Observations on Prince Charles

In the mid-1990s, the novelist Michael Dobbs predicted a clash between a left-wing, environmentalist Prince of Wales and a nasty, right-wing Tory government. Nearly a decade later, a more predictable - and more disturbing - conflict has been exposed at the heart of our unwritten constitution.

Charles Windsor's persistent lobbying and harassment of ministers in favour of his own right-wing causes is at last being publicly acknowledged. He is such a notorious political infighter that Michael Heseltine told him he had "all the hallmarks of a seasoned politician". One former minister, Peter Morrison, has recounted how Charles called him into Kensington Palace, screamed and banged his fist on the table when Morrison wouldn't accept his arguments.

Tory ministers more often than not allowed themselves to be bullied by Charles. But now the war between Downing Street and Highgrove is plain for all to see.

Many on the left had taken Charles as something of a sympathiser, primarily because of his resistance to GM crops. Yet Charles is, in fact, part of the oldest of the old right: he is, as the Labour peer and Blair confidant Lord Haskins astutely observed earlier this year, a feudal thinker.

Charles, as he accepted the cheers of the jubilee crowd in June, ranted against "the poison of change": he is a nostalgist for a premodern world where everybody knew their place in the hierarchy of nature. (Hence his resistance to GM foods.) This is also why he was such a tireless promoter of the now-discredited Laurens van der Post, a compulsive fantasist and liar. Van der Post exalted "primitive" peoples who lived without the "encumbrance of science or Enlightenment rationalism". This is a pre-rational philosophy for a man at the head of a pre-rational institution.

Downing Street has been extraordinarily accommodating towards Charles. During the foot-and-mouth crisis, he spoke to the Prime Minister daily to lobby for vaccination. Charles has even been named a government "design tsar", giving him the power to stamp his "vision" of classical architecture on Britain's new hospitals. This is despite there being no evidence that the Prince, who has a degree in history, has any special skills in the subject.

Charles has not responded with gratitude but with persistent anti-government leaks. He has said that he will not be diverted from using "the authority of his position" to speak out across a range of public issues. He does not seem to question his conviction that a hereditary position should have any "authority" at all.

As Charles steps up his campaigning against Blair - allowing the Tory MP Nicholas Soames to draft his complaints, writing to the Lord Chancellor to complain about new Labour's political correctness - perhaps even the pro-monarchy PM will lose patience and start questioning Charles's suitability for the throne.

Charles should proceed with caution. Remember: this is a man who preaches fuel conservation yet drives one of the greatest fuel-wasters in the world, a Bentley - or rather, three of them. This is a man who took a trip to the US to inspect urban slums and spent half his time there playing polo; a man who preaches agricultural traditionalism but was happy to shut down his own "model farms" so that he could make an extra few quid by "rationalising" the Duchy of Cornwall.

As Francis Urquhart warns the king in Michael Dobbs's novel To Play the King: "Those who live in glass palaces would be well-advised not to throw stones."

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