The Prince must take the blame

They still do not understand the nature of the beast. That is the only conclusion to draw from the behaviour of the Prince of Wales and his advisers, as they struggle to keep an old but sensational allegation out of the tabloid press.

Anybody with an ounce of sense could have told the Prince's private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, that his intervention on Thursday evening was guaranteed to make front-page news, not just in the Daily Mail - whose sister paper, the Mail on Sunday, started the chase and found itself injuncted last weekend - but the broadsheets, ensuring the widest possible coverage. Peat's televised denial was a gift, creating fevered public discussion of a story that has been circulating privately for months.

I can't remember when I first heard it; and, in any case, it exists in several forms, all of them scurrilous. When three royal biographers were invited to discuss on TV the state of the monarchy a couple of weeks ago, they solemnly debated whether disclosure would destroy the Royal Family, only to discover that each of them had been told a different version, one of which did not even involve Prince Charles.

In that sense, Peat was right to describe the story as risible, although it is not the word I would have chosen to convince readers of mass-market newspapers not to give it any credence. What Peat got wrong was his assumption that he could invoke his employer's prestige to dismiss the allegation. A lofty announcement that "the Prince of Wales has told me it is untrue and I believe him implicitly" cuts little ice these days. In saying that he accepted Charles's word and in asking the public to do the same, Peat missed the fact that this is a currency that has been devalued almost to worthlessness.

The heir to the throne is the monarchy's biggest liability, despised for his treatment of Diana, Princess of Wales, and derided for private behaviour that has been shown to be both arrogant and infantile. Even if the allegation at the heart of last week's flurry of legal moves is untrue, and there is no reason to think it is anything but fantasy, the Prince's lifestyle - his meanness, his dependence on servants to perform the simplest and most intimate of tasks, his pompous correspondence with government ministers - has provided masses of material for the tabloids to get their teeth into. There may have been a time when Charles was regarded as merely eccentric, a harmless chap who talked to his plants, but these days he is a pathetic figure, haunted by a series of startling revelations.

All of this has come about because of a reckless strategy on the part of the late Princess, who appealed to the tabloids to champion her when her marriage went wrong, breaking the historic alliance between senior royals and ordinary people into the bargain. It has been a sensational revenge, lasting long beyond her death and - the point that Charles and his advisers still appear not to have grasped - creating a decisive shift in the loyalty of the mass-market papers. That shift is evident in the way that the tabloids, which could once be relied on to run servile pieces about the Royal Family, are now taking the side of disgruntled former servants: the Mirror and Paul Burrell, the Mail on Sunday and George Smith, the man patronisingly described by Peat as a "former royal household employee who, unfortunately, has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder".

Why not just accuse him of being a fantasist? The Prince's side has not exactly come out with all guns blazing, ridiculing the Mail on Sunday's allegation; they do not realise what a formidable enemy they have taken on or that the only tactic that works with bullies, which is what tabloids have become, is to stand up to them.

Instead, Clarence House has sent out a signal that Charles is on the defensive, as the then leader of the Conservative Party was last month. Indeed, the Prince is starting to look like the Royal Family's IDS, wounded but still struggling, except that he offers the tabloids better sport. For no matter how much private agony he has to endure, the Prince of Wales cannot follow Iain Duncan Smith's example and step down.