Prince Charles will not be silenced when he is made king, say allies.Speak up, Prince Charles. But be ready for the backlash.

Prince Charles will not be silenced when he is made king, say allies

Exclusive: Sources close to heir say he will break with Queen’s habit of discretion by continuing to speak out on issues that matter to him

Robert Booth

The Guardian, Thursday 20 November 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/19/becoming-king-not-silence-prince-charles-allies

Prince Charles is ready to reshape the monarch’s role when he becomes king and make “heartfelt interventions” in national life in contrast to the Queen’s taciturn discretion on public affairs, his allies have said.

In signs of an emerging strategy that could risk carrying over the controversy about his alleged meddling in politics into his kingship, sources close to the heir say he is set to continue to express concerns and ask questions about issues that matter to him, such as the future of farming and the environment, partly because he believes he has a duty to relay public opinion to those in power.

“He will be true to his beliefs and contributions,” said a well-placed source who has known him for many years. “Rather than a complete reinvention to become a monarch in the mould of his mother, the strategy will be to try and continue with his heartfelt interventions, albeit checking each for tone and content to ensure it does not damage the monarchy. Speeches will have to pass the following test: would it seem odd because the Queen wouldn’t have said it or would it seem dangerous?”

In the past Charles has stirred controversy by lobbying politicians over issues such as genetic modification of crops, education and health. The government has already conceded that if the currently secret “black spider memos” he has written to ministers are ever made public, and readers concluded Prince Charles was disagreeing with government policy, that could “seriously damage” his future role as king.

“The prince understands the need to be careful about how he expresses concerns or asks questions, but I do think he will keep doing exactly that,” said Patrick Holden, an organic farmer, friend of the prince and adviser to him on sustainability. “He is part of an evolving monarchy that is changing all the time. He feels these issues are too serious to ignore.”

The comments came as part of a wide-ranging Guardian investigation into the possible shape of a King Charles III monarchy. Next week the supreme court will consider whether 27 letters between Charles and government ministers should be published following a nine-year freedom of information battle between the Guardian and Whitehall. The government and the palace argue correspondence and meetings with ministers are a necessary part of his preparation for kingship and in 2012, the then attorney general Dominic Grieve said they had to be kept confidential to protect Charles’s position of political neutrality.

Constitutional experts have frequently praised the Queen for almost completely keeping out of public debates on political matters and Charles is said to understand that his ability to speak on matters which have a political element to them will be in a different category to the freedom he enjoys in his current role. Courtiers also argue that his 40 years as heir carrying out thousands of engagements across the country and abroad mean he is uniquely well-placed to relay public opinion.

“Speculation about the Prince of Wales’s future role as king has been around for decades but it is not something we have commented on and nor will we do so now,” said a Clarence House spokeswoman. “The Prince of Wales cares deeply about this country and has devoted most of his working life to helping individuals and organisations to make a difference for the better – and not for his personal gain. He takes an active interest in the issues and challenges facing the UK and around the world through his own work and that of his charities.

“Over the past 40 years in his role as heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales has visited countless places and met numerous people from every walk of life. He carries out over 600 engagements a year. This gives him a unique perspective which has often led to him identifying issues before others which might otherwise be overlooked. He is often described as being ahead of his time and the evidence for this has been well documented and includes leading the work on corporate social responsibility, from as early as the 1980s, demonstrating the benefits of organic farming, as well as finding ways to help young people who are not in employment, education or training through his Prince’s Trust.”

Paul Flynn, a Labour member of the Commons political and constitutional reform select committee, said continued interventions would not be compatible “with the serious job of the monarch to act as someone above politics and above controversy”.

“We know Prince Charles has deep-seated, passionate views, some of which are sensible, some eccentric and some barmy,” he said. “If he continues to be a controversial figure on issues like complementary medicine and country sports he could precipitate a constitutional crisis if he comes up against a government which is bent on some course of action and he disagrees and refuses to sign the act of parliament.”

Flynn said the Queen’s silence on controversial issues had secured the monarchy and made it acceptable in a democracy. He said that if Prince Charles decided to go outside those boundaries as king “he imperils the monarchy”. But one source said Charles got frustrated that people seemed to think he did not understand that being head of state was a different job.

Michael Meacher, the former environment secretary who Charles lobbied over genetically modified crops, suggested that if King Charles wanted to intervene, an unprecedented new system of transparency about his communications with government would be required.

“I would favour the arrangement whereby if letters are received it is made known either in response to a freedom of information request or without prompting so people will know if the king has taken an interest,” he said. “People will be watching to see if the action taken is in line with what is thought to be his view … People are sceptical and suspicious and they have a right to know if the king has taken an interest.”

The Freedom of Information Act protects the royal family’s correspondence from public exposure, so any FOI request would only work if parliament changed the law.

As king, Charles is likely continue to oversee some of the charity operations he has created. Under the auspices of the Prince’s Charities he built up a network of 21 charities, now reduced to 15, and has used several of them to lobby government ministers and officials over causes that matter to him ranging from complementary medicine to traditional architecture. The number of charities in the network may be reduced further but some will remain.

