The supreme court has cleared the way for the publication of secret letters written by Prince Charles to ministers, declaring that an attempt by the government to keep them concealed was unlawful.
The verdict – the culmination of a 10-year legal fight by the Guardian – is a significant blow for the government, which has been battling to protect Charles from scrutiny over his “particularly frank” interventions on public policy.
Five of the seven judges in the court ruled in favour of the Guardian. The verdict was delivered on Thursday by Lord Neuberger, the president of the court.
No date has been fixed yet for the publication of the letters. The Sun reported on Wednesday that David Cameron had told Charles that he would l attempt to change the law to prevent the letters ever being released.
The judges concluded that the then attorney general, Dominic Grieve, did not have the legal power to veto a freedom of information tribunal, which had decided the letters should be published.
In 2012, the tribunal ruled that the 27 pieces of correspondence between the prince and ministers in Tony Blair’s government should be made public.
The tribunal said it was in the public interest “for there to be transparency as to how and when Prince Charles seeks to influence government”.
Grieve overruled the tribunal, arguing that publication of the letters between September 2004 and April 2005 would seriously damage the Prince of Wales’s kingship.
Delivering the verdict, Neuberger said: “The supreme court dismisses the attorney general’s appeal. The effect is that the decision of the upper tribunal, that the advocacy correspondence is disclosable under the Freedom of Information Act and, in the case of environmental material, the environmental information regulations 2003, stands.”
He said it was not reasonable for Grieve to issue the veto “simply because, on the same facts and admittedly reasonably, he takes a different view from that adopted by a court of record after a full public oral hearing”.
He added: “There is no clear or specific suggestion anywhere in the [Freedom of Information Act] that it is intended that [a veto] should enable a member of the executive to over-ride a judicial decision.”
Lord Wilson and Lord Hughes each gave dissenting judgments on the issue and believe that Grieve was entitled to veto the court’s decision.
