The Prince of Wales believes that wind farms are a "horrendous blot on the landscape" and that their spread must be halted before they irreparably ruin some of Britain's most beautiful countryside.
The Telegraph can reveal that Prince Charles, who has an abiding interest in environmental issues, has told senior aides that he does not want to have any links with events or groups that promote onshore wind farms.

The Prince, who believes that Britain needs to rethink its energy policy, is considering making his anti-turbine views public at a time when the issue is on the political agenda and wind farms are spreading throughout the country. Senior aides at Clarence House, where Prince Charles has his private office, say that the heir to the throne has been firmly against wind farms for years, but that he has so far chosen not to enter the public debate on their future. A spokesman declined to comment yesterday but a friend of Prince Charles said: "This is a difficult issue for the Prince because he is in favour of renewable energy and is concerned by the effects of global warming. "But he believes that wind farms are 'a horrendous blot on the landscape'. He thinks that if they have to be built at all they should be constructed well out at sea."

The wind farm issue is becoming increasingly contentious. The Government is committed to their spread because it has promised to raise the share of Britain's energy coming from renewable sources to 10 per cent in 2010 and then to 20 per cent in 2020. Renewable sources produce less than four per cent of energy needs at the moment. Stephen Timms, the energy minister, has said: "Wind energy is here and now. It is the most proven green source of electricity generation and can supply a rising proportion of our electricity needs." Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, announced two weeks ago that local people would have a greater say in the siting of wind farms under a Tory government. He said that he would change planning rules to ensure that local opinions could not be overruled or ignored.

The Prince's views were welcomed by anti-wind farm campaigners. Campbell Dunford, the chief executive of the Renewable Energy Foundation, formed last month to press for a review of Britain's energy strategy, said: "I am delighted to learn of the Prince of Wales's views. His Royal Highness's support on this matter would be invaluable. He understands there is nothing incompatible with being green and being opposed to wind turbines.
"We oppose the huge, dominant use of wind farms onshore because they won't do the job. I am sure the Prince is concerned by the aesthetics of wind farms. The great thing about the Prince is that he doesn't just shoot from the hip. He studies the facts and makes carefully formed judgments."

Some conservation groups criticised the Prince's stand. Bryony Worthington, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth, said: "It's a shame because this will weaken the Prince's green reputation, which has otherwise been very good." Prince Charles's annual income of almost £12 million comes from the Duchy of Cornwall. The estate consists of 126,000 acres, much of it suitable for wind farms in Devon and Cornwall, but internal Clarence House documents seen by The Telegraph show that he will not consider having them on his land, or be associated with them whatsoever.

The nearest wind farm to the Prince's country home at Highgrove, Gloucestershire, is seven miles away. The Prince chooses to spend much of the summer on the Balmoral estate in Scotland which is owned by the Queen. The nearest wind farm to Balmoral is at Novar, 65 miles away.
Jonathon Porritt, a leading conservationist who advises Prince Charles on environmental issues, is a supporter of wind turbines which he describes as "beautifully compelling". Mr Porritt, however, believes the positioning of the farms has been insensitive and that there needs to be greater consultation with local people.

The first British wind farm was built in Cornwall in 1991. There are now 89 in the country and at least 16 more are due to be built over the next two years. Work began last week on a 430ft-high turbine -- one of the world's tallest -- near Lowestoft, Suffolk. The £3 million project is expected to generate electricity for more than 2,000 homes.
 

Plans to build a wind farm on the edge of one of Britain's most important bird sanctuaries have raised fears that the area could be destroyed as a haven for wildlife.
The 12 turbines 380-feet high would stand on a stretch of coast visited by a huge number of waterbirds that feed on its mudflats and salt marshes.
Migrating flocks also fly over the area and opponents of the scheme fear many birds could be killed by the rotor blades of the turbines.

Developers say they chose the site -- overlooking Bridgwater Bay in Somerset -- partly because it is close to the Hinkley Point nuclear power station and the landscape would not be spoiled. Nearby residents, including many who work at Hinkley, were appalled by the plan. They said the turbines would tower above the power station and kill or scare off birds. Bridgwater Bay is recognised as an area of special scientific interest and is part of the Severn Estuary area of special protection under British and European law, mainly because of the rich birdlife. Nightingales breed on farmland adjoining the coast.

