Mark Pack

I’m not an expert in this area, so there’s one thing that really puzzles me about the Guardian’s splash about the “secretive” process by which the Prince of Wales is asked to approve certain legislation: it doesn’t seem to me to be anything new. Obscure perhaps, but not new. Which is why I took a look at Hansard and found this - that looks to me like regular reporting in public of the occasions when the Prince of Wales or the Queen has been formally consulted over legislation because it might affect their private interests (the mechanism involved).

So is this really such a splash story or more a revelation about how little journalists (or pretty much anyone else, come to that) look at what is said in Parliament? Not such much a case of a clever use of Freedom of Information requests to unearth a secret as a case of missing what was there in plain view?