More than £2.7m was spent meeting requests for the pictures and while take-up was patchy, more than 20,000 images of Charles in a medal-laden Royal Navy uniform were sent out – a 31% hit rate.
But the reluctance to reveal where they ended up has emerged from a Guardian freedom of information request which the Cabinet Office has been resisting for many months. Last October it rejected the request for the information by arguing disclosure would be an “actionable breach of confidence”. In effect it implied a public authority which requested a portrait of the king to display in public might sue the government for revealing that it had done so.
When the Guardian appealed on the grounds that “requesting a portrait of the king funded by the taxpayer for the express purpose of being publicly displayed cannot reasonably be considered a confidential matter”, it dropped that justification and changed tack to claim release would “prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs”, a different exemption under the Freedom of Information Act.
It said disclosure “would be likely to trigger questions about why certain organisations requested the portrait and (by extension) why others did not” and that organisations would be distracted from operational activity by having to answer them.
Posted by ButIDigress79
3 comments
Perfectly normal to have pictures of the monarch in government buildings and in Embassies and High Commissions overseas
The Cabinet Offices attitude to the FOIA request is bizarre. This isn’t like asking how much was spent on government-displayed pix of ER II (costs scattered back over decades, on different systems, I can easily believe it would be disproportionate to go hunting for all that). But when it’s one release, recently and presumably with all requests going through the Cabinet Office, it really can’t be that hard.
I live in the UK (London to be specific) and I have not seen a single portrait of Charles. I travel to Wales frequently, I haven’t seen one there either.
While it is weird I do get it because some fans are crazy and I can see them harassing whoever did not ask for one 😅
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