Keeping in Touch

Some senior judges have granted one of Daveybloke's stupider relatives a privilege long ago sacrificed on behalf of the rest of us by the high priests of national security: the privacy of the heir to the throne remains inviolable even when he attempts to influence those functionaries who run the country for the greater good of G4S and BAE Systems. Drawing on some superhuman reserves of energy which miraculously remain to him after yet another day of waiting for his mother to die, the prince has been in the habit of firing off hand-written notes with useful advice for the Government. The possibility that these epistles might be published sent the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, into an undignified scramble to keep the prince's pearls of wisdom from the public's porcine eye; and the judges have now ruled that Grieve was correct, if constitutionally aberrant, to do so. Should the public see the letters, its perception of the prince's political neutrality would be fatally compromised, and this would be a Very Bad Thing. The mere fact that the prince wrote the letters in the first place is really no problem at all, because the prince is being "instructed in the business of government"; they are, it would appear, not so much crank missives as essays towards an Open University course in political cosiness.

The lord chief justice noted that Grieve's constitutionally aberrant overruling of a previous court decision was not quite pernicious, because Grieve's decision could be challenged in another court (as it was, by the Guardian) and upheld for the protection of the royal dignity (as it was, by the lord chief justice). This neat little circle of old-boy civility "provides the necessary safeguard for the constitutionality of the process".