Prince Charles may have helped New Zealand's government get £250,000 to preserve some Antarctic huts

Prince Charles may have helped win the New Zealand government a quarter of a million pounds.

The UK handed the sum to New Zealand back in 2007 to help the country fund efforts to preserve the Antarctic huts built by explorers Robert Scott and Ernest Shackelton. It followed wide-spread public pressure and now we know Prince Charles was among those calling for the funding.

The 'black spider' memos released by the UK government today reveal that the Prince wrote to the then Culture Media and Sport secretary Tessa Jowell calling for "imaginative flexibility" on rules preventing her department from funding overseas projects. Here's the letter:

The plea followed a meeting with Helen Clark, then the New Zealand Prime Minister, who told him about the project to preserve the huts in the South Pole. He wrote to Jowell: "I entirely agree with her evidently strongly-held conviction that all those nations connected to that heroic era of exploration should help contribute to the huts preservation."

It's not clear whether Prince Charles' plea made any difference to the decision by Culture Minister David Lammy two years later to give the project £250,000 in taxpayer money.