UK Supreme Court forces publication of Prince Charles’s letters to politicians

The decision by the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court to force the publication of 27 letters sent by Prince Charles to government ministers will offer a brief insight into relations between the heir to the British throne and politics.

By a five-to-two majority, the judges ruled that the former Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, had acted wrongly by overruling an earlier decision by a court ordering publication of the letters, saying that Mr Grieve should have lodged a court appeal.

“A decision of a judicial body should be final and binding and should not be capable of being overturned by a member of the executive,” said Lord Neuberger, the president of the supreme court.

Clearly unhappy, the British government said it would now "need to study" how it complied with the long-awaited ruling — prompted by an application by The Guardian newspaper a decade ago. It is unclear if it will seek to make redactions.

However, the 27 letters, written between September 2004 and April 2005, will be the only ones that will see the light of day, since the government passed legislation granting royal letters an absolute exemption from Freedom of Information rules.

Some of the letters are deadly dull, it is understood, but a few raised fears in Mr Grieve that if they created a perception that the prince had forfeited his “position of political neutrality as heir to the throne, he cannot easily recover it when he is king”.

Describing the judgment as "disappointing", Prime Minister David Cameron said he believed that most British people would think that it "is fair enough" that senior members of the royal family should be able to express views to ministers confidentially.

Reverence

The Freedom of Information laws included a power of government veto. “If the legislation does not make parliament’s intentions for the veto clear enough, then we will need to make it clearer,” he said.

Former Labour minister, Margaret Beckett, one of those who did receive letters, indicated that the prince had often ventilated the same opinions in his many public speeches on the environment, architecture and other issues.

Known as the “black spider” letters, because of his distinctive handwriting, they were “treated with great reverence and went straight to the top of the pile in the red box containing the minister’s business for the day”, ahead of letters from cabinet colleagues, she said.

Some letters by the prince have been published, including a famous one in 2002 where he complained to prime minister Tony Blair that farmers who wanted to continue fox-hunting were being treated worse "than blacks or gays".

A spokeswoman for the prince, who had not expected the supreme court would rule in his favour, said he was “ disappointed the principle of privacy has not been upheld.”

Six of the judges said a ruling to publish had to be honoured, unless it was overturned by a higher court.

However, one judge, Lord Wilson, argued that his bench colleagues had undermined parliamentary sovereignty by trying to rewrite the FOI Act.