‘Black spider’ memos wreck Charles’ ‘neutrality’

London

A cache of secret memos sent by Prince Charles to senior UK ministers has finally been published, following a 10-year freedom of information battle between the Guardian newspaper and the government. The letters reveal that Charles lobbied ministers, including the former Prime Minister Tony Blair, on a wide range of issues, including agriculture, the armed forces, architecture and homeopathy.

The correspondence was disclosed after the newspaper won a decade-long legal tussle with the government, which had argued that publication of the letters would make it hard for Charles to maintain a position of public neutrality when he became king.

The letters, published yesterday, reveal how Charles lobbied Tony Blair when he was prime minister to replace Lynx military helicopters. Charles complained: “I fear this one more example of our armed forces being asked to do an extremely challenging job without the necessary resources.”

He also complained to Blair in great detail about “increasing problems” affecting the dairy sector, saying that the regulatory body, the Office of Fair Trading, had become “a serious obstacle to developing dairy co-operatives”. He warned Blair about the “anxieties which are developing particularly among beef farmers and to a lesser degree sheep farmers” as a consequence of a government midterm review.

The memos to ministers, including Blair, Elliot Morley, John Reid, and Charles Clarke, covered a range of areas, from the diet of schoolchildren to fisheries – in particular the Patagonian toothfish – the built environment, beef and sheep farming, herbal medicines and defence. 

The government blocked the release of the letters, claiming that their publication risked undermining Charles’s “position of political neutrality”, which would not easily be recovered when he became king.  The letters – 27 memos to and from the heir to the throne, the prime minister and ministers in six government departments – relate to an eight-month period from September 2004 to April 2005, and were the subject of a Freedom of Information Act request by the Guardian journalist Rob Evans. 

The government has spent more than £400,000 on legal costs to fight the battle.

The relationship between Charles and the prime minister was so close that Blair even asked Charles directly what he wanted him to do about encouraging the use of herbal medicines in the UK, which some scientists believe do not work. Charles complained that an EU directive was having a “deleterious effect on the complementary medicine sector by effectively outlawing the use of certain herbal extracts”. (The Guardian)