Charles at Seventy

by Robert Jobson

  The prince believes such a description is inaccurate. Any thoughts he has put to paper in private letters to ministers, he says, are for their eyes only. He knows it at the time of writing and the recipient knows it when reading them. What he writes is within any bounds of the unwritten constitutional. With this in mind, in Charles’s view, it is his ‘constitutional duty’ as heir to the throne to act in this way. Drawing attention to key topics on which his unique position has enabled him to glean information, such as climate change, organic farming or youth empowerment, is demonstrating ‘leadership’.

  He minds deeply, he says, about the country and the people he is born to serve and to do nothing, he believes, would be a dereliction of his constitutional duty. To leak details of such private meetings or correspondence, something he would never consciously do, would also be a breach of that unwritten code. Therefore, he is extremely conscious when preparing a speech or an article to ensure its contents come within the confines of his constitutional position.

  The UK government’s decision to defend the prince’s position in court in what escalated into a hugely expensive ten-year legal battle with the Guardian newspaper does not show an obsession with secrecy, as some newspapers and commentators argued, but a robust interpretation of the complex position of the heir to the British throne and what is expected of the role and how it functions. In May 2015, this all came to a head over private letters sent by the prince to then Labour government ministers a decade previously. It was ruled in the Upper Tribunal of Britain’s Administrative Appeals Chamber that twenty-seven of the letters could be released. The then government’s veto on publication of the letters was declared unlawful by the Court of Appeal in 2014 – a decision that was upheld by the Supreme Court on appeal, which the sitting prime minister, David Cameron, called ‘disappointing’. It was decided that the letters written in 2004 and 2005 would be published with ‘provisional redactions’ to protect personal data of people other than the prince.

  The letters, which covered the period between September 2004 and April 2005 when Tony Blair was prime minister, reflected, according to the then attorney general Dominic Grieve, Charles’s ‘most deeply held personal views and beliefs’. During a visit to a Prince’s Trust charitable project in London on the day of the ruling, the prince was ambushed by an overexcited TV reporter, Channel 4’s Michael Crick, who started barking questions at him. Was he ‘worried’ about the release of the documents? Had he been ‘behaving unconstitutionally’ by writing letters like that? Not altering his stride, the prince gave a dismissive sideways glance at the persistent Crick, who rather self-importantly, and more for the camera than anything else, continued to shout questions one after the other without taking a breath or really waiting for a response. As the prince walked into the building, he could be heard saying disdainfully, ‘Very predictable.’

  For a journalist of Crick’s wealth of political experience, they were naïve and heavily loaded questions, too, that the prince was hardly likely to address on a London pavement. Speaking for the prince afterwards, a Clarence House spokesman said Charles was ‘disappointed the principle of privacy had not been upheld’.

  At the heart of the matter is the potentially negative impact of the court’s ruling on how the prince conducts his business. If he was so mindful, it could effectively stop the prince performing his duty freely and without fear or favour. It would mean that every time he put pen to paper and sent the letter to the government it could end up front-page news. That would serve nobody.

  The court battle materialised after journalist Rob Evans from the Guardian newspaper applied in 2005 to see the prince’s letters under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) 2000, which was initially denied by the information commissioner. Several more contentious legal decisions followed. Evans wrote that his newspaper limited the request to cover just eight months because FOI rules allow applications to be refused if too much information is requested. In 2010, the FOI was tightened and now correspondence involving the monarch or heir to the throne cannot be made public for twenty years, or five years after the writer’s death, whichever is longer.

  Mr Grieve vetoed an original decision to order publication made by the Upper Tribunal in 2012, but it was eventually ruled that his actions were invalid, paving the way for the documents finally to be disclosed. The Guardian, the information commissioner and the Cabinet Office later published the documents to an underwhelming response. The released letters covered a whole range of areas. Frankly, apart from the principle of privacy being lost, the ‘revelations’ were hardly earth-shattering. Indeed, the prince had spoken out publicly on many of them before. The publication of the letters prompted Tory MP Zac Goldsmith to tweet, ‘Prince Charles exposed for standing up for the environment, education, welfare of our soldiers, sustainable farming, etc. Outrageous.’

  Writing to the then education secretary, Charles Clarke, in November 2004, the prince criticised what he described as modern teaching methods and said he favoured the creation of a teacher-training institute that would address a ‘gap in the teaching of English and history’ identified by his own Educational Summer Schools. He described himself as ‘someone with such old-fashioned views’. Indeed, he once reportedly said when greeting Charles Clover, who was writing a book on Highgrove in 1993, ‘Are you a graduate of English literature? They’re the only people I have time for.’

  The prince wrote to Clarke that his own summer schools were challenging the fashionable view that teachers should not impart bodies of knowledge, but instead act as ‘facilitators’ or ‘coaches’; a notion Clarke said he found ‘difficult to understand’. Asking for support for the initiative into 2005 and beyond, the prince added, ‘Perhaps I am now too dangerous to associate with.’ It’s true he was never afraid to speak his mind. During a speech at a presentation of the Thomas Cranmer Schools Prize on 19 December 1989, he let rip. ‘[I and others] wonder what it is about our country and our society that our language has become so impoverished, so sloppy and so limited that we have arrived at a wasteland of banality, cliché and casual obscenity.’

