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Latest volume of former spin doctor’s diary reveals Blair accused Prince Charles of ‘screwing’ the government Tony Blair believed that the Prince of Wales publicly interfered in sensitive areas of government policy in a manner that sometimes stepped over the constitutional boundaries historically respected by the royal family, according to Alastair Campbell. In extracts from the latest volume of his diaries, published in the Guardian today and on Monday, the former No 10 communications director writes that Blair became so exasperated he once privately accused the prince of “screwing us”. Campbell, a teetotaller, also discloses in today’s extracts that the pressure of working in Downing Street became so great that he started drinking again around the turn of the millennium. He never told Blair. The main focus of today’s extracts confirms what ministers across the spectrum have long complained of in private: the Prince of Wales regularly attempts to influence government policy, usually in long handwritten letters. In the most detailed account of the prince’s interventions, Campbell suggests that the heir to the throne even displayed signs of disapproving of the government. Campbell indicates that at one point Blair raised his concerns with the Queen. “While publicly we stayed supportive, TB said Charles had to understand there were limits to the extent to which they could play politics with him,” Campbell wrote on 31 October 1999 of a meeting between Blair and the prince after he took Prince William on a provocative day’s foxhunting. “He said it was 90 minutes of pretty hard talk, not just about hunting.” Campbell writes that Blair became angry when the prince: • Made “deeply unhelpful” interventions during the foot and mouth crisis in 2001. Campbell wrote on 16 March 2001: “TB said he knew exactly what he was doing. He also asked whether Charles had ever considered help when 6,000 jobs were lost at Corus [the steel manufacturer]. He said this was all about screwing us and trying to get up the message that we weren’t generous enough to the farmers.” • Boycotted a banquet in 1999 for Jiang Zemin, then president of China, a decision criticised by Blair as “silly”. In a long paper to Blair the prince wrote: “I feel very strongly about it.” • Challenged Blair on plans to outlaw foxhunting. In what Campbell described as a “long note on hunting” in late 1999, the prince said it was good for the environment. • Declared in the same note that hereditary peers, the majority of whom were abolished by Labour in 1999, had much to offer. Campbell wrote that the prince had said “menacingly”: “We don’t really want to be like the continentals, now do we?” • Insisted that he had to speak out about GM foods after Downing Street had made clear its unhappiness with what Campbell describes as a “dreadful” Mail on Sunday article. In the same note to Blair the prince wrote: “I cannot stay silent.” Campbell said Blair was furious with the prince’s Mail on Sunday article in May 1999. “He was pretty wound up about it, said it was a straightforward anti-science position, the same argument that says if God intended us to fly he would have given us wings. It certainly had a feel of grandstanding.” Campbell writes that Blair thought the prince had a political agenda because he was upset by the former prime minister’s speech to the Labour conference in October 1999 in which he attacked the “forces of conservatism”. He wrote on 1 November 1999: “TB said he bought the line that because we were modernising, that meant we were determined to do away with all traditions but he had to understand that some traditions that did not change and evolve would die. It all had the feel of a deliberate strategy, to win and strengthen media support by putting himself at arm’s length from TB and a lot of the changes we were making.” Campbell added: “TB felt he had been really stung by the forces of conservatism speech. He said they felt much more vulnerable than in reality they are. We know they still have the power to ‘keep us in our place’ but they don’t always see it like that.” Blair even appeared to have raised his concerns with the Queen. On 1 June 1999, shortly after publication of the prince’s article, Campbell wrote: “TB saw the Queen and seemingly didn’t push too hard re Charles but he was very pissed off.” Campbell said last night that the anger in the Blair team was mainly caused by the prince’s media operation under Mark Bolland, his deputy private secretary between 1997 and 2002. Matters improved when Paddy Harverson, the prince’s head of communications, joined his team in 2004. Campbell told the Guardian: “Tony Blair valued their regular private conversations and respects Prince Charles’s right to speak up on important issues. But this was a period when it seemed Charles’s media team was proactively and publicly setting them at odds on some of the government’s most difficult issues – not just hunting, where the differences were well known, but GM food, China, and agriculture. “When Paddy Harverson [Bolland's successor] came in, things improved greatly. It might seem ironic me complaining about the media operation but just as I felt Charlie Whelan gave Gordon Brown problems so I thought the same of Mark Bolland at times for the Prince of Wales.” Clarence House declined to comment. Power and Responsibility: The Alastair Campbell Diaries, Volume Three, cover the years 1999-2001. Tony Blair Prince Charles Labour Nicholas Watt guardian.co.uk