by Joan Smith
The issue of Charles’ opinions is becoming more and more relevant because he has recently started to take on more official duties from his 87-year-old mother…
It is understood the majority of meetings were requested by the Prince rather than the ministers concerned. Minutes are not publicly available, with both sides refusing to disclose what is discussed.52
Charles is not always so reticent, making an unwise foray into international relations in 2014 when he compared the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, to Hitler. Many of us share his suspicions about the president of a country with a dreadful human rights record, but that is not the point: an unguarded remark of this kind, which amounts to little more than an insult, was a headache for the British government and a gift to Putin. Shortly afterwards, the extent of the Prince’s private lobbying became a little clearer when a number of Labour ex-ministers agreed to take part in a radio documentary.53 A former Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Hain, said that the Prince was delighted with the ‘spectacularly good results’ of a trial of complementary medicine in the province and tried to persuade the Welsh and Whitehall governments to follow suit; neither department took any notice but Hain actually seems to have welcomed Charles’s lobbying, as did a former Environment minister, Michael Meacher. He said he had worked with Charles to persuade Tony Blair to support green energy and block GM crops: ‘We would consort together quietly in order to try and ensure that we increased our influence within government.’ Meacher did at least acknowledge that the Prince was ‘pushing it a bit’ when he used his influence in this manner, but said he was delighted to have his support. Charles’s interference did not get such a welcome response from the former Education Secretary, David Blunkett, who resisted the Prince’s lobbying to bring back grammar schools. ‘I would explain that our policy was not to expand grammar schools and he didn’t like that,’ Blunkett recalled.
‘Black spider’ memos
The democratic deficit implied by these lobbying activities is breathtaking. It is mainly thanks to The Guardian, and in particular a reporter called Rob Evans, that they have come under the spotlight at all; in a rare instance of high-quality journalism about the monarchy, The Guardian has spent ten years trying to force publication of a small selection of lobbying letters written to ministers by the Prince. It is no secret that the heir to the throne has reactionary and indeed anti-science views; what the government doesn’t want us to know is how he lobbies on behalf of these causes, firing off letter after letter which have become known (because of his handwriting) as ‘black spider’ memos. Back in 2005, The Guardian made a modest FOI request to see twenty-seven letters written in a seven-month period between 2004 and 2005. It was the beginning of an epic court battle which ended up at the Supreme Court in November 2014, where no fewer than six judges were asked to rule on the Attorney General’s decision to overrule a series of findings in favour of publication. At the time of writing, the Supreme Court’s decision has not been announced, but this epic battle has already produced remarkable insights into Charles’s autocratic behaviour.
Even before the matter reached the Supreme Court, the government had spent more than £250,000 in legal fees in a rearguard attempt to keep Charles’s views secret, and threatened The Guardian with an application for full costs if its legal action was ultimately unsuccessful. 54 The reason ministers went to these lengths became apparent in September 2012, when an independent freedom of information tribunal ruled that the twenty-seven letters should be published. First of all, the tribunal dealt with the question of public interest, saying: ‘The essential reason is that it will generally be in the overall public interest for there to be transparency as to how and when Prince Charles seeks to influence government.’55
It went on to argue that lobbying by the heir to the throne ‘cannot have constitutional status’ and should not be protected from disclosure. Crucially, its members said that the evidence revealed:
Prince Charles using his access to government ministers, and no doubt considering himself entitled to use that access, in order to set up and drive forward charities and promote views, but not as part of his preparation for kingship … Ministers responded, and no doubt felt themselves obliged to respond, but again not as part of Prince Charles’s preparation for kingship [my italics].
What the letters reveal, in other words, is Prince Charles using his position and status to force ministers to respond to his views, even though he has no constitutional right to do so. In normal politics, where transparency is quite properly an issue, this kind of covert influence-seeking would be seen as improper, if not calling into question someone’s suitability to hold public office. The then Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, moved swiftly to protect the Prince, announcing that he was vetoing publication. Two years later, at the Court of Appeal, three judges ruled that Grieve had acted unlawfully. They said he did not have reasonable grounds to veto publication and ordered him to pay The Guardian’s costs, which by then amounted to £96,000. Grieve is a decent man who won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the human rights campaign group Liberty after his sacking from government in 2014, so it was sad to see him pursuing this battle against transparency with such vigour.
