Afternoon:
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"Frankly," Prince Charles tells me, "if you really want to know, it is very frustrating that I'm ahead of my time.
"Some of my ideas take 25 or 30 years to get through. In this case, I passed the ideas to a person who understood their significance. And now, or so I am told, these ideas are starting to bear fruit."
The Prince is not harping on about architecture or climate change.
Rather, he is referring to a passion that has preoccupied him since soon after he set up the Prince's Trust in 1976: how to help disadvantaged young people.
Seven years ago, Prince Charles sent Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of the pioneering children's charity Kids Company, a sheaf of 25 clinical papers that looked at the impact of abuse on children's brain development.
Today those papers form the backbone of a seminal research project being undertaken at University College London.
Batmanghelidjh believes these studies - which involve scanning the brains of troubled teenagers attending Kids Company - will prove that the brain is altered by early trauma and abuse, and that once we understand how this works it will change how we think about helping deprived children in the UK.
Speaking exclusively to the Evening Standard during a break in his visit to Kids Company in Lambeth, Prince Charles says: "People often go on about how hard it must be for me to relate to disadvantaged children but there is a certain amount you can try to understand through empathy.
"Everybody's been through hard times. Empathy is half the business. The other half is 'do to others what you'd have them do to you'."
Earlier I watched the Prince, accompanied by the Duchess of Cornwall, banter with children at Kids Company whose backgrounds could not be more different from his own.
He engaged a five-year-old boy who had seen his mother's head cracked open by a machete, spoke to an eight-year-old who was too scared to sleep at night in case her mother tried yet again to commit suicide, and met a family of four who until Kids Company helped were living in a garden shed.
By the time he is ready to depart Kids Company at 12h50 sharp, a crowd has gathered on the other side of the street, penned back by police.
As the Prince is ushered by his assistant press secretary towards the open door of his Jaguar to take him to his next engagement at HMP Belmarsh, there are cheers of "Charlie boy! Charlie boy!" One cheeky woman shouts: "Give us a kiss Charlie boy!"
Once, the Prince might have waved regally and gone on his way but the new Charles, recently turned 60, breaks free from his minders, strolls across the road with a smile, and gives his admirer a kiss.
As he laughs and shakes people's hands, he asks them: "Do you all live here? Amazing. Not too dangerous, I hope."
The protocol of the day has already been broken. It was the Duchess of Cornwall who had first gone off-piste by starting an impromptu ping-pong match with 10-year-old Emmanuel Theophilus, from Camberwell.
Then the Prince started playing table soccer and shooting pool with the boys, though with rather less success than his wife.
"Keep practising, sir," a seven-year-old goaded the Prince after he'd hunkered down, taken aim, and missed an easy pot.
The Prince and the Duchess work well together. There is no evidence of the apparent grumpiness she is said to feel towards her husband's public engagements.
And although the day was organised chaos, the children are clearly moved that the future King of England had bothered to come down.
"Do you have any children?" asks Brandon, seven, offering Prince Charles a just-made plasticine snail, before adding: "Can we eat yet?"
Does the Prince ever wonder, I ask, how he might have coped if, by a twist of fate, he had been born on the wrong side of the tracks? "Yes," he pauses.
"Yes, absolutely. But the interesting thing is how many of the children who attend Kids Company end up going to university.
"If only more people could see the remarkable job Camila Batmanghelidjh is doing here and the 85 per cent success rate she gets.
"What we're doing at the Prince's Trust is partnering with her on some new initiatives, including a pupil referral unit due to open in Westminster."
Later, flanked by seven police outriders, he visits HMP Belmarsh, the most high-profile of Britain's maximum security prisons.
Stepping into the high-walled compound shortly after 1.15pm, he is greeted by the governor, Philip Wragg, before visiting the courtyard, transformed into a healing garden as part of a programme run by the Prince's Charities Foundation.
There, the Prince is introduced to two carefully vetted inmates.
The younger one, Mr Force, looks nervous as he shakes his hand, while the other, Mr Poole, chats easily to the Prince and says: "I'm out in time for Christmas."
The Prince does not appear to ask him what he is in prison for. Nor does he offer him a Duchy Original.
Additional reporting by Emma Rowley
Reader views (1)
Gotta love the work he does... well worth the small priuce we pay.. give me the hardworking royals anyday over the heads of state of so many countries.. keep up the good work.
- Dave, Madrid, 11/09/2009 15:21
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