THE future King has demanded action to stop the "evil doings" of the Labour leader, according to a letter leaked to The Times.
But Tony Blair can rest easy in Tuscany. The missive was written in 1907 by the Prince of Wales, later to become George V, about Keir Hardie, founder of the Labour Party.
In an astonishing insight into the relationship between the monarchy and politicians at the turn of the last century, the Prince voiced grave fears about Hardie's visit to India, where he had been backing the cause of home rule.
The Prince wrote to John Morley, Secretary of State for India in the Liberal Government of the day, thanking him for "the various telegrams relating to Mr Keir Hardie, which you kindly sent me at Balmoral".
But the Prince, who had visited India the year before and fallen in love with "this wonderful and fascinating country", added: "I also fear his visit to India may cause trouble in the future. I am confident that if he really becomes a danger in the country, that you will take steps to put a stop to his evil doings."
The Liberals and the royals were apparently united in their fears about Hardie and Labour - the Prince because of his activities in India and other parts of the Empire and the Liberals because by then Labour was eating into their working-class support.
The letter is one of a batch that has been acquired by Argyll Etkin, the Mayfair specialists in royal history, from an American collector's George V archive. Ian Shapiro, director of the company, said: "There are a lot in this vein. He was a man who did not mince his words, provided that he knew he was writing to friends who would keep his words secret. "
The Prince's father, Edward VII, was also suspicious of Hardie, describing him as a scoundrel in a letter to Lord Minto, Viceroy of India, in 1909. "The harm he has done is incalculable and makes my blood boil," he wrote.
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Royalty baffled by upstarts (UK Times)
BY ALAN HAMILTON
THE future George V believed that socialism could derail India's inevitable progress towards self-government, his letter to the Secretary of State for India, revealed by the royal historians Argyll Etkin, shows.
Keir Hardie's appearance in Calcutta, in October 1907, was seized upon by the Raj as tinder to ignite widespread rioting in Bengal. The small, bearded former Ayrshire miner, who found himself at the head of the fledgeling Labour Party, had given interviews suggesting that the politics of India were no better than those of the Balkans.
The local pro-English press accused Hardie of visiting "the most disaffected town in Bengal . . . the sooner he leaves India the better". Pro-Indian papers claimed that widespread civil disorder had been stage-managed by the British rulers to discredit Hardie.
When our present governing party was created in a draughty hall in Farringdon Road in 1900 its founding fathers knew as well as their latter-day descendants that a movement founded on socialism stood no chance of government. A proposal that the new movement recognise the class war was defeated, as was the suggestion that their representatives in the Commons should be drawn only from the working class.
But their notions were still beyond the ken of the Royal Family. Prince George was disturbed to note that in the 1906 general election, in which the Liberals scored a landslide victory, Hardie's Labour Party increased its Commons presence to 29 seats, trebling its share of the popular vote, a success consolidated in local elections later that year.
Prince George was no doubt influenced in his view of these upstart working-class types by his private secretary, Sir Arthur Bigge, a wily and wise old courtier who had been Queen Victoria's private secretary. As late as 1912 the man who was now enthroned as George V was still muttering about socialists, complaining that his father, Edward VII, had given the Order of Merit to one of their number, the eminent naturalist Dr Alfred Russel Wallace.
A letter from Buckingham Palace to Downing Street in that year notes: "The King says he does not care whether a man is a Liberal, radical or a Tory, but he thinks that the Order of Merit should not be given to socialists."
This all changed, of course, when the Socialists won power in 1924. The King and his first Labour Prime Minister got on famously. Ramsay MacDonald in his diaries praised not only the King's absolute constitutional propriety, but his warmth. The King, for his part, recorded that MacDonald always kept him better informed on matters of state than had any of his previous prime ministers.
Evidence is still slender on how our present monarch really gets on with her Labour Prime Minister. But then, unlike Keir Hardie, he is not a socialist.
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View of monarchy and the Left(UK Times)
BY JOHN GRIGG
THE letter prompts a few thoughts about the relationship between our constitutional monarchy and the political Left.
On October 13, 1907, when the letter was written, Hardie was making headlines on a visit to India, which occurred during a world tour financed partly by the Salvation Army and partly by the Jewish-American soap millionaire Joseph Fels (an early example of the plutocrat bankrolling Labour, now such a familiar phenomenon).
The Prince thanks Morley for "various telegrams" about Hardie's activities in India, and says that "if he really becomes a danger there" he (the Prince) is confident Morley will "take steps to put a stop to his evil doings".
In fact, Hardie left India of his own accord a few days later, and his views on India hardly seem revolutionary from today's perspective. He thought that more Indians should be employed in the Civil Service, that there should be no colour bar in government appointments, and that there should be more power for village councils - and an improved educational system.
But the Prince had a personal reason for animus against Hardie. When his eldest son, the future Edward VIII, was born, Hardie had launched a bitter attack in the Commons in which he deplored the attention given the event and hinted that there were things in the Prince's life that would not bear scrutiny.
In this and other ways Hardie had also given much offence to Edward VII. But when Hardie had appendicitis he received a hand-written letter of sympathy from the King.
There is no record of a similar gesture to Hardie by George V. He died fairly early in the King's reign (in 1915), but if he had lived longer all might have been forgiven, because George V certainly did establish warm, even cosy, relations with the Labour governments of 1924 and 1929, and especially with their leader Ramsay MacDonald.
There was nothing unconstitutional about George's letter to Morley, because it is clear that he had been sent official documents to read, on which he was free to comment.
In contemporary terms, the Liberal Government of which Morley was a member was a government of the Left, viewed indeed as dangerously radical by most people of the Prince of Wales's type. It is ironical, therefore, that Morley should have been consulting the Prince about Hardie's dangerous activities in India, in the spirit of a defender of the established order.
Do today's ministers write to the present Prince of Wales, and is he encouraged to comment on their problems? For his sake, and possibly also for theirs, I hope so.