Bob Corns, a spokesman for English Nature, said: "It's about as heavily protected an area as we have in Britain. Migrating birds such as swallows and housemartins use this coastline and they could be at risk from the rotors, particularly at night. Some of the turbines would be within 100 yards of the nature reserve. "Something like 35,000 waterbirds are in the bay during an average winter and the wind farm could disturb birds feeding on the mudflats."
Richard Archer, of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said: "The noise and disturbance is the problem. This is an internationally recognised spot for birdlife. A couple of the proposed turbines would overlook a sandy feeding area and we'd be much happier if they were moved back."

Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, has pledged that a Tory government would give communities more say in the siting of wind farms. He has accused Labour of "pressing ahead regardless" to encourage wind turbines. The government is committed to increasing the amount of power from renewable sources. David Bellamy, the naturalist and broadcaster, is among a growing number who have challenged the policy, arguing that wind turbines "chop up birds".

Campaigners in Somerset said they were angry with Your Energy, the developers, and Lady Gass, the Lord Lieutenant of the county and the owner of the land where most of the turbines would be built.
"We're surprised Lady Gass has entered into such a deal," said Dick Jones, whose home in Knighton would be only a few hundred yards from the nearest turbine.
"She purports to be a custodian of the countryside but these turbines will wreck it. They will be monumental, among the biggest in Europe. We're very worried about the constant low-frequency noise they generate."
John Lucas, a retired police officer from Shurton, said he would put up with the turbines if they were efficient. "But they just don't do the job," he said. "They require back-up. Even with the power station this is one of the few relatively unspoilt stretches of coastline left in Somerset and these turbines will have an enormous visual impact."

Peter Farmery, a retired engineer, accused Lady Gass of selling her birthright. Lady Gass declined to comment but her land agent, David Barke, said: "Lady Gass believes we must look at alternative sources of power. The wind farm would be close to the hideous bulk of Hinkley so it's not going to detract from the landscape."
 

I like the look of John Prescott's house. Not his grace-and-favour London apartment in Admiralty House, nor his official country residence, Dorneywood, in Buckinghamshire, and certainly not the flat in south London that he had a spot of bother about with his old union, the RMT. No, I mean the house in his Hull constituency, the one I imagine he thinks of as home. I certainly would. It is a long, rambling place with projecting battlemented wings in the Tudor style, each adorned with a coat of arms.

In the middle there is a handsome Queen Anne revival pediment of the sort Norman Shaw would have been proud of; you can see lots of similar ones with their characteristic bay windows in Shaw's delightful arts and crafts suburb of Bedford Park, west London, often painted by the French impressionist Pissarro and once inhabited by Lucinda Lambton, the high priestess of architectural extravagance.

I apologise for going on about the deputy prime minister's home at such length, but I am sure it really will grow into a place where children love to run from one end to the other, with plenty of space for Mrs Prescott to escape to when the DPM is in one of his more volcanic moods. The only sad thing is that if Mr Prescott has his way no such house will ever be built in the English countryside again. For last week he issued a revised version of Planning Policy Statement No 7 which now stipulates that houses may obtain planning permission to be built in officially designated countryside only if "the design is truly outstanding and groundbreaking".

According to Prescott's understrapper, the planning minister Keith Hill, the government intends to "change the face of new country-house architecture from a pastiche of historical styles to innovative, cutting-edge design". So no more Norman Shaw, no more gothic revival, no more mock Tudor, no neo-Georgian -- and no more Prescott Towers, which is an endearing pastiche of all these styles put together.

In future, that nouveau riche pile in its own spacious grounds that you see catching the setting sun will be constructed out of a challenging melange of glass and steel and concrete. In a twirly bit of spin shameless even for new Labour, the office of the DPM released along with PPS7 several statements from architects such as Lord Foster and Lord Rogers saying how farsighted Prescott was being. Seldom was a stitch-up between vested interests so flagrantly celebrated. Modernist architects who were receiving few commissions to design private houses have colluded with Labour politicians furious that toffs such as Lord Rothermere are building classical-revival houses by the likes of Quinlan Terry.

After the five-year plans for our schools and hospitals, we now have a 100-year plan for our architecture. For, as you will recall, Hazel Blears, the Home Office minister, has just informed us that Labour expects to be in power for decades. It is hard to think of a more sweeping attempt by the state to dictate taste since the doge of Venice decreed that all gondolas in future should be painted black (yes, I know Henry Ford had the same idea about his cars, but you could always buy a Buick or a Studebaker instead). To arrogate such ludicrously inflated powers suggests that Prescott is as blind to the proper limits of government in a free society as he is to the history of architecture.

