Richard Rogers is amused to recall the appalled reaction of his Italian mother, a committed socialist, to his first big step on the society ladder in Britain: “What the hell do you want to be knighted for?” That was in 1991. Five years later this most fashionable architect, for whom alone the term “champagne socialist” might have been coined, went on to become a life peer and is now Baron Rogers of Riverside.

Not everyone loves a lord, however, and being part of the British Establishment doesn’t mean you necessarily have it all your own way, even in architecture. As he has made sure all the world knows, Rogers is furious that his firm has been dropped from the project of redeveloping the site of the old Chelsea Barracks next to Wren’s Royal hospital.

Rogers attributes this to the intervention of the Prince of Wales with the site’s owners, the royal family of Qatar, and has called for a public inquiry into what he regards as “an abuse of power” and “unconstitutional behaviour”.

It suits Rogers to claim that a lone royal personage has “single-handedly destroyed this project”, because this casts him as the progressive enlightened genius struggling against the forces of reaction. In truth, the prince was not exactly alone: there was strong local opposition to the redevelopment scheme which had already forced a scaling down in height and density.

Similarly, it now suits Rogers to claim that he is the subject of continuous royal persecution, that the prince had earlier scuppered his schemes to redevelop Paternoster Square, north of St Paul’s, and to enlarge the Royal Opera House.

As I recall, Rogers’s firm was but one of several being considered for both these jobs. And when you compare the rather agreeable public space which is the new Paternoster Square with the sort of covered shopping mall which Rogers had proposed, or consider the success of the Dixon Jones work in Covent Garden, it seems to me that the right choices were made.

Rogers came to fame and fortune as an exponent of high-tech architecture. He remains a child of the 1960s, of that indulged and indulgent, let-it-all-hang-out decade. High-tech is based on the naive premise that architecture is a matter of technology and engineering rather than of sculptural form, space, texture and historical and cultural resonance. It employs steel, reinforced concrete and glass rather than brick, stone and timber. So, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (on which Rogers worked with Renzo Piano) and the Lloyd’s building in the City of London, the services — pipes, staircases, lifts, air-conditioning, etc — are placed outside the structural frame on the assumption that they will need to be replaced in due course.

Whether to hang the innards of a building on the outside really makes practical sense remains a matter for debate. For all Rogers’s talk about making London like Barcelona, full of people drinking coffee under umbrellas in piazzas, his architectural approach is often less comfortable in the delicate fabric of an old city. And we shouldn’t forget that it was his 1982 proposal for enlarging the National Gallery which was praised by the then president of the Royal Institute of British Architects for saying “Sod you!” to the public.

The rise of this particular strand of architectural modernism is curious. The 1970s saw a widespread reaction against the arrogance and perceived inhumanity of the modern movement, of high-rise housing estates and comprehensive redevelopment, in favour of an eclectic and colourful post-modernism. Yet the same decade also saw the rise of Rogers and Norman Foster, his former partner, although they were often only the leaders of a team of designers in what has been described as a shifting mafia of assistants and consultants.

What is now clear is that the two benefited from the burgeoning cult of celebrity. Suddenly Richard and Norman were seen everywhere, collecting prizes, medals, knighthoods and peerages along the way. Such is life but it surely ill behoves someone who, while posturing as a man of the people, has signed up to the traditional Establishment to complain of privilege.

Rogers is a quintessential Establishment figure. Blessed with the most important attribute for a successful architect — charm — as well as his Italian good looks, he knows everyone and rapidly became the favourite architect of new Labour.

The likes of Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson once delighted to be seen at the River Café, the fashionable Thames-side restaurant, close to the Rogers office in Hammersmith, that is run by his wife, Ruth.

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