For a decade or more the causes Prince Charles supports have raised more than £100million a year, a formidable sum that, by some distance, makes him Britain’s biggest charity fundraiser.
At the same time his Prince’s Trust, the enterprise he set up when he left the Navy 45 years ago, has helped 950,000 young people turn their lives around with both practical and financial support.
These are by no means modest achievements, but today the Prince of Wales finds himself mired in claims about cash for honours that are as potentially damaging to his reputation as they are unseemly.
What is especially troubling is the suggestion, revealed in a cache of emails, of his apparent willingness to procure favours for wealthy donors to his charitable projects.
Understandably the prince feels aggrieved that the revelations now look set to overshadow his many accomplishments, which also include heritage schemes up and down the country.
As he is often at pains to point out, not a penny of taxpayers’ money has been swallowed by any of these projects.
Prince Charles awards a CBE to Saudi tycoon Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz at Buckingham Palace in November 2016
It is one such scheme – the restoration of Dumfries House in Scotland, a magnificent but crumbling mansion until the prince stepped in to save it for the nation in 2007 – that is at the heart of these allegations.
In an audacious and highly risky move, the prince secured both the house and its priceless collection of Chippendale furniture.
But at a cost – maintaining and renovating the 18th-century Palladian pile, as well as providing the infrastructure for the local economy that was part of his vision for the house’s future, has been huge.
And so, as he has done on many other occasions over the years, the prince turned to his closest and most trusted aide Michael Fawcett, whose commercial astuteness he has long relied on.
It is hard not to feel sympathy for the prince’s dilemma. But just as cash and politics is an explosive combination, money and Fawcett is an equally toxic mix.
Many believe that in his desire to please his royal boss, Fawcett, the one-time palace valet, has exposed Charles to the danger of looking either very foolish or lazy – or possibly both.
The emails revealed how Fawcett apparently helped to secure an honour for a Saudi businessman in return for his generosity in supporting both Dumfries House and the Castle of Mey, the Queen Mother’s former Scottish home and another of Charles’s pet projects.
There is now a Mahfouz Garden at Dumfries House and a Mahfouz Wood at the Castle of Mey, named after the businessman who received an honorary CBE from the prince at Buckingham Palace in 2016.
Charles's former valet Michael Fawcett is pictured outside his London home today walking his dog with his wife Debbie Burke
As the Mail revealed yesterday, the prince was unaware of his aide’s correspondence, or of that from other middlemen or fixers involved in this grubby saga. Indeed, we also disclosed that the prince was ‘so surprised’ by the claims that first ‘he couldn’t believe them’.
But is that really good enough for a man who in a few short years will be on the throne?
It has certainly given a fillip to the republican cause and provided ammunition for royal critics, such as the maverick former Lib Dem MP and self-proclaimed ‘instinctive republican’ writer Norman Baker, whose call for Scotland Yard to investigate has been dismissed by insiders as ‘blatant opportunism’.
But for Charles there are detractors much closer to home, many within his own family, who have warned that Fawcett and the prince’s dependence on him is a threat to
