The government is about to publish a second batch of letters written by Prince Charles to government ministers, following a successful freedom of information request by the Guardian.
The 17 letters, set to be published at 2.30pm on Thursday, cover the prince’s correspondence between 2006 and 2009 with ministers in four departments.
The cache is understood to include correspondence between the heir to the throne and several government ministers about issues including health, rural affairs and architecture.
The government’s decision to release the correspondence cuts short what was set to be another battle over the publication of the second tranche of the prince’s correspondence with ministers. A freedom of information tribunal was due to hold a hearing later this year on whether the Guardian should be given access to this batch.
Last month the government released 27 letters between the prince and ministers after a 10-year legal battle which cost the government more than £400,000 in legal expenses in its ultimately failed attempt to block the original 2005 freedom of information request by the Guardian.
The first batch dated from 2004 and 2005 and showed Charles petitioning ministers on subjects from the Iraq war to alternative therapies.
From the then prime minister, Tony Blair, Charles demanded everything from urgent action to improve equipment for troops fighting in Iraq to the availability of alternative herbal medicines in the UK, a pet cause of the prince.
David Cameron’s last government attempted to veto the release of the letters. In 2012 the then attorney general, Dominic Grieve, warned they “would be seriously damaging to his role as future monarch because, if he forfeits his position of political neutrality as heir to the throne, he cannot easily recover it when he is king”. The case was eventually decided at the supreme court having involved 16 judges.
In a single letter in February 2005, Charles urged a badger cull to prevent the spread of bovine tuberculosis – damning opponents to the cull as “intellectually dishonest”; lobbied for his preferred person to be appointed to crack down on the mistreatment of farmers by supermarkets; proposed his own aide to brief Downing Street on the design of new hospitals; and urged Blair to tackle a European Union directive limiting the use of herbal alternative medicines use in the UK.