Fortunately for those of us who believe in accountability, Grieve’s explanation of why he went to such lengths to keep the content of the letters secret had already given the game away. Grieve frankly admitted that he used the veto because the public could interpret the letters as ‘disagreeing with government policy’. It is a cornerstone of the British constitution that the monarch cannot be seen to favour one political party over another; hence any perception that Charles disagreed with a Labour government ‘would be seriously damaging to his role as future monarch because, if he forfeits his position of political neutrality as heir to the throne, he cannot easily recover it when he is king’.56
I don’t believe this is about perception: it is about a senior member of the royal family challenging the policies of an elected government. That alone makes him unfit to succeed his mother as head of state, when ministers will no doubt find his lobbying even harder to resist. Don’t forget that this case is about only a tiny batch of the hundreds of letters Charles fires off, which Grieve described as ‘in many cases particularly frank’ and reflecting the Prince’s ‘most deeply held personal views and beliefs’. They were addressed to ministers at a wide range of departments, including Business, Innovation and Skills; Health; Children, Schools and Families; Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Culture, Media and Sport; the Northern Ireland Office and the Cabinet Office.57 We also have some idea, from the information tribunal’s ruling, of the subjects he raised: ‘holistic’ medicine, genetically modified crops, cuts in the armed forces, architecture and agricultural policy.58 It does not take much ingenuity to guess his views on any of these subjects, which are doubtless typical of a socially conservative landowner with a prejudice against allopathic medicine. In a telling paragraph in their 126-page ruling, the three judges conceded that Charles’s activities ‘are not neutral and in a number of respects have been controversial’. The government has now imposed a blanket ban so that even if this batch of the Prince’s letters is finally forced into the open, later ones will remain secret.
But covert lobbying is by no means the only way in which the Prince gets his way on matters of public policy and indeed legislation. He also has special powers in his role as Duke of Cornwall, a title which makes him beneficiary of a private landholding which provides an annual income of just over £17 million. His consent is required for legislation which affects the ‘hereditary revenues, personal property or other interests’59 of the Duchy, and in recent years he has been invited to give his consent to new legislation on everything from the London Olympics to shipwrecks. Documents released in 2012 show that the Labour government’s fisheries minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, wrote to the Prince’s private secretary in 2008 enclosing two copies of a draft marine and coastal access bill. He highlighted clauses which would require the Prin
ce’s consent and got a response a couple of months later, informing him that ‘the Prince of Wales is content with the bill’.60 This archaic formula is bad enough – I am not ‘content’ with many pieces of legislation, such as the bedroom tax, but I quite rightly don’t have a veto over them – yet Prince Charles is not the only member of the family to benefit from these far-reaching powers. I’ve already mentioned the occasion in 1999 when the Queen vetoed a Private Member’s Bill, a fact which emerged as a consequence of another FOI request. Tellingly, the request, which revealed a treasure trove of material about royal interference, was not made by a journalist; it came from a legal scholar named John Kirkhope, who wanted to see papers relating to the royal veto for use in his graduate studies at the University of Plymouth. The government fought to keep the papers secret for fifteen months, and it isn’t difficult to see why.
