The Guardian view on the Charles letters: self-indulgence on an industrial scale
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Version 0 of 1. A corner of a large constitutional curtain was lifted on Wednesday. The Guardian’s freedom of information request for the Prince of Wales’s correspondence with Blair-era ministers was a shot in the dark, a request to Whitehall departments for relevant exchanges between the palace and Whitehall dating from an arbitrary period in 2004-5. What came back, at the end of a 10-year legal battle in which the government’s most senior lawyer did everything possible to keep the papers under lock and key, was inevitably a mixed bag. The letters are both fascinating and a bit tedious. The papers reveal one big thing that matters. It is no secret that the prince likes to lobby for his causes. That’s why the FOI request was made. What these papers show is the sheer breadth and depth of the lobbying, which stretches from Downing Street to Northern Ireland, via education, health, culture, the environment and defence. It goes well beyond architecture and organic farming to school teaching and the performance of airborne surveillance aircraft in Iraq. And the letters themselves are detailed to a fault, telling ministers far more than they need to know about the importance of the Patagonian toothfish, the single farm payment and the recent report of the Local Authority Caterers Association on school meals. This is a letter-writing effort on an industrial scale. Given who is writing the letters, it all has to be replied to, often at almost equal length. The prince’s protestations of apology, which verge on a kind of narcissism, are to be found on almost every page. “I think you will know by now – to your cost! – that these are matters about which I care deeply,” says one letter. At another point there is the rueful admission: “But perhaps I am now too dangerous to associate with!” Mostly it is more tiresome than dangerous. But at times in the correspondence we see an heir to the throne pressing ministers on matters of real political sensitivity. GM crops is one such subject, and we know from Lord Mandelson’s memoirs that ministers had to tell the prince to tone it down and be more cautious. School education policy is another high-profile issue, on which the letters cast fresh light. “I remain convinced,” the prince writes to Ruth Kelly, “that the current approaches to teaching and learning need to be challenged.” He is keen, he tells her, that teachers of English and history should “come together to engage with the questions from first principles as to why teach English and history. Why are these subjects important? What should we be teaching in these subjects?” This is a political battleground. And these are the words of someone who is not supposed to be political player. There is a principle at stake here. Most of the time, Prince Charles behaves more as a bit of a bore on behalf of his good causes than as any sort of wannabe feudal tyrant. The idea that he is some latter-day George III or Kaiser Wilhelm, an over-mighty ruler wrestling with ministers for control of the wheel, with epochal consequences for his country, would be wide of the mark, at least on this evidence. But these papers reveal something that cannot just be dismissed, which emphatically justifies the long FOI exercise. That thing is the sheer scale of the prince’s lobbying efforts. Even if much of that is expended on the prince’s less controversial hobby horses, other parts push into more controversial areas. It adds up to a disturbing absence of proportion and self-awareness. It will do the prince little good. This is, presumably, why the attorney general fought so hard to stop publication. The importance of these papers is not whether they reveal the prince’s controversial (or not) views on the European Union directive on herbal medicines. The importance is what they say about his judgment and its constitutional implications. The Queen has used silence and blankness to secure the modern monarchy. The silence and the blankness matter, and the prince should have learned as much from a process of contact with ministers that is supposedly part of his training. He has not been a very good student. At one point in a letter to John Reid, the then health secretary, the prince warns that “without proper consideration, various chickens will come home to roost in your own department”. The same could be said of Prince Charles, and in his case there is rather more at stake. |