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What are the royals for if not to protect our heritage? He's meddling, you say, but the Prince is at his best when he becomes involved. The neighbours never wanted these glass and steel high-tech residential towers stuffed with £50million flats. But they had no influence over the combined might of Lord Rogers, Gulf State money and the Candys (who have two other vast projects in the capital) and who are held in awe by London's planning committees.
Prince Charles could do something. He pulled rank and wrote a letter to his friend, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the ruler of Qatar, who was backing the project. The arrogance of architects has been trumped by the arrogance of princes.
In fact, Charles is always right. He is just too far ahead of his time:
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Over the past 40 years, the meddling Prince Charles has had an uncanny knack of championing causes decades before they became popular. The former Cabinet minister Charles Clarke once derided him as “old-fashioned and out of time” but he is curiously prescient for a man surrounded by flunkeys and courtiers.
He was still experimenting with cherry brandy when he first talked about the environment. He was derided for instigating a bottle bank at Buckingham Palace years before councils thought of recycling. David Cameron now espouses his call for more localism, Tesco is catching up with his views on organic food. Long before 9/11, he was talking about Islam and the need to understand the underlying religious tensions in this country. With his Prince's Trust he was years ahead of Sir Alan Sugar in encouraging young people to start their own businesses.
He has set up projects to embrace his beliefs about social deprivation, community cohesion, urban planning and Britishness, firing off letters to ministers suggesting the elderly may not be having a nice time in hospital.