Revival and reinterpretation are the lifeblood of architecture, as they are in most arts. Britain's first classical architect, Inigo Jones, was imitating the Venetian Andrea Palladio, who was in turn imitating the ancient Roman Vitruvius. Without the revival instinct we wouldn't have half Britain's best loved buildings, from Chatsworth to Big Ben. And even self-styled modernist buildings are beginning to look a trifle derivative and dated. The gleaming white holiday home built in north Devon for the former BBC chairman Gavyn Davies has a charming 1930s look to it, and why shouldn't it? Le Corbusier, the father of modernist domestic architecture, would be a great-great-grandfather if he were alive today.

But the worst thing is not the attempt to dictate one style rather than another but the government's insistence on dictating right across the country what should be built and where. And of course the new PPS7 is a rich man's charter, just as was the original version, better known as Gummer's Law. Only if you could afford to hire a fancy architect and buy enough land to screen your new country house from the gaze of the vulgar were you to be allowed to build in any remote and picturesque spot. By contrast, if you scraped together cash to buy a wedge of land the farmer no longer wanted and set about building your own bungalow, you would be ordered to demolish the lot sharpish.

Unless, that is, you happen to be a member of the travelling community. In some of the most delectable parts of England, bands of travellers are now buying up fields of 1-20 acres. The first the neighbourhood knows of the raggle-taggle gypsies-o is when their bulldozers turn up to remove any inconvenient hedges and begin laying down drains and hard standing. Then the caravans move in. But the law does not, or at least not for a year or two. In the celebrated case of Minety, Wiltshire, a high court judge has allowed one of these illegal settlements to remain, on the grounds that evicting the inhabitants would cause hardship and suffering. So one law for the rich, and no law for the Romany. And the rest of you had better not put up so much as a medium-sized greenhouse if you want to stay out of trouble.

No doubt I would be as aggrieved as anyone else if gypsies installed themselves illegally at the bottom of our garden. All the same, I cannot stifle a furtive twitch of exhilaration to see somebody making a mock of Britain's intolerably rigid planning laws. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act is just about the last of Labour's post-war pieces of nationalisation and control to survive more or less intact. No wonder Mr Prescott falls on it with such delight to dictate where and what shall be built, from the country mansions of grandees to whole new settlements across southern England.

Yet this is only part of a wider pattern of government self-aggrandisement. Scarcely a day goes by without some minister or government agency handing out gratuitous advice on how we ought to live our lives: how to keep our homes hygienic, how to stop smoking, what to eat and drink (more often what not to), what to stock up with in case of national emergency, and (last week's idiocy) how to play with our children.

The only people who pay not the slightest attention to any of this appear to be the gypsies, if their uninhibited and untidy lifestyle is anything to go by. They also appear to be the only people who don't get arrested. Perhaps there might be some connection. If only I liked caravanning.
 

Georgina Downs, the young Sussex singer who mounted a three-year campaign on the dangers posed to public health by toxic crop-spraying, has suffered a remarkable snub from the Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs. Miss Downs and her parents experienced chronic health problems through nearly 20 years of exposure to the poisons sprayed on a field next to their home near Chichester.

The most extensive evidence it received was from Miss Downs herself, who spent thousands of pounds on collecting case studies and scientific papers, and on making a video.
In June, Alun Michael, the minister for rural affairs, announced that, after a full review of the evidence and in consultation with Prof Howard Dalton, his chief scientific adviser, he was satisfied that the protection afforded to the public was perfectly adequate.

Now it has emerged, however, that Prof Dalton never saw Miss Downs's evidence.
At a recent meeting of "key stakeholders", attended by Mr Michael, Prof Dalton told Miss Downs that Defra had never sent him her evidence.
He had consulted the PSD and the Advisory Committee on Pesticides, but was not aware that her evidence even existed. Nor had he seen the paper from Prof Samuel Epstein, an international authority on pesticides, who is an enthusiastic supporter of Miss Downs's campaign.
Prof Dalton agreed to look at her evidence, although, as she pointed out, this could serve little purpose. Mr Michael has made his decision, citing for his support the views of a man who had not seen the evidence which prompted the inquiry in the first place.