After ministers lost the case, the Cabinet Office was forced to release an internal Whitehall pamphlet which revealed that at least thirty-nine bills had been affected by powers allowing members of the royal family to veto or consent to proposed legislation.61 The Queen and Prince Charles had been asked to approve bills on subjects as varied as higher education, paternity pay, ID cards, civil partnerships and even high hedges. Civil servants were warned that ‘a major plank’ of bills would have to be removed if either the Queen or the Prince withheld consent; even when consent was granted, any amendments to bills would also have to be submitted for royal approval, a process which could delay progress of the legislation through Parliament. According to The Guardian: ‘Charles has been asked to consent to twenty pieces of legislation and this power of veto has been described by constitutional lawyers as a royal “nuclear deterrent” that may help explain why ministers appear to pay close attention to the views of senior royals.’62
The royals’ supposed lack of power and influence is the most pernicious of all public fantasies, worse even than the sentimental outpourings that accompany the family’s engagements, marriages and births. It allows the Queen and her relatives to retain a species of unaccountability denied, rightly, to all institutions which receive public funding – and many that don’t. We expect MPs, government ministers, the police, the legal profession, doctors, even the press, to be open about what they are doing and acknowledge mistakes. The British monarchy is an exception to this principle and many others, a relic from periods of history when all that mattered was getting and retaining power. It is a system of government which has been tried and rejected all over the world, as we shall see in the next section.
33 Daily Telegraph, 8 June 2014.
34 Daily Express, 26 June 2014.
35 Joe Little, editor of Majesty magazine, quoted in the Daily Express, ibid.
36 ‘Worth Every Penny? The real cost of the monarchy to British taxpayers’, published by Republic (www.republic.org.uk).
37 The Guardian, 28 January 2014.
38 Daily Mail, 15 October 2013.
39 BBC News, profile of Edward VIII, 29 January 2003.
40 BBC News, 9 January 2003.
41 Daily Telegraph, 31 March 2002.
42 The Guardian, 19 July 2000.
43 Daily Telegraph, 14 September 2014.
44 Daily Mail, 14 September 2014.
45 The Guardian, 16 December 2014.
46 Military Actions Against Iraq Bill, reported in The Guardian, 15 January 2013.
47 Daily Telegraph, 23 April 2011.
48 BBC News, 25 September 2012.
49 BBC News, 25 September 2012.
50 Daily Mail, 11 August 2013.
51 The Independent, 21 July 2013.
52 Daily Mail, 11 August 2013.
53 The Royal Activist, BBC Radio 4, 29 June 2014.
54 The Guardian, 28 March 2014.
55 The Guardian, 16 October 2012.
56 The Guardian, 12 March 2014.
57 Evening Standard, 13 March 2014.
58 The Guardian, 18 September 2012.
59 The Guardian, 30 October 2011.
60 The Guardian, 18 September 2012.
61 The Guardian, 15 January 2013.
62 Ibid.
Part III
Up with democracy
IT IS SOMETIMES easy to forget, looking at monarchy from a purely British perspective, what a strange creature it is. The reality is that it’s on its way out, leaving only around twenty-five families in the entire world who enjoy these unique privileges by an accident of birth. Fewer than a quarter (forty-three) of the world’s nations are monarchies, and even that figure is inflated by the fact that Elizabeth II is monarch of sixteen Commonwealth nations. It is worth mentioning here that she is also Head of the Commonwealth, an organisation with a combined population of 2.1 billion people, yet her role is neither elected nor subject to a fixed term. The Commonwealth’s governance includes a vague statement that the choice of the next head ‘will be made collectively by Commonwealth leaders’ but no mechanism is set out; the widespread expectation is that Prince Charles will seamlessly succeed his mother.
None of the world’s largest democracies – India, Indonesia or the US – has a hereditary head of state or displays any enthusiasm for having one. When India became independent in 1947, many of its maharajas agreed to sign over their ancestral territory and palaces to the new state; in 1972, the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, stripped them of their remaining titles and privileges. Even when quasi-royal dynasties arise and dominate the political scene, as the Nehrus/Gandhis did for a time in India, the democratic process asserts itself in the end.
