By his choice of causes to champion, Prince Charles has proved over the decades that he is untroubled by what people think of him. He has pursued unfashionable causes, from alternative medicine to neo-Georgian architecture, with the steadfastness of a man who knows he will never have to face the voters. His political platform is solid gold, whilst those of politicians are built on more ephemeral foundations.
His first wife is usually credited with the courage to take up unpopular issues and tackle injustices. Earl Spencer gave the roll-call of the Diana-sponsored ‘constituency of the rejected’ in the funeral eulogy to his sister: lepers, Aids victims, those injured by landmines and the homeless. But long before Diana developed a social conscience, Charles was using his position as heir to the throne to promote social change.
Since 1976 he has established 18 lobbying organisations. They include the Prince’s Trust, which has helped over half a million young people; the Prince’s Teaching Institute which promotes ‘traditional’ lessons such as geography and English; the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, which supports Islamic arts and crafts; the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health, which promotes ‘complementary medicine’; the Turquoise Mountain Foundation which protects the buildings in medieval Kabul; Business in the Community, founded in 1982, which pioneers what we now call corporate social responsibility; and the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, the nemesis of modernist architects everywhere.
If you add the model village of Poundbury in Dorset, and the organic Duchy Orginals business, it is an astonishing empire of organisations, each reflecting Prince Charles’ personal political views. It has become as fashionable today to praise his prescience, especially his support for organic farming, youth opportunities, and socially-responsible business, as it was to denounce him as a meddling crank 20 years ago.
Not for him, the easy photo-opportunity dressed in body armour or at someone’s bedside. This is social activism on a grand scale. It will leave a legacy far more impressive than his two most-recent predecessors as Prince of Wales, one of whom is chiefly remembered for shooting a thousand pheasants in a day and collecting stamps, and the other for abdicating the throne and being a potential Nazi sympathiser.
Prince Charles’s passions do not end with the organisations he has established. He has the campaigning zeal of a Peter Tatchell or a Bruce Kent. He is a noble with a cause. By his social entrepreneurialism he has proved he believes it. His biographer Jonathan Dimbleby says Charles ‘has accumulated a number of certainties about the state of the world and does not relish contradiction.’ The problem is that he wants us to believe it too. This draws us into a constitutional mine-field because high on his hit-list of targets are government ministers. Charles has lobbied health secretaries Andy Burnham and Patricia Hewitt over complementary medicine (and secured nearly £1m of taxpayers cash for the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health). He has complained to education secretary Ed Balls about changes to the primary school syllabus; he has lobbied Yvette Cooper over the design of eco-towns. Within days of Hazel Blears arriving at the Department for Communities and Local Government in July 2007, she received a letter from the Prince’s Foundation on the Built Environment, and soon its director was serving on a government working group.
As a special adviser to both Patricia Hewitt and Hazel Blears I have seen how these letters are received by the civil servants in the private offices. In the maelstrom of official correspondence and departmental papers, they stick out like a diamond in a midden. You can guarantee that they are put under the nose of the minister within hours of arrival, unlike nine tenths of the letters sent to ministers. They are placed high in the piles of paperwork in the red box, and fast-tracked through the system. There are few ministers in departments which cover Prince Charles’s wide range of interests who have not received letters from Charles or his proxies.
In April 2008 Hazel Blears made a not entirely complimentary throw-away remark about Poundbury in a speech to the Fabian Society. Within days a beautiful letter arrived from the Prince of Wales, hand-written in ink on expensive paper, with the Prince of Wales feathers at the top of the page. I can’t divulge its contents, but within a few weeks Hazel Blears was a guest on a trip to Poundbury.
As a health special adviser, I attended an event at Clarence House hosted by Prince Charles to promote alternative medicine. The other guests included a health minister, civil servants from the Department of Health, and the Prime Minister’s health policy adviser. It was a short, business-like affair, with a couple of speeches, and a handshake, brief conversation, and photograph with the Prince. Any company or charity trying to reach opinion-formers and ministers, especially if their arguments were so contested as those of alternative medicine’s advocates, would kill for this kind of access. It is afforded to Prince Charles as a matter of course.
It is clear that Prince Charles spends a great deal of time trying to influence government policy. As a citizen he is entitled to lobby ministers and attempt to get them to change their minds. It will take a future historian to work out the degree of his success. But right now, some questions should be asked about this easy behind-the-scenes access enjoyed by one man with so many causes. If a commercial lobbyist had this level of access, there would be an outcry. Yet our innate sense of respect and perhaps even deference prevents us from questioning the secret relationship between the heir to the throne and ministers of the crown.
A good starting point might be publication of all correspondence over the past 30 years. There will be several archive boxes full. It would a fascinating, and beneficial exercise to shine some light into the Prince’s lobbying. It may well reveal a benign progressive influence in the heart of Whitehall. Without transparency we will never know.
This is a longer version of an article first published in the Times