Prince Charles should take over Safeway

He's always banging on about proper food and how unpatriotic the big supermarket chains are

Somewhere among the detritus of my purse I have a Safeway's supermarket loyalty card. Theoretically this should mean I am taking a keen interest in the battle to take over the Safeway empire which as you must know is up for grabs. Since I also have loyalty cards for Tesco, Sainsbury and the Co-Op and buy 90 per cent of my groceries at Waitrose across the road, loyalty doesn't really come into it. It simply means that I'm a compulsive collector of store cards offering a 10 per cent discount on the shopping I've just bought or a chance to win a weekend in Fez as soon as I've filled in the application form.

I was about to say that I couldn't give a toss who takes over Safeway until I remembered the fateful night, dark and stormy of course, that I waited three hours for a bus to Inverness in Fort William and would certainly have died of exposure had it not been for the Safeway cafeteria. It's the only place in town you can get a cup of coffee after 6pm.

In an ideal universe Fort William would have an old-world roadhouse made of rough-hewn stone with a great log fire in the hall and bonny wee lasses in Harris tweed aprons offering travellers steaming mugs of some comforting brew laced with 12-year-old single malt whiskey. In reality Fort William has Safeway, plastic tables and dishwater coffee but when the alternative is three hours at a rain-lashed bus stop with an icy wind, whose complaining? Well, possibly the new Safeway boss if he's the sort of man who likes to run a tight ship.

As the hottest place in town, the Fort William oasis attracts skiers, climbers, hikersand sundry other tourists like myself who fill their trolleys not with expensive groceries but with all their unwieldy baggage and then hog a table for three hours over a cup of tea. Hardly economical in the cut-throat world of supermarket profit margins. Maybe like that infamous inn in Glencoe down the road which once had a sign saying No Dogs or Campbells, there will be a notice saying No Riffraff Travellers, Bone Fide Shoppers Only.

Here's a thought. Why doesn't Prince Charles, who seems to be at a loose end these days, take over Safeway? He's always banging on about proper food and how unpatriotic the big supermarket chains are for flying carrots in from New Zealand instead of buying them from organic farmers like Tony Archer in Ambridge. Prince Charles has the money; more importantly he has the know-how, being the founder and moving spirit behind Duchy Originals which produces organic sausages, bacon, jam, biscuits and Christmas puddings. For supper last Monday we had some Duchy Originals pork sausages I spotted on the top shelf in Waitrose and very good they were too.

HRH may need to bone up a bit on big business practices and man management. Duchy Originals' turnover last year was £14m, whereas Tesco's was £9.4bn. Excluding all its marmalade, mince pie and all-butter shortbread licensees, the Duchy Originals office employs a staff of 11. Tesco has more than 85,000 employees but, hey, what's wrong with a challenge? The prince could do an MBA at a London business school. "It would do you good to get out of the palace dear and throw yourself into something new," I can hear Camilla say.

As for grocery supremos being philistines who think only about piling high and selling cheap – fiddlesticks. I once ran into the late Sir Alastair Grant, the former Safeway chairman, at a bagpipe competition on the Isle of Skye. I think he may have been one of the judges; he was certainly decked out in a kilt with all the trimmings. Sir Alastair was as far from being philistine as I am from being computer literate and that's a very long way indeed. We talked about Celtic mythology, selkies, black houses, black bun (no, they don't sell it in Safeway) and the libretto he was writing on for Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's new opera about Bonnie Prince Charlie. Not once I promise you did we talk about the price of eggs.

The more I think about the notion of a royal takeover of Safeway, the more I warm to it. What could be more appropriate for a nation of shopkeepers than to be ruled by a monarch whose son and heir is a grocer? And not just any old grocer – a man with a mission to feed his people decent home-grown food, none of that fancy foreign muck. Waiting for a bus at Fort William will take on a new dimension. Camomile tea, wholemeal flapjacks and a queue to talk to the bizzie lizzies. I can't wait.