The list of countries that ceased to be monarchies in the twentieth century is too long to rehearse in its entirety but it includes Italy, Egypt, Tunisia, China, Germany, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Greece, Albania, Romania, Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Portugal, Russia, Syria, Iceland and Mongolia. Kings, emirs, kaisers, queens, maharajas, grand-dukes, princes and czars found themselves out on their ears, sometimes in farcical circumstances; in 1952, Egypt’s last monarch, the playboy King Farouk, was allowed to leave the country on the royal yacht as long as he promised to send it back when he arrived in exile in Italy. On paper, Farouk had abdicated in favour of his infant son, who became Fuad II, but the country was declared a republic the following year; Farouk continued to pursue a lavish lifestyle, swelling to almost 300 lbs in weight and dying of a heart attack, aged forty-five, in 1963. Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, was even less fortunate, dying with his family in Yekaterinburg, a town in the Urals, when the revolutionary government ordered his murder in 1918. Nicholas was a relative of George V and looked uncannily like him, but the King refused his cousin’s desperate plea for asylum in the UK after his abdication at the time of the revolution a year earlier. Family feeling counts for less than one might think among the royals, but the gruesome fate of the Romanovs has since been transformed into a romantic myth, celebrated in films like Nicholas and Alexandra.
In Europe, around a dozen of Europe’s fifty countries retain some form of monarchical system, although three of them – Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Monaco – are almost too small to count. The Monégasque royal family has a public presence out of all proportion to the size of the principality, chiefly because the late Prince Rainier III made the astute move of marrying an American film star, Grace Kelly. Their children have a permanent presence in gossip magazines, where their marriages, divorces and indeed paternity suits provide reams of copy. The current incumbent, Prince Albert II, has two ‘illegitimate’ children and spent years refusing to acknowledge paternity; DNA tests in 2005 and 2006 established beyond doubt that he was the father of both children but they remain excluded by law from the royal succession. The Grimaldis are typical royal hedonists, in other words, enjoying an existence similar to that of the pop stars, soap stars and models who populate the pages of Hello! magazine. This is true of many of the world’s remaining monarchies, although some do a better job than others of concealing their excesses from the people they rule; in 2005, the town of Marbella in Andalusia declared three days of mourning
for King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who liked to spend his summers there rather than at home in his strictly religious kingdom, where alcohol and gambling are forbidden. Fahd’s visits to Marbella began in the 1970s and he eventually owned a 200-acre estate outside the town equipped with a private clinic, a mosque, several palaces and a sports complex. After his death, The Guardian listed his entourage with something approaching awe:
On his last visit, the king arrived with a fleet of jumbo jets and about 3,000 family members, friends, camp followers and staff. He booked 300 hotel rooms, hired 500 additional staff, and more than 100 new Mercedes cars arrived on transporters from Germany, where they had been leased.63
Europe’s monarchies do not have wealth on this scale but they are self-indulgent in their tastes, even after the 2008 financial crisis. It accounts, among other things, for the dramatic collapse in support for Spain’s monarchy in recent years. Juan Carlos I was hailed as a bulwark of democracy in 1975 when he assumed the throne after the death of the dictator General Franco, putting an end to one of Europe’s most enduring tyrannies. Few people would have imagined, at the time, that his subsequent loss of public esteem would be so precipitous as to force his abdication almost four decades later. In 2014, Juan Carlos stepped down in favour of his son, whose accession as Felipe VI prompted republican demonstrations in many Spanish cities. Like Prince Albert of Monaco, Juan Carlos had been dogged by rumours of affairs and embarrassing paternity suits; shortly after he gave up the throne, the Spanish Parliament tried to cut off further scandals by passing a law to give him immunity from such actions.64 But these were far from being the only gaffes which humiliated his Queen and turned people against him; the most egregious was a free trip to Botswana in 2012 where Juan Carlos, who was then honorary President of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund, went on safari to shoot elephants. The trip came to light only because the elderly King fell, broke his hip and had to be airlifted back to a Spanish hospital.65 Then there was the scandal around his son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, a former Olympic athlete who married the King’s younger daughter, the Infanta Cristina. In June 2014, less than a week after her brother ascended the Spanish throne, a court upheld corruption charges against the Princess in a case involving Urdangarin, who was accused of fraud, falsifying documents and embezzlement.66 Five months later, Cristina failed in an attempt to have the charges dropped; at the time of writing, the couple are awaiting trial. An opinion poll published less than a week after the King’s abdication suggested that the gesture was not enough; two-thirds of the Spanish population demanded a referendum on the future of the monarchy, a choice they have so far been denied.67
