Why has the royal train, green and majestic, been scrapped? It makes no sense.
Its annual cost is £1million. Compare and contrast this with the fact that far more than £1million was spent last year on 170 totally ungreen helicopter journeys for the Royal Family – costing nearly £17,000 each.
To make them more comfy, the Palace plans to buy two new AgustaWestland helicopters for about £8million each.
The King is not short of money at all. Thanks mainly to an embarrassingly overgenerous deal made in 2011 with Tory Premier David Cameron, rivers of gold now flow into the King’s bank accounts from the ‘Sovereign Grant’.
Oh, and the absurdly inflated cost of the two journeys made by the royal train last year – supposedly £78,000 