Move follows 10-year legal battle over letters sent to government ministers in 2004 and 2005

Prince Charles’ secret letters to British government ministers expressing frank views that the government has warned could undermine his political neutrality will finally be published on Wednesday.



The move follows a 10-year battle by the Guardian to expose the heir to the throne’s so-called ‘black spider memos’ to public scrutiny.

The 27 letters were sent between Charles and ministers in seven government departments in 2004 and 2005 and were the subject of a Freedom of Information Act request by the Guardian journalist Rob Evans.

The government has been battling to protect the Prince of Wales from scrutiny over what the former attorney general Dominic Grieve has described as Charles’s “particularly frank” interventions on public policy in the letters.

Grieve vetoed the information tribunal’s original decision to order publication in 2012, warning that the letters “contain remarks about public affairs which would in my view, if revealed, have had a material effect upon the willingness of the government to engage in correspondence with the Prince of Wales, and would potentially have undermined his position of political neutrality”.

The letters will be published with some redactions on Wednesday following the upper tribunal’s ruling on Tuesday afternoon that it had “accepted Mr Evans’s submission that what is described in the decision as ‘the open material’ is to be supplied to other parties without restriction on their ability to publish that material.”

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In March, supreme court judges finally approved the publication of the letters. David Cameron said at the time that the decision was “deeply disappointing”.

He said: “This is about the principle that senior members of the royal family are able to express their views to government confidentially. I think most people would agree this is fair enough.”

A spokesperson at Clarence House, Prince Charles’ London home, said at the time that it was “disappointed that the principle of privacy has not been upheld”.

The letters were sent between the prince and seven different Whitehall departments that at the time were led by Labour secretaries of state. They were business, innovation and skills; health; children, schools and families; environment, food and rural affairs; culture, media and sport; the Northern Ireland Office and the Cabinet Office.



Despite voicing disappointment at the principle of privacy being undermined in their eyes, Clarence House aides have previously indicated they are relatively relaxed about the publication of the letters themselves and are said to believe that Grieve’s suggestion that their content could undermine Charles’s political neutrality overstates the case.

Critics of Charles’s alleged meddling in public affairs welcomed the ruling but have called for greater transparency still and for all new applications to see Charles’ correspondence with ministers to be answered positively.

Since Evans’ original request to see Charles’s letters, the government tightened up the Freedom of Information Act to provide an “absolute exemption” on all requests relating to the Queen and the heir to the throne. That means applications are automatically rejected.