Why Prince Charles Should Keep His Views to Himself
After
a second cache of his letters to government ministers was revealed, Britain’s
future King should be reminded that the point of a constitutional monarch is
that they do not set policy.
So, now we know why Prince Charles
and the government fought so hard to get his letters to ministers suppressed.
It is the sheer sense of entitlement, the arrogance and the
usually-fulfilled expectation of obedience that oozes from every typewritten
word of the second and final cache of letters, released last week.
In the first batch of letters, dating from 2004—2005, which
were released last
month, Charles actually came across as well-briefed and largely
respectful of the elected ministers he was addressing.
The difference of tone in this second batch, written between
2006 and 2009, is marked. Charles appears to be significantly emboldened by the
passage of time.
The tone is simultaneously hectoring, demanding, victimized,
and arrogant; Charles manages to convey both an expectation that anything other
than automatic deference to him would constitute lèse-majesté, and a sense of
bafflement that his plainly entirely reasonable, nay ‘splendid’ plans even
require further discussion before implementation.
He also, somewhat hilariously, gets a case of the ‘poor
me’s’ in one letter, perceiving a conspiracy by the establishment against him.
He complains about the “waves of invective” he has endured
“over the years from parts of the Medical and Scientific Establishments (sic)”
regarding his views on alternative medicine.
Charles comes across as a confused and confusing cross
between a pernickety, detail-obsessed former headmaster and a trendy vicar who
has just picked up Eckhart Tolle, but got no further than Chapter One.
The tone of the letters is just as incendiary as the
specific demands. At their most brazen, these demands include putting one of
his own staffers into the office of the minister for housing as part of a
proposed ‘exchange of secondees’.
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