And now for the big reveal: The envelopes, please. Yes, those ones, covered in distinctive black handwriting, with three envelopes encasing each letter, the better to ensure privacy and confidentiality.
Those are the 27 so-called "black spider memos" written by Prince Charles to various British government ministries. They are soon to be revealed to the public after a bitter 10-year legal battle between the Guardian newspaper and the British government, or as I like to think of it, the people vs. the establishment. The people won, in this case. Feel free to have a gin to celebrate.
What are the contents of these letters? Will they, as former attorney-general Dominic Grieves suggested in 2012 when he overruled a tribunal decision and kept them hidden, threaten Charles's monarchy because of their "frank" nature? The Guardian wondered, "Are these black spider memos wholly in keeping with Charles's constitutional role as a future monarch? Could he be exploiting his position by lobbying ministers? The trouble is, we just don't know."
What we do know is that the government has spent some $450,000 and 10 years fighting to keep those letters secret. I don't know about you, but when the government clasps its hands over something, I have a profound urge to peel its fingers back. The letters will be reviewed and released at some unspecified point in the future, possibly with redactions, which is a fancy way of saying, "lavish use of black marker."
The other thing we know is that Prince Charles has a history of wading in political waters, including advocating against the ban on fox hunting; criticizing the production of genetically modified foods; and promoting discredited alternative health practices such as homeopathy.
He loathed the design of the proposed redevelopment of the Chelsea Barracks in a historic part of London, and mentioned it to the owners of the site, the Qatari royal family, whom he happened to know. (Oddly, all the royals in the world seem to know each other.) The proposal was killed.
The people of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms of which Charles will one day be head of state, including Canada, may be hunky dory with this meddling. But first they have to know the level and nature of meddling in order to make an informed decision. This is what's been kept carefully hidden for years, out of fear that a finger-in-the-pie Prince will be drastically less popular than his laissez-faire mother.
"Everyone is saying there's a right to know everything. I don't agree," Charles told his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994. "There isn't a right to know at all." Yes, that's a quote from the future Charles III, not Charles I. It's contained in Catherine Mayer's enlightening new biography, Charles: the Heart of a King. The book is a balanced and largely sympathetic account, and it's absolutely clear on one thing: Charles is a crusader for the things he believes in, mainly his view of technology as a disrupting influence, and he is not about to give that up. "To the Prince," Ms. Mayer writes, "civilization often appears as a serpent that comes between man and primal harmony."
Or, as a republican like journalist Nick Cohen puts it: "The Prince's views are almost medieval in their obscurity." (Full disclosure: I'm a republican, too.) It's fine to have medieval views if you're starring in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but less helpful when wielding influence in the public sphere. Anyone who thinks Charles does not have influence is fooling himself: You only have to read Ms. Mayer's account of the meetings he holds with cabinet ministers, the incessant letters he writes to them and the speeches he gives that are (unlike the previous examples) widely discussed.
Or you could read about the case of Edzard Ernst, professor emeritus at the University of Exeter, who believes that Charles and his advisers were responsible for silencing his research into alternative medicine. The full account of their conflict can be read in Dr. Ernst's new memoir, A Scientist in Wonderland, but the essence is this: Dr. Ernst trained as both a medical doctor and a homeopath, spent years studying the effectiveness of alternative treatments and concluded that many, including homeopathy, were bogus.
When he criticized a study commissioned by Charles into the economic benefits of alternative remedies, he was denounced by the Prince's staff to his superiors. The university investigated Dr. Ernst (he was cleared). But his research funds disappeared and his department was shut down. Charles had initially seemed to support his work, but as Dr. Ernst writes in his book, "To the contrary: He seemed to be a staunch advocate of unreason and a formidable opponent of any attempt to bring science or critical thinking to bear on alternative medicine."
Are there more such stories contained in the black spider memos? We'll only know when the British government gives in to the inevitable and hands them over, as it should have done years ago. The envelopes, please.