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Prince’s attacks on ministers, while well-meaning, were not welcomed, particularly if
they were made in public as when, in 1987, he condemned Nicholas Ridley’s policies on
the environment at the opening of the North Sea Conference. While many people agreed
with his views on the environment, to the politicians it seemed that he was appealing to
a constituency over their heads. The Ministers for Energy were particular targets; while
the Prince spoke from the heart and was generally in line with public feeling on such
subjects as stubble-burning by farmers, he did not always make the equation between
pollution-removal and human employment as in the case of CO 2 emissions and the
effect of regulation on coalminers’ jobs. There were battles with the Royal Institute of
British Architects when the Prince publicly attacked schemes for a new wing of the
National Gallery – ‘a carbuncle on a beloved face’ – and Paternoster Square in front of
St Paul’s: ‘architects have done more damage to London than the Luftwaffe’. He took on
the advanced wing of the Church of England with attacks on the New English Bible and
the Alternative Prayer Book, applauded by many but perhaps not necessarily in line
with his mother’s official position as Supreme Governor of the Church whose policy she
must officially support (although those who know Elizabeth suspect that her views on
both are in line with her son’s). In 1991 he delivered the Shakespeare Birthday Lecture
with a passionate plea for the teaching of the Bard, combined with an attack on the
Government’s policy on primary education which infuriated the then Education
Secretary, Kenneth Clarke. A decade later, the Prince’s publicly expressed views on
genetically modified crops and his public concern over the position of the farming
community during the foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001 aroused suspicion in the Labour
Government.
While the Prince was earning himself an international reputation as an
environmentalist, holding an unofficial environment conference in the run-up to the Rio
Summit in 1991, inviting the Brazilian President Collor and Senator Albert Gore to talks
aboard Britannia, and lashing architects, politicians and misguided ‘modernizers’ in the
Church and the teaching profession, the behind-the-scenes struggle between the Queen’s
courtiers and the Prince’s to retain the Prince within the ambit of Palace control ended
with a definite defeat for the Palace. In this the key figure was Commander Richard
Aylard, RN, the Prince’s Assistant Private Secretary, a grammar school boy with a
degree in Applied Zoology and Mathematics who had served as a naval officer on board
HMS Invincible during the Falklands War.
From the late ‘80s Aylard had been responsible for co-ordinating the preparation of some of the Prince’s most
outspoken and influential speeches [Dimbleby wrote]. When some raised their eyebrows on the discovery
that the likes of Jonathon Porritt [a leading environmentalist, then director of the Friends of the Earth] had
the Prince’s ear, Aylard affected innocent concern about their anxieties but ignored them. Porritt, supported
by Aylard, became an increasingly influential figure at the Prince’s environmental court; but it was Aylard
who held the threads together and, with a finely tuned ear for the Prince’s verbal mannerisms, wrote
increasingly effective drafts for the Prince to work on. 8