Phone hacking the royals has a long history … Prince Charles’ 1981 calls from Australia back to Lady Di in London were taped by a group of conspirators looking for ways to sideline Malcolm Fraser’s plan for Charles to become GG … From our Royal correspondent Prunella Faux 

Assange, for some time, has been fruitlessly plotting to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London with diplomatic immunity. 

The latest development has been the rejection by the UK Foreign Office of Ecuador’s request to accredit the prickly Australian as a diplomat. 

This brings back fond memories of the indignant response to Malcolm Fraser’s idea in 1981 that Prince Charles be appointed governor general of Australia.  

This forgotten flutter with giving Charles training wheels Down Under involved a group of anonymous millionaires using bugged phone conversations and leaks to the press in order the stymie and ultimately sink Fraser’s plan. 

The late Simon Regan, former editor of the aptly named Scalliwag was involved in the derailment plan. A former hack from News of the World, he also wrote biographies, two of which persuaded the anonymous tycoons that he was just the man to do some leaking for them. 

The first biography was an undistinguished hagiography of Rupert Murdoch, which Regan was in the process of updating when he met the conspirators. The second was a biography of Prince Charles, the tone of which can be guessed by its title, The Clown Prince. 

For reasons that were never made clear the shadowy Australian plutocrats were opposed to the young prince taking up residence among the kangaroos and other wildlife at Yarralumla. Maybe, they were ardent republicans. 

It was decided to secretly record Charles’ phone calls while he was on a tour of Australia in 1981, just a few months before his marriage to Diana Spencer in July that year. His fiancée remained in England, although she had been briefly to Australian early February 1981 with her parents, who were visiting their sheep station at Yass. 

Regan declined to name these conspirators, although in interviews after the scandal broke they were described in a Times article of May 1981 as:

“A prominent newspaperman, a middle-aged industrialist, a Telecom employee and a large beer-swilling youth nicknamed ‘Beach Boy’.”  

According to Regan, five telephone calls between Charles and Lady Di had been taped. He made a partial transcript of one and sent it to his London agent, Burnett Rigg of Soho Square, who promptly offered it to “publications in Britain and Europe”. 

Rather unconvincingly, Regan claimed that his agent had made these offers without his permission.

Just what did Prince Charles say to his fragrant fiancée during the three long weeks that they were apart?

It says much for the innocence of those times that the most exciting part of the contents was considered to be HRH’s disparaging remarks about the PM, Malcolm Fraser. The star quality of the young fiancée completely passed these dotards by. 

Despite a German court also holding that these documents should not be published, as not only were the conversations private but they were obtained through an unauthorised wiretap, Die Aktuelle went ahead and published them. 

According to the Time Magazine of May 18, 1981, there were rumours British newspapers wanted to publish them but, in parliament, Margaret Thatcher denounced any such publication as “despicable”. 

Excerpts from the tapes were, however, published in the Melbourne rag, Sunday Observer. 

According to The Sydney Morning Herald (9 May 1981) – and probably as a result of the publication of secretly recorded conversations – the Commonwealth Attorney General’s Department “moved swiftly to investigate the publication … to determine if transcripts published … had  breached federal laws”.  

A spokesman said the investigation would take “a couple of days” and that the investigation “could involve the new Telephonic[sic] Interceptions Act and, possibly, the Crimes Act.” 

The initial response by the royal family on May 18, 1981, according to news reports, was that the telephone transcripts were fakes. 

However, in February 1981, Prince Charles revealed that while his fiancée was in Australia, and they were keeping secret their engagement for three weeks, he was told by his security staff that there was a lot of media interest in the possible engagement and to be careful about telephone calls.

In his first interview with his fiancée following the announcement of their betrothal, Prince Charles actually said he was told the phones were “tapped”, but he thought that was “highly unlikely”. 

The speedy public response, in May 1981, from the royal family, the UK parliament, the Australian government, its police and those in charge of telephone services did not become standard practice. 

It was the sort of response that should have been made to every instance of telephone bugging of any important member of the royal family, specially after the assassination of the Lord Mountbatten in 1979, two years earlier. 

As the many stories coming out of the Leveson inquiry demonstrated, everyone was doing it. For example, when Lord Mountbatten’s daughter Lady Pamela Hicks and grandson Lord Brabourne figured among potentially sensitive victims of the phone hacking by Fleet Street’s private investigator Steve Whittamore, no such steps were taken on their behalf. 

A fat lot of good hacking did the red-tops. The Sun has just announced a £24 million loss amid costs associated with hacking payouts, lawyers and a slump in print ads. 

The House of Lords has also recently voted support for Leveson Mark 11 and tougher press regulations.