Northern Ireland.
Regardless of any misgivings about his conservative prejudices, the Labour government was obliged to protect the heir to the throne, first by arguing against publication of the letters, and later by an amendment of the Information Act, to prevent future applications for their contents to be disclosed. In 2009 the information commissioner had blocked disclosure, but that was overturned in 2012. The upper tribunal ruled that Charles’s letters, and the ministers’ replies, qualified as ‘advocacy correspondence’, and there was thus ‘a public interest strongly in favour of disclosure’. This was a marked shift from the decision against the Mail on Sunday six years earlier over his Chinese journal. Unlike in that case, the tribunal’s judges rejected Charles’s demand that his letters be classified as a state secret.
During the appeal to the upper tribunal, Dominic Grieve, the Conservative attorney general, had exaggerated Charles’s vulnerability: ‘The Prince of Wales is party-political neutral. Moreover, it is highly important that he is not considered by the public to favour one political party or another. This will arise if, through these letters, the Prince of Wales was viewed by others as disagreeing with government policy.’ Describing the letters as ‘particularly frank’ and reflecting Charles’s ‘most deeply held personal views and beliefs’, Grieve urged the court to ban publication, ‘because if he forfeits his position of political neutrality as heir to the throne he cannot easily recover it when he is king’.
Grieve lost. The upper tribunal ordered that the letters should be released. ‘I never discussed the issue with Charles,’ said Grieve, and appealed once more to the Court of Appeal. This application was successful, and publication was blocked. After more trials the Guardian appealed to the final arbiter, the supreme court – just as another obstacle to normalising Charles’s succession arose.
In March 2015 the supreme court declared that Charles was not acting as a private citizen, and ordered the publication of the correspondence. Charles’s spokesman expressed his disappointment that ‘the principle of privacy had not been upheld’. But after so many years of conflict, the letters were disappointing. Charles’s opinions were expressed in a public-spirited but neutral manner, and gave scant ammunition to his enemies. His attempts at persuasion demonstrated only his lack of power. The only consolation for monarchists was that government lawyers had, presumably on Charles’s behalf, acknowledged to the supreme court that his advocacy letters would need to cease once he became king. Overt lobbying, they recognised, would be incompatible with expectations of impartiality. The pledge was not entirely convincing.