Prince Charles has vowed not to 'meddle' when he becomes king, so what will he be doing?

Betraying a certain lack of self-confidence, as if in a tight corner during a particularly daunting job interview, Prince Charles tells us that he will give up public “meddling” in matters of public debate when he becomes king. Good. He could do no other, after all. As he himself fesses up – “I’m not that stupid”.

Which of course leaves the entire universe of private “meddling” which he can indulge in to his heart’s content.

This isn’t as bad as it sounds. The so-called “spider” memos that were revealed a few years ago showed his interests to be mostly eccentric and harmless, such as the plight of the Patagonian toothfish. Who could possibly dispute that this beleaguered creature deserves to survive into the modern age (the fish, not the prince)?

The real crisis – easily avoidable one would hope – would be if ministers were eccentric enough to actually allow this affable old bloke to tell them what to do. They should follow the old constitutional dictum as stated famously by Walter Bagehot, a 19th-century journalist (and thus eminently qualified to opine on anything), that a British constitutional monarch has “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn”. Er, and that’s about it.

Thus, say if the Prince of Wales wrote to the health and care secretary, Mike Hancock, to say that he really should promote homeopathic medicines and dish them out on the NHS at vast cost to the taxpayer, then the secretary of state should ask his officials to draft a response along the following lines, Blackadder-style: “Thanks for the letter; always insightful and valuable advice from your majesty; indebted to you; our clinical experts say homeopathic medicines, while some find them efficacious in some cases, do not generally merit funding from the public purse; the NHS is skint; so we’re not going to hand them out; see you at the garden party; love to Camilla.”

In other words, not so very different to the kind of response he might send to a cranky 70-year-old constituent who thinks they’re the king of England and themselves an authority on medicine but who lacks any formal, or even informal, training whatsoever.

The Prince of Wales has an obvious role during what will, with the best will in the world, be a relatively short reign, and he can look back in history to find one – his great-great grandfather, Edward VII. He too succeeded a much loved and respected monarch who had a record-breaking long tenure on the throne, and had overseen a transformation in British society. His private life was colourful, and he underwent plenty of public criticisms in his own long apprenticeship (Edward, or Bertie to the family, was 59 when he became king in 1901). Faced with all that, Edward decided to devote himself to diplomacy, not least because he was a cousin or otherwise related to most of the kings and emperors scattered around Europe. Then, as now, the British were having difficulties in making good their relations with the French and the Irish, and the king did his bit to cement the Entente Cordiale and, less successfully, encourage his ministers to solve the Irish Question.

Prince Charles, in the post-Brexit world, should be a travelling salesman for Britain, because we’ll need friends and markets abroad more than ever. He should be a super-ambassador, and given some targets for winning export business, trade deals and pushing recalcitrant foreigners to do what his ministers want – like, say, getting Trump to sign up to a climate change treaty, or the EU to let us bring our pets over to the continent. That would suit his talents well, be of national significance, and make him popular here and abroad. He’d have little time left over to meddle, public or privately.