I have to resist saying ‘I told you so’ on plastic, says Charles
PRINCE Charles says he is trying to resist saying ‘I told you so’ after being decades ahead of public opinion on plastic pollution.
For 40 years he has highlighted the scourge of plastic but has been dismissed as ‘old-fashioned and out of touch’, said the heir to the throne.
Now it is one of the public’s biggest causes of concern and an issue on which the Mail has been campaigning for more than a decade.
The prince made his comments in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine to mark his 70th birthday on November 14.
‘One of my duties has been to find solutions to vast challenges we face over accelerating climate change … however, it seems to take forever to alert people to the scale of the challenge,’ said Charles.
‘Over 40 years ago, I remember making a speech about the problems of plastic and other waste but at that stage nobody was really interested and I was considered old-fashioned, out of touch and “antiscience” for warning of such things.’
Now the world has finally caught up. However, he added: ‘I don’t really see any value in saying, “I told you so”. As a teenager, I remember feeling deeply about this appallingly excessive demolition job being done on every aspect of life.
‘In putting my head above the parapet on all these issues … I found myself in conflict with the conventional outlook which, as I discovered, is not exactly the most pleasant situation to find yourself.’
Charles also warned: ‘If we don’t engage with these issues, and many other related and critical problems that they inevitably compound, we will all be victims. Nobody escapes.’
Prince Harry is said to admire his father’s persistence on green issues. He told a film crew making a BBC documentary to mark Charles’s birthday: ‘ The man never stops. Whether it’s dinner or tea or whatever and we sit there and speak to him, he gets so frustrated. You can understand why, when he cares that much and he’s been banging the drum for this long.’
Some have accused Charles of meddling in public affairs but he defended his actions to film-maker John Bridcut. ‘If it’s meddling to worry about the inner cities, as I did 40 years ago, and what was happening, or not happening, there – the conditions in which people were living – if that’s meddling I’m very proud of it.’
The Duchess of Cornwall told the BBC her husband ‘really wants to save the world’, Radio Times reported. Camilla admitted he could be ‘pretty impatient’ but said Charles was ‘driven by this passion inside him to really help’.
The documentary being screened on November 8 on BBC1 at 9pm also revealed Charles is a workaholic. He works seven days a week from 9am, often until after midnight. Last year, he is said to have held 500 meetings behind the scenes on top of official engagements.
See the full feature in the December issue of Vanity Fair, on sale from tomorrow.
‘Putting my head above the parapet’