ON A GREEN TOUR (IN A JET CHARTERED FOR £700,000) WITH THE PRINCE OF HYPOCRISY

ALL too often, Prince Charles has seemed oblivious to the contrast between what he preaches and what he practises. To the public, he presented himself as a worthy citizen, so concerned about making economies and saving the planet that he’d ordered bricks to be put in all his cisterns to conserve water. This was all very well — but a quick glance at just one year of his travels exposes him as something of a hypocrite. At the beginning of 2009, he chartered a jet for a ten-day ‘environmental tour’ of Chile, Brazil and Ecuador. Leaving aside the contribution this made towards global warming, the cost was £700,000. Two months later, he flew in a chartered Airbus A319 to Italy and Germany to promote the British government’s climate change policies. The cost was £80,000 — considerably more than the £15,000 he would have paid for scheduled flights. As usual, his justification was convenience and his inordinate amount of luggage — including his own organic beef and other special foods that he’d brought along for himself. On his return, he used the royal train for a five-day ‘green’ tour to encourage young people to ‘tread more lightly on our planet’. That journey cost £90,000. Soon afterwards, he travelled to a conference in Manchester on the royal train — pulled by a steam engine that produced 90 times more carbon dioxide than a family car. His love of luxury travel is by no means Charles’s only Achilles heel when it comes to practising what he preaches. In a video broadcast in 2013, he extolled the countryside’s ‘spiritual’ dimension, waxing lyrical about ‘the tractors in the fields, the skilled workers, the livestock, the growing crops and the landscape’s biodiversity, now so much under threat Royal carbon footprint: Charles and Camilla jet into Chile for an ‘environmental tour’ in 2009 from climate change, diseases and insensitive development’. Shortly afterwards, he allowed the Duchy of Cornwall to sell 55 acres of prime farming land in the Tregurra Valley, east of Truro, for a housing development, a Waitrose supermarket and a huge car park. ‘Prince Charles must have the skin of a rhinoceros not to recognise the hypocrisy of it,’ complained the farmers who grew winter feed and grazed their cattle on that land. Readers of Country Life magazine were also puzzled. In the November issue that year, he’d written about the ‘folly’ of losing agricultural land to developers, and condemned supermarket chains for squeezing the incomes of farmers. Yet self-interest appeared to overrule any sympathy that he might have felt for the farmers. In another video message, recorded for Earth Day (on April 22) and delivered on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund, he urged people to turn off their lights for the sake of the environment. That same day, he flew 80 miles from Highgrove in Gloucestershire to Ascot in Berkshire aboard a helicopter based at Farnborough in Hampshire — a roundtrip of 250 miles.