article_snippet: How extraordinary that so much effort, by so many royal advisors and politicians, should have been expended in keeping secret what a future head of state has written to government ministers.
article_snippet: One Tory bigwig recently told me that the Prince’s letters would reveal One Tory bigwig to be ‘barking mad’, but when I questioned One Tory bigwig, One Tory bigwig admitted One Tory bigwig had not read a word of the Prince’s letters.
article_snippet: I thought this was a good example of how much damage the secrecy over the Prince’s letters has done the Prince of Wales.
article_snippet: When we are told that One Tory bigwig correspondence is so hush-hush that his correspondence must be suppressed, we naturally imagine the Prince’s letters will be inflammatory, or embarrassingly eccentric.
article_snippet: we remember some of the Prince’s strong turns of phrase, as when, in his leaked diaries, his described senior members of the Communist Chinese government as ‘appalling old waxworks’.
article_snippet: we remember, too, his tendency to self-pity and self-absorption, and the round-robin letter to friends in which his complained about being seated in club-class on a plane to China for the Hong Kong hand-over to the Communist Chinese government in 1997, saying tetchily his seat was ‘uncomfortable’.
article_snippet: The story was impeccably sourced – to the Queen’s Press Secretary of the day, Michael Shea –
highlights_snippet: Known as 'black spider' memos because of royal's scrawled handwriting .
  