‘Put not your trust in princes ... in whom there is no help,” according to the Psalms — and to Alastair Campbell. How he loathes the meddling Prince, Old Jug Ears, sticking his crook into everything. Cherie Blair, the Iraq war, everything else pales in comparison with the heir to the throne, whom he accuses in his diaries of being an interfering old fool.
The Prince of Wales is depicted as the Black Prince, the future King of England born at the shallow end of the gene pool, weak, snivelling but also dangerously powerful. Tony Blair is quoted as saying that Charles was “screwing” his Government over such pivotal issues as foxhunting and had behaved appallingly by sticking up for farmers during the foot-and-mouth crisis.
The Prince of Wales can’t get it right. First the former communications chief went for him, now he stands accused of wasting Tory ministers’ time, forcing them into nine meetings in the past ten months, including two with Caroline Spelman on “tree health”. While the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are hailed as rock stars in Canada, staying in their log cabin and racing each other over the lakes, and while his mother bonds with Michelle Obama, Prince Charles is the unwanted filling in the royal sandwich. This week his extravagant expenses have been picked over just as Kate is praised for her thriftiness in wearing the same dress twice and doing her own shopping.
But compare him with other princes. Look at Albert (not the Consort but the continental), who appears to have forced his reluctant bride up the aisle in tears in Monaco last weekend. He seems to be sowing his own seeds faster than Prince Charles can plant his organic marrows. You want to grab Princess Charlene and run as fast as possible with her out of the Principality to save her from this bad, bald ogre surrounded by his conniving aides.
Would we prefer a vacuous playboy, or even the golf-playing younger brother, Andy, to this serious, contemplative, earnest man who likes chickens and has become rather a responsible father?
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There are issues that the Prince mustn’t touch — the constitution, Europe, the Middle East, whether to go to war and, Mr Campbell is right, Britain’s relationship with China. But it is clear that Mr Blair actually valued the Prince’s advice on occasion.
The former Prime Minister wrote to The Guardian yesterday to complain about the inaccuracy of Mr Campbell’s description of his relationship with the Prince. This wasn’t toadying: it is too late for an invitation to the Royal Wedding and Mr Blair is never going to be made godfather to Will and Kate’s eldest child. He hasn’t complained about any other part of the diaries. So he must have thought Mr Campbell was just wrong.
Why? Because Prince Charles is actually pretty well informed for a man surrounded by footmen and has been prescient in the campaigns he has chosen. Remember the bottle bank at Buckingham Palace that must have embarrassed his parents? He instigated that 20 years before councils started recycling. He was eating organic lettuces years before Gwyneth Paltrow espoused beansprouts. He was talking about Islam and reading the Koran before 9/11, warning that Britain needed to understand the religious tensions in this country. He championed community building projects over ideological Modernist architecture years before the Big Society.
With his Prince’s Trust, he found a kinder way than Alan Sugar of encouraging young entrepreneurs, and he was banging on about phonics and the national curriculum while Michael Gove was still manning the picket lines on strike as a young reporter in Aberdeen. He rarely makes a U-turn, but he hasn’t needed to: even his letters to Labour ministers in the past decade complaining about the treatment of the elderly now look reasonable.
In fact, coalition ministers want to meet the Prince. “I was embarrassingly flustered about whether to bow or not,” said one minister. “You suddenly realise that he has met everyone from Nelson Mandela to Winston Churchill.” They won’t be beheaded if they ignore him and, unlike businessmen who come to lobby, he can’t offer any financial inducement to a political party to take up his causes. He is too profligate at a time when everyone else is struggling to make their family budgets work, but as someone who paid nearly £4.4 million in tax to the Treasury last year he has more right than the non-doms to want to make his voice felt.
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The former Prime Minister called his discussions with the heir to the throne “immensely helpful”. Neither Prince Charles nor Alastair Campbell was elected, but you wonder whether Mr Blair now wishes he had listened a little less to Mr Campbell and a little more to this unpaid prince.