Speak up, Prince Charles. But be ready for the backlash

King Charles won’t be able to pretend he’s impartial, which could fundamentally change the monarchy

Gaby Hinsliff

The Guardian, Friday 21 November 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/21/king-charles-speak-out-ready-for-backlash

So Prince Charles is to be the first real king for the Facebook age. The heir to the throne, we are told, does not intend to maintain the iron self-restraint of his mother but to share his feelings with us.

When and if he becomes king, he will make “heartfelt interventions” on issues he feels strongly about, rather than discreetly avoiding politics as the Queen has endeavoured to do for 60 years. He will be “true to his beliefs”. The future monarch does not wish to be inscrutable and remote but human and understood, a king for a nation that increasingly wears its heart on its digital sleeve. Or, depending on one’s view, a king for a nation that never quite knows when to shut up.

To which one can only say that if he wants to bring his lobbying out into the open, then good for him; countless lobbying scandals have proved sunlight is always the best disinfectant. Better we all know what’s going on than that he shapes policy secretly via the handwritten “black spider memos” he sends privately to ministers. But one can only hope the Prince of Wales knows exactly what he’s starting here.

There is an element, perhaps, of making a virtue out of a necessity. Queen Elizabeth came to the throne aged only 25 and virtually unscrutinised by the media: her subjects knew little of her opinions, which made it easy to pretend she didn’t have any. Her son simply doesn’t have that option. Having already spent four decades in public life, and quite rightly having found useful things to do in it, he inevitably brings a lot more baggage to the throne.

The great irony of the official line that the Prince’s extensive correspondence with government should remain private to preserve his “political neutrality” is that he has invaded his own privacy – rampantly – already. We know exactly what he thinks about climate change, organic farming, the countryside, alternative medicine; who now thinks these views would change if he became king? Even if the Wizard of Oz wanted to pull the curtain back around him, there’s barely any curtain left.

And to give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps Prince Charles knows that. Perhaps he’d gladly trade the deference shown to his mother for the joy of being his own man; perhaps he won’t mind when people disagree rudely and loudly with him, when he divides the nation rather than uniting it. (The downside of having public opinions, as Myleene Klass has just discovered, is that people will insist on having them right back at you). Perhaps he’ll simply accept it gracefully if future governments dismiss homeopathy as quackery, rather than funding it on the NHS.

And perhaps, having had 40 years with little to do but think this through, he already realises that the constitutional settlement would inevitably evolve in response to an activist monarch and is comfortable with that. In which case, he shouldn’t be criticised for meddling but applauded for sacrificing ultimate private power in favour of strictly limited public influence – because that is what he’d be doing. But one doubts that’s quite what he has in mind.

Not everything would change, of course. Take the weekly audience with the prime minister, at which the monarch exercises the royal right to “advise and warn” in private. Downing Street can be a lonely place, and the value of being able to chew things over in strict confidence with someone outside the eye of the storm means the ritual will probably endure even if a future monarch took it upon himself to “advise and warn” publicly too. But the royal relationship with parliament is a trickier matter altogether.

One couldn’t blame the Queen for occasionally approaching the Queen’s speech with all the enthusiasm of a hostage reciting a propaganda statement written by her captors. But what keeps things just this side of plausible is that when she reads out “my government’s” legislative plans with a commendably poker face, we can’t be sure if she thinks it populist nonsense or pitifully thin gruel; we don’t know enough about her private views on austerity, or immigration, or Iraq. But few would doubt how King Charles III felt about, say, announcing plans to scrap all climate change targets because “my government” doesn’t believe in global warming. What then?

It would be wrong for a democratically elected government to ditch a manifesto promise – even a stupid promise – to avoid embarrassing an unelected king. But repeatedly forcing him to read a king’s speech contradicting his public wishes would render him an oddly weakened, powerless figure: healthy for democracy maybe, but altogether less comfortable for him. I wonder whether both sides wouldn’t begin to ask if parliament really needs a state opening at all, if unromantically bunging the year’s legislative plans out by press release might be easier all round.

And where it gets really awkward is with the monarch’s historic powers to choose the prime minister and to refuse a government’s request to dissolve parliament and call an election. We’ve traditionally fudged the blatantly undemocratic nature of all this via a tacit agreement that the Queen can keep her ancient powers so long as she doesn’t actually use them, or not outside of some unimaginable emergency. Our unwritten constitution is built on a deep and peculiarly British desire to avoid any awkwardness; an acceptance that republics too have flaws; and crucially, on faith in the monarch being uniquely capable of acting in the public interest rather than her own. Were she to start forcibly expressing her own interests like any other politician, that faith would evaporate faster than mist over Balmoral.

The reason the Queen refused to speak out on Scottish independence, despite the importance of what was at stake, was surely that the monarch cannot be both in the fray and above it. You can’t be “true to your own beliefs” without people who hold radically opposed beliefs concluding – not unreasonably – that you don’t act in their interests; you cannot be partial, yet still somehow claim to be the impartial power of last resort when it suits you. All of which means that if Prince Charles chooses to be a very different kind of monarch, his subjects may quite logically choose to have a new relationship with him. Speak up, Your Highness, by all means. Just don’t expect the crowd to stay silent.