Prince Charles as a Conspiracy Theorist and His Views on Alternative Medicine

The Daily Beast explains:

So, now we know why Prince Charles and the government fought so hard to get his letters to ministers suppressed.

It is the sheer sense of entitlement, the arrogance and the usually-fulfilled expectation of obedience that oozes from every typewritten word of the second and final cache of letters, released this week...

The tone is simultaneously hectoring, demanding, victimized and arrogant; Charles manages to convey both an expectation that anything other than automatic deference to him would constitute lèse-majesté, and a sense of bafflement that his plainly entirely reasonable, nay ‘splendid’ plans even require further discussion before implementation.

He also, somewhat hilariously, gets a case of the ‘poor me’s’ in one letter, perceiving a conspiracy by the establishment against him.

He complains about the “waves of invective” he has endured “over the years from parts of the Medical and Scientific Establishments (sic)” regarding his views on alternative medicine.

Charles comes across as a confused and confusing cross between a pernickety, detail-obsessed former headmaster and a trendy vicar who has just picked up Eckhart Tolle, but got no further than chapter one...

One of Charles’s main goals seems to have been the full-scale integration of alternative medicine into Britain’s mainstream, publicly-funded National Health Service (NHS).

And we are not just talking about the odd cup of dandelion tea here. Charles airily called for spending cuts at three existing NHS homeopathic hospitals to be reversed, in utter disregard of complex budgetary calculations performed by local primary care trusts.

Complementary and alternative medicine—described as ‘quackery’ and ‘witchcraft’ by the British Medical Association, of which he was once, controversially, president—has long been known to be one of the Prince’s pet hobby horses.

While many normal people (who might not necessarily believe that talking to one’s plants would help them grow, as the Prince claimed in a 1986 interview) would have sympathy with the Prince’s arguments that complementary medicine should form part of an ideal national health service, it is equally clear that a successful outcome to Charles’s concerted lobbying campaign to have such treatments brought into the NHS would require a root and branch rethink of how the Health Service operated and was funded in the UK....

Let us remember that the whole point of a constitutional monarch is that they do not set policy, but in the most damning letter—to the then Health Secretary Alan Johnson—this is exactly what Charles seeks to do. He offhandedly calls for a pilot of alternative medicines in the NHS in England.

“I mentioned the work that is underway in Northern Ireland and it would be splendid if you felt it might be possible to replicate this exploratory integrated project on the mainland, perhaps as a choice pilot? Do let me know what you think of these various projects…”

What would happen to the letter of anyone else in the land who wrote to the Health Secretary with such a set of “splendid” proposals is not hard to imagine. But Charles was, of course, dignified with a reply, and, incredibly, Johnson told him: “I will consider your suggestion of an exploratory project in England.”...

In one letter, Charles actually suggested that serving locally-sourced organic vegetables to hospital patients would be an appropriate use of resources. And then, while he was at it, he lightly proposed that this ‘highly imaginative’ idea could be extended to “schools and other public sector bodies”.

Well, why not eh? Jolly good idea, what?

But, has the man ever seen the prices at an organic farmer’s market, one wonders?

The minister responds, as he always does, promising (wearily?) that he will “certainly look at these projects.”