  To this day the prince champions the teaching of Shakespeare in schools. Perhaps he recalls how it fired his imagination when he was a teenage student. It was graduate Eric Anderson – who in later life would become headmaster of Eton College between 1980 and 1994, recruited to teach English at Gordonstoun – who first inspired Charles’s passion for the work of the Bard of Avon. In 1964, Anderson put on a school production of Henry V and cast the talented Charles in the part of Exeter. The play was a success, but the audience of local people insisted that it was a pity that the best actor, Charles, was playing Exeter instead of Henry. He went on to play the lead role in Macbeth. Having discovered that he could lose himself as the character he was playing, the prince excelled on stage. Ever since, Charles has not only been a great supporter of the arts but of Shakespeare in particular. During the Shakespeare Birthday Lecture of 22 April 1991, he said, ‘The marginalising of Shakespeare seems to be symptomatic of a general flight from our great literary heritage.’

  In October 2004, the prince wrote to the environment minister Elliot Morley, wishing him ‘well in your endeavours’ to curb illegal fishing by trying to ‘bring to heel the recalcitrant countries who sanction, either directly or by turning a blind eye’. He suggested the use of the Royal Navy for enforcement activity, mentioning in particular illegal fishing of the Patagonian toothfish and continuing in a mournful vein, ‘Until that trade is stopped, there is little hope for the poor old albatross, for which I shall continue to campaign.’ He finishes by saying, ‘Let us hope that, between all of us who mind about sustainable fishing, we can make a difference before it is too late.’

  In another letter, to the Department of Health in 2005, Charles wrote about his concerns regarding the redevelopment of a hospital, stating that he was frustrated by the logjam that had prevented it. He said control of hospital estates had caused him growing anxiety. ‘I fear that if the estates are transferred no
w without proper consideration, various chickens will come home to roost in your own department in coming years as the physical and mental well-being of future communities is affected.’ he penned. He also asked to be consulted before any further decisions were made. ‘I do pray we could discuss these matters more fully before irrevocable decisions are taken,’ he added.

  The prince had long been at loggerheads with aspects of our health service and in particular with the acceptance and use of alternative medicine. ‘I would suggest that the whole imposing edifice of modern medicine, for all its breathtaking successes, is like the celebrated Tower of Pisa: slightly off balance,’ he said at the British Medical Association’s 150th anniversary in December 1982.

  In another letter, to Tessa Jowell in 2005 – she was then the culture, media and sport secretary – the prince asked her about the conservation of Antarctic huts built for the first polar expeditions. He wrote that he was at a ‘loss’ to understand why the restoration was considered to be an ‘overseas’ project, due to there being British territory in the Antarctic. ‘Whatever the case, and however futile my plea to you for a bit of imaginative flexibility in the interpretation of these rules, I just wanted to emphasise the iconic importance of these huts,’ he wrote. He also offered to help find wealthy individuals to help the conservation project if the government could not find the funding.

  Writing to Prime Minister Tony Blair in February 2005, the prince then waded into the extremely contentious debate over whether to cull badgers to prevent the spread of tuberculosis in cattle. The prince told him, ‘I, for one, cannot understand how the “badger lobby” seem to mind not at all about the slaughter of thousands of expensive cattle, and yet object to a managed cull of an over-population of badgers; to me, this is intellectually dishonest.’

  In September 2004, the prince had written to Mr Blair saying it would be ‘splendid if the government could find ways’ to encourage consumers to demand British produce, as without their support British agriculture and the countryside would not survive. Despite acknowledging the fact that ‘European rules preclude the government from running a campaign to promote, solely, British produce,’ the prince writes, ‘I only wish that more could be done to encourage people to buy British.’

  The prince also wrote to Mr Blair warning him that the armed forces did not have adequate resources the year after Britain went to war in Iraq. He had particular concerns about problems with Britain’s surveillance capability, crucial to the operations in Iraq. He told Mr Blair that he was worried about delays to replacements for the Lynx aircraft due to ‘significant pressure on the defence budget’.

  He also wrote of a major advance in monitoring technology, which he had seen in action in Northern Ireland, and warned, ‘The aim of the Ministry of Defence and the Army Air Corps to deploy this equipment globally is, however, being frustrated by the poor performance of the existing Lynx aircraft in high temperatures.’ He went on, ‘Despite this, the procurement of a new aircraft to replace the Lynx is subject to further delays and uncertainty due to the significant pressure on the Defence Budget. I fear that this is just one more example of where our Armed Forces are being asked to do an extremely challenging job (particularly in Iraq) without the necessary resources.’ Mr Blair wrote back saying the ‘replacement of Lynx and Gazelle reconnaissance and surveillance capacity will be a priority’.

