Prince Charles backed plot to oust beleaguered Australian PM Gough Whitlam in 1975

Prince Charles supported the controversial sacking of Australia’s prime minister in 1975, newly released private letters reveal.

The dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s government by then governor-general Sir John Kerr, the Queen’s representative, plunged Australia into a constitutional crisis.

Mr Whitlam’s administration had been rocked by scandals and an economic crisis. 

The opposition urged Sir John to intervene and sack Mr Whitlam unless he agreed to call an election.

In March 1976, four months after the sacking, the 27-year-old prince wrote to express sympathy for the governor-general. 

‘Please don’t lose heart,’ he wrote. 

‘What you did last year was right and the courageous thing to do and most Australians seemed to endorse your decision when it came to the point.’

Suspicions about the Queen’s role in the affair have long helped to fuel Australia’s republican movement. 

But the papers absolve her of any responsibility, and Sir John in fact hid his intentions to sack Mr Whitlam from the Queen.

But Prince Charles undertook what would be seen as a breach of royal protocol since the Queen has always maintained a strict policy of non-interference in Australian politics.

The letter risks Charles’s standing in Australia as heir to the throne. He said: ‘I wanted to write and say how much I sympathise with you.’

He pressed Sir John not to worry about these ‘demonstrations and stupidities’, or become ‘depressed or dejected with your role. 

I imagine that you must have come in for all sorts of misinformed criticism and prejudice.’ 

Charles also shared his own experience, saying every time he went to a university there was a ‘demonstration or ‘scene’ of one sort or another’ against him.

The handwritten letter is revealed for the first time in a book by Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston in The Truth Of The Palace Letters: Ambush, Deceit And Dismissal in 1975.