ANKARA
Secret letters sent by the heir to the British throne to U.K. government ministers were published Wednesday.
The letters date back to between 2004 and 2005 and have been published after a 10-year legal dispute between the liberal-left Guardian newspaper and the British government.
Critics argue the letters show how Prince Charles lobbied the government on certain issues.
In one such letter, he expressed his reservations to then Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2004 over the arming of British troops deployed abroad, writing, “I fear this is one more example of our armed forces being asked to do an extremely challenging job without the necessary resources.”
The government spent over £400,000 attempting to block the “black spider memos,” so-called because of his scrawling handwriting and use of underlining and exclamation marks.
Former attorney general Dominic Grieve vetoed the decision to publish the letters in 2012 warning they “would potentially have undermined his (Prince Charles) position of political neutrality” and contained the prince’s “most deeply held personal views and beliefs.”
The Guardian originally applied to see the letters in 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act and in 2014 overturned Grieve’s veto in the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land.
The government amended the Freedom of Information Act providing an “absolute exemption” for letters written by the Queen and her heir to the throne.
Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said, “We fought this case because we believed – and the most senior judges in the country agreed – that the royal family should operate to the same degrees of transparency as anyone else trying to make their influence felt in public life.”
