Prince’s talks with man who says Britain’s overcrowded
ROBIN Page is one of the countryside’s most colourful — and controversial — characters, but he has a kindred spirit in Prince Charles.
I hear the heir to the throne invited the former One Man and His Dog presenter to Clarence House for private talks on Tuesday.
‘Very privileged, as chairman of the Countryside Restoration Trust, to have a meeting with Prince Charles yesterday,’ Page confirms. ‘What a good, green man.’
Page does not say what they spoke about but on the same day he posted online about the damaging effect of ‘overpopulation’ on Britain. ‘Why do all our bigwig conservationists talk about protecting the planet — none will talk about UK’s environmental disaster — over-population?’ he asked.
Page established the Countryside Restoration Trust in 1993 in response to growing fears about intensive and industrialised farming.
His co-founders were artist gordon Beningfield and conservationist Sir Laurens van der Post, Charles’s mentor and Prince William’s godfather.
Sir Laurens was hailed as a ‘modern sage’ in life, but his reputation took a battering after his death in 1996 with revelations that he had fathered a child with a 14-year-old girl who had been under his care during a sea voyage to england from South africa.
There were also embarrassing claims that he had embellished the truth in his memoirs and travel books.
Page has never shied away from controversy himself. after he was sacked as a columnist by a broadsheet newspaper in august, he attacked the ‘corporate, urban money men’ responsible. He said the axing of his rural affairs column after some 30 years represented the latest blow to ‘Britain’s most endangered minority in multi-cultural Britain — traditional country people’.
Page quit as an independent councillor in Cambridgeshire earlier this year, claiming both local and national government policies were ‘trashing’ the countryside.
He previously hit the headlines when he compared the approval of an affordable housing development to ‘jihadists trashing their history in Iraq’. a ‘joke’ about giving contraceptives to immigrants in raisins also landed him in hot water.
a Clarence House spokesman declines to comment.