Like Bruce Springsteen, Prince Charles is known in his entourage as "The Boss".

I know this because I was told it by an erstwhile member of his press corps. If I so wished I could name this indiscreet person but not only would it be a breach of confidentiality it might mean that he/she would lose his/her head or be tossed into the Tower never to be seen again. Even worse, they might be required to return the gong they were given for protecting The Boss from nosey hacks.

Prince Charles, insists the Time journalist Catherine Mayer, the latest scribe to tuck him between hardcovers, is much misunderstood, not least, one might add, because he so rarely allows his real self - whoever that is - to emerge from the shadows.

Ms Mayer has made it her mission to "let daylight in", in the hope that the man under the spotlight will be revealed. It is a tough assignment and not without its pitfalls. Following the publication of excerpts, in which we discovered that infighting in the prince's household was likened by one former staffer as Wolf Hall, Clarence House turned its ire on the hapless author. "It is not an official book," declared Kristina Kyriacou, the prince's Thomas Cromwell. "The author did not have the access as claimed."

So far, so typical. As seasoned royal watchers have come to expect, it is never easy where the House of Windsor is concerned to separate fact from fiction.

One well recalls the furore which erupted when Andrew Morton published Diana: Her True Story, which related in eye-popping detail the nightmare of the people's princess's marriage to the heir to the throne.

Her bulimia and reports of her throwing herself down stairs were all a fantasy we were told by flunkeys who ought to have been given Nobel Prizes for dissembling. Indeed, scorn was cowped on the suggestion that Diana had actually spoken to Morton.

Mayer, it should be underlined, comes not to bury the man who would be king, but to attempt to understand him. He is, she insists, an inveterate do-gooder who has started up more charities than Alan Sugar has whelk stalls.

Lord Sacks, until recently Britain's chief rabbi, speaks of the prince's "greatness", a word he says he doesn't use lightly. The Dalai Lama is likewise a champion. Meanwhile, Charles is even venerated in Armenia where the locals embrace him as a descendant of Vlad the Impaler, Bram Stoker's model for Dracula.

With so much going for him and so many eminent folk rooting for him, it could be argued that to see HRH as a victim is somewhat absurd.

But then, as Bertrand Russell said of religion, the monarchy relies on mass acceptance of a ridiculous idea. Since he was born 66 years ago, Charles, unlike the rest of us, knew what his destiny was. His has been a life lived in limbo which, were his situation less gilded, would have been intolerable.

As it is, he has had to invent a role which has often led to him being ridiculed by all sides of the commentariat. Everything he does or says is subject to forensic examination and detailed discussion. Like pot noodle, you must either love him or loathe him. If we are to believe some of my more loopy peers, he is nothing more than a fruitcake, a talker to plants (what's so wrong with that?) and scunnered by most modern architecture (and who with an aesthetic bone in their body is not?).

Mayer's Charles, however, is a man who is not desperate for his mother to die in order to allow him become the third king of that name.

Rather his self-appointed mission is to save the planet and all those who dwell on it. You may mock him for this but I rather admire him. "I only take on the most difficult challenges," he told Mayer. "Because I want to raise aspirations and recreate hope from hopelessness and health from deprivation." Irrespective of one's views on the monarchy, these are lofty ambitions and deserve better than derision. Now, we learn, he has let it be known that he does not want to be used as a broker of arms deals. Good for him. As he himself has said, he is a revolutionary, albeit one garbed in tradition and conservatism. Long may he continue to upset convention and make headlines.