Daily Telegraph

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Go on Charles: babble, rage and ignore the treacherous toads

By Boris Johnson

Do you ever feel, dear readers, that the media are engaged in a
gigantic conspiracy against the truth? Have you ever rubbed your eyes, and
wondered why they are not making the obvious point? If you have, then the answer
is almost always that you have stumbled across a story where the media's own
interests are at stake, and when the interests of the press are at stake, the
reality of the position is quite irrelevant.

Consider the business of the Prince of Wales and the Mail on
Sunday. To judge by the headlines, old Charlieboy has broken off from chatting
up his begonias and dropped the most phenomenal clanger. He has said or done
something quite preposterous - insulted the Luxembourgers, perhaps, or claimed
that marmalade can cure acne. He is being accused of "meddling", of shooting his
mouth off, and failing to bite his tongue.

One after another, the self-interested editors of our media
organisations line up to accuse him of being a headline seeker. What has
prompted this orgy of abuse? Has he said that government ministers should not be
driving 6-litre Jaguars? Has he complained about the destruction of the Green
Belt? No: it is only when you read the papers quite carefully that you discover
that the Prince has not said anything new at all.

On the contrary, it turns out that the Mail has illicitly
obtained his private diaries, his private diaries, and has splashed them over
several pages, including some quite fruity stuff about the handover of Hong
Kong.

Like any other person, the Prince is trying to assert his
sovereign and inalienable copyright over his private diaries, and to prevent the
paper from publishing any more. In order to defend its conduct the Mail has
found some disappointed ex-courtier who has been prepared to describe how, from
time to time, the Prince does indeed say things which he knows will make
headlines.

I hope it is not prejudicial to the case if I say that I think it
an utterly pitiful defence. The diaries were lifted by some secretary,
photocopied by the paper, and the Prince should have as much right as anyone
else to protection of his private writing; and anything he says in his diaries
has a completely different status from anything he says in public. But you won't
read much of that in the papers this week, because every editor in the world
wants to establish the principle that they can print whatever the hell they
want.

So they make a great hoo-ha about the Prince's alleged courting
of headlines, as if his occasional decision to say something in public validated
their decision to breach his copyright, and they drown out the truth with a
chorus of baying "constitutional experts" warning about what the Prince can and
cannot say.

"The Prince has gone too far", says the Daily Mail, in an ecstasy
of hypocrisy, since its sister paper is determined to publish documents that the
Prince would much rather keep private. The bewildered public takes away the
impression that the papers want the Prince to shut up, at the same time as
wanting the right to make him say more in public. Which is it?

My own view is that the Prince has a perfect right to speak about
subjects that interest him and about which he cares; and the whole point about
being Prince of Wales is that he can do so and attract headlines, without any
real political consequences. He is not a minister. He cannot make laws.

He is a 57-year-old landowner with a not particularly good degree
in anthropology who talks to flowers and wants to be reincarnated as a piece of
feminine sanitary equipment. By dint of heredity he happens to occupy a unique
place in people's loyalties and affections, and if he thinks he can do some good
by some pronouncement, I don't see why he shouldn't say more or less anything he
pleases.

Under the modern British constitution, he is a peripheral figure.
He can rage against modern architecture, but unlike John Prescott he cannot
carpet rural England with new developments. He may have his views about GM
crops, but he cannot do a thing about the regulations that will call them into
being.

He has his views about the advantages of a traditional approach
to education, and learning poems off by heart, but he has infinitely less
influence on the British educational system than the equally unelected Lord
Adonis. He is far less powerful than the meanest minister in Blair's government,
and he is of course much less powerful than the editors of the Daily Mail and
the Mail on Sunday.

In terms of cosmic influence, it is like comparing the Sun to
Pluto.

Indeed, it is a measure of his lack of gravitational pull that
this ex-courtier Bolland has so readily decided to betray his boss and say
things that he hopes will be obliging to the Mail. And yet it is, of course,
this very powerlessness that gives the Prince his value. He is criticised for
saying (in his private diary) that the Chinese leadership looked like "appalling
old waxworks", and for noting the electric fans they used to keep the flags
fluttering. He is attacked for failing to attend the banquet for the Chinese
president in 1999, a move he intended to be a snub.

But there is hardly anyone in government who would wish to say
anything remotely difficult about China or Tibet - not when Britain and China
have such huge and growing interests in common. You can't expect Rupert
Murdoch's press to duff up the Chinese, not when he wants to beam his balderdash
to a billion satellite viewers.

The Prince can say these things precisely because he is not in
charge, and his peculiar position means they will be heard, even if we choose to
ignore him. That is why we need him to keep it up.

Go on Charles: you keep firing off those green ink letters to
ministers; you keep going with the unfashionable causes; keep babbling away to
the herbaceous borders; don't stop caring about Tibet and the Book of Common
Prayer; don't worry about the treacherous toads who defect to a self-interested
media. The Prince's actions are completely harmless, and sometimes useful.

Can I have my knighthood now?