The Prince of Wales can no more walk past a controversy about modern architecture without adding his guinea's worth than a dog can pass a lamppost without cocking his hind leg. Increasingly, he reminds you of Charles Bronson in Death Wish, a self-appointed vigilante wreaking revenge on any proposal to build a column of glass and steel.

His latest victim is Lord Rogers of Riverside. Deciding that Rogers's plan for the £3 billion redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks was unsympathetic to the site beside Wren's Royal Hospital, Prince Charles used the old princes' network to convey his concerns to Qatar's Royal Family, who are backing the project. Now the plan has been withdrawn, even before the local planning department has had its say. You can dislike Rogers's design and still feel the architect has cause to feel bruised at the way he has been trumped by Prince Charles.

Lord Rogers's gripe is that, by intervening, Prince Charles has abused his constitutional powers. It is more lamentable than that. The prince's intervention is an act of aesthetic Luddism. The battleground should not be between modern architecture and classical, but between good architecture and bad. Consider how much poorer London is for not having Daniel Libeskind's proposed Spiral annexe to the Victoria and Albert Museum, with its angular walls coiling upwards like a Cubist cobra. Berlin, meanwhile, is blessed with Libeskind's haunting Holocaust Museum.

Those who buy or rent new buildings, and the public that have to live with them, are the rightful arbiters of our landscape. It takes courage for an architect to stand up to the monarch-in-waiting. But in an enlightened modern democracy, should one be put into a position to have to do so?