Prince Charles, a victim of monarchists' cruelty

Because of the silliness of monarchy, he has repeatedly been placed in situations for which he is entirely unsuitable

Republicans are often accused of hating the Royal Family, while monarchists claim they "love" Elizabeth and Charles Windsor. Yet, in truth, it is the monarchists who are putting the Windsors through hell and we republicans who want to set them free to live a normal life. When the in-house investigation into the on-going farce at St James's Palace is released tomorrow, we will all be provided with another vivid illustration of this.

All the available evidence suggests that Charles Windsor is an unintelligent man who, in a kinder world, would not be placed in a managerial role of any kind. So, of course, the monarchists' decision to put him in charge of more than 300 servants where he can rule unchallenged – indeed, where everybody tells him how jolly clever and good all his ideas are – has ended in disaster.

Tomorrow's report will contain only the barest minimum that has been allowed by the Palace to slip out. The "investigation" has been led by Sir Michael Peat, Charles Windsor's private secretary, and he declared before he even began looking into the affair that on Charles's part, "no impropriety has taken place". It is as though Tony Blair announced an investigation into himself by Alastair Campbell. Bear this in mind when you read the details: however superficially tough the report might seem, the reality will have been far more chaotic.

Because of the irrational nature of monarchy, Charles has been placed repeatedly – and pitilessly – in situations like this. Despite the best education money can buy, he achieved derisory A-level results, but was still admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, solely because of who his mother was. Predictably, his degree was a belly-flop. He then went on to be almost comically incompetent in the navy. He couldn't master navigation for the life of him (a pretty fundamental skill when you're at sea), but equally the authorities couldn't punish his failures in the way they would with anybody else. As the Naval Secretary to the Ministry of Defence wrote: "The thought of Court Martialling the heir to the throne for a navigational error is good nightmare material." In the end, he had to be given multiple intensive courses until eventually he was receiving one-to-one tuition. Like Forrest Gump, he has wandered through life inadequate at everything, yet being lauded as though he were able.

Charles himself is not to blame. This is all the fault of the ridiculous institution of monarchy that has denied him the opportunity to find a job that suits his limited talents: working as a gardener, perhaps. (Charles is a horrible symbol of the fact that in addition to having very limited upward class mobility, we have almost no downward class mobility at all. In a meritocracy, he would probably fail – but instead, class ringfences him from that possibility). No wonder Charles is deluded. A friend of his told the gossip columnist Nigel Dempster that "he lives in an isolation ward of flattery. He goes to Hollywood and is told he's handsome. He swaps jokes with a comic genius like Peter Sellers and the other Goons, and they fall down laughing. He boffs a woman once, and she tells him he's the greatest lover she's ever had ... The best education in the world can't defend you against sycophancy on that scale." This process – which is inherent to the cruel institution of monarchy – has warped Charles in innumerable ways, as it would any of us.

But, I hear you cry, doesn't Charles make learned speeches to academic audiences? Didn't he deliver one of the Reith lectures? How can he be stupid? Yet our soon-to-be-emperor has no intellectual clothes. Everything he touches – from his unsuccessful "model villages" to his personal staff – swiftly falls apart. His speeches are, by and large, cobbled-together nonsense received with a politeness based on his position rather than their quality. Even Charles's closest aides admit that all too often he simply spouts whatever the last person to whisper in his ear has said. His very sympathetic biographer Jonathan Dimbleby admits that his aides "were uncomfortable with his tendency to reach instant conclusions on the basis of insufficient thought". Edward Adeane, Charles's private secretary for many years, was deeply disturbed by the fact that "Charles was extraordinarily easy to lead by the nose". These are understatements.

The quality of his judgement can be seen in the mentors he has chosen for himself throughout his life. Look, for example, at the late Laurens van der Post. Charles revered Van der Post as a guru. He wined and dined him, and made great efforts to boost Van der Post's public standing, and even chose him as William's godfather. As Van der Post's distinguished official biographer JDF Jones puts it: "For 20 years, they shared the most intimate conversations and correspondence. Charles even told him about his dreams." Yet Van der Post was, as Jones says, "a compulsive fantasist". He intoxicated Charles with his tales of the "noble savages" who lived in the Kalahari. These condescending myths had long since been discredited by anthropologists (something Charles really ought to have known since he studied the subject, at least nominally, at university), but Van der Post repeated them as though they reflected his own experiences. He went even further with this quackery and convinced Charles that the Old Man of Lochnagar, a fictional character Charles had created when he was 20 in a story for his little brothers, was Charles's "guru" inherited through the ages and embedded in Charles's "collective unconscious". Most people spotted that Van der Post was a charlatan at 50 paces; Charles lapped up this gibberish.

Yet the monarchists still encourage the exploitation of Charles by people like this. It is Charles who suffers, because he is allowed to entertain delusions about his own intellect. When it was revealed last year that Charles bombards busy government ministers with his incoherent ramblings – and becomes extremely petulant if they do not respond promptly – they said that he was "performing his civil duty". His office announced that he "will not be diverted from using the authority of his position to speak out across a range of public issues". But what authority does his position have? Why on earth should a hereditary position have any authority at all? To allow him to entertain this belief is to encourage madness.

We even allow him to display hypocrisy on a staggering scale without positing out that he is making himself into a national joke. Remember: this is a man who preaches fuel conservation yet drives one of the greatest fuel-wasters in the world, a Bentley – or rather, three of them. This is a man who took a trip to the USA to inspect urban slums and spent half the trip playing polo. This is a man who preaches about agricultural traditionalism but was quite happy to shut down his own "model farms" so that he could make an extra few quid by "rationalising" the Duchy of Cornwall.

The revelations tomorrow will just be another reminder that monarchy has placed Charles Windsor in a situation for which he is entirely unsuitable. How could genes determine your suitability to be head of state? It is time to end the cruelty of the monarchists and release Charles to live in the countryside he loves and marry Camilla without fretting about the Church of England – and to introduce a sensible way of selecting our future head of state. Elections, anyone?

johann@johannhari.com