  On reflection, had this drawn-out legal battle really been worth it for either party? After a fortune spent on lawyers’ fees, frankly, the letters didn’t expose anything significant, and certainly not some cancer at the heart of our democracy and constitutional monarchy. Had it been worth his while fighting it? That, of course, was a matter for the government. Indeed, the letters showed instead a man who cares profoundly about his country and who isn’t simply prepared to sit idly and do nothing about issues where he sees solutions to failing systems. In public, through his speeches, television interviews and published articles, the prince has for decades chosen the more difficult path.

  The prince has often challenged the current orthodoxy and the conventional way of thinking. In many cases he has highlighted dangers ahead well before so-called experts have even acknowledged them. Clearly, while he is in a position to do so, whether prince or king, he will, those closest to him confirm, continue to try to raise the debate of areas he sees as important whenever he sees fit.

  How he behaves and thinks in private is a question that officials – particularly among the Queen’s senior officials at Buckingham Palace – would rather was not made a matter of public debate. The ‘black spider memo’ fiasco raised that spectre and it had deeply worried the Queen’s senior advisers. Of course, the letters were examined for evidence of any pressure brought to bear by a hereditary monarch-in-waiting on elected ministers and for any evidence that government policy was changed following the prince’s intervention. But the correspondence proved benign.

  The future king hadn’t overstepped the undefined mark. The prince is not naïve and anticipates that some politicians – even Privy Councillors, who have sworn an oath to be ‘a true and faithful servant’ to the Crown – are less than faithful. When he puts pen to paper he is aware his carefully worded missives would reach the public’s ears. In reality, sources close to him admit that the inbuilt dissident in him would not mind that at all.

  The prince has made his position on so-called ‘meddling’ clear. ‘I think it would be criminally negligent of me to go around this country and not actually want to try and do something about what I find there. I think that’s my duty to do so. If some people don’t like it that’s too bad, isn’t it, frankly, because I think there are more important things to worry about, which is this country,’ he said in an interview with Sir Trevor McDonald in 2006, in a documentary to mark thirty years of the Prince’s Trust. He consummately believes in what he does and the way he does it. In his view, it is not prying or lobbying, scrawled in black ink in memos to ministers. His interventions are simply his ‘demonstrating leadership’, and that he is able to do so is acutely important to him.

  In July 2018, Clarence House courtiers faced another ‘tin hat’ moment when they were called upon to defend their boss. There was nothing they could do but brace themselves and hope that too much flak didn’t come their way. The prince and his team were certainly rattled by the Inquiry into his erstwhile ‘friend’, disgraced former bishop Peter Ball. The Prince of Wales was required to make a written submission to an Inquiry into the convicted paedophile stating that he did not seek to influence any police investigation. In the submission that was read to the Inquiry, he said he felt, ‘deep personal regret’ for trusting Ball when initial reports of abuse emerged, years before he was jailed in 2015.

  In a 1997 letter, the prince said of a critic of Ball, ‘I’ll see this horrid man off if he tries anything.’ And in a series of letters between Charles and the bishop, read to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Ball spoke of a ‘malicious campaign’ against him and ‘harassment’ by ‘fraudulent’ accusers. In another letter to Ball in 1995, the prince said, ‘I wish I could do more. I feel so desperately strong about the monstrous wrongs that have been done to you.’ And, in 1997, the prince wrote a letter in which he described an apparent accuser as a ‘ghastly man…up to his dastardly tricks again’.

  In 2015, Ball’s world of lies collapsed around him and he was jailed for thirty-two months for offences against eighteen teenagers and men. In the written submission, read by the counsel to the Inquiry, Fiona Scolding, the prince said he had been ‘misled’ and, at the time, ‘there was on my part a presumption of good faith’ in relation to Ball. He added,

  Peter Ball told me he had been involved in some sort of ‘indiscretion’ which prompted his resignation as my local bishop. He emphasised that one individual that I now understand to be Mr Neil Todd had made a complaint to the police, that the police had investigated the matter, and the Crown Prosecution Service had decided to take no action. Events later demonstrated beyond a
ny doubt, to my deep regret, that I, along with many others, have been misled.

  Knowing what was known in 2018, there’s no doubt the prince’s letters to Bishop Ball in the 1990s, in particular his expression of sympathy for the ‘monstrous wrongs’ supposedly done to him, were acutely embarrassing and reveal a degree of naïveté on his part. But, to be fair, the prince wasn’t alone at that time in doubting the allegations against the apparently beguiling and believable Bishop Ball. Major institutions such as the Church, NHS and BBC were also notably reluctant to ask uncomfortable questions and to make proper enquiries, either.

  In the prince’s case there was a sense, as his statement said, of ‘deep personal regret’ that he was one of the many deceived by the bishop. The fact that he opened his personal correspondence for scrutiny is a recognition, his officials insisted, of the importance the prince attached to the Inquiry. Clearly, he felt too that his ‘presumption of good faith’ in the Bishop Ball case was so badly betrayed. The prince said that the ‘true context and details’ of complaints against Ball ‘did not come to my attention until the time of Mr Ball’s trial and conviction in 2015’, and, when they did, he immediately ceased contact with Ball once the judicial process had concluded and he was found guilty of such egregious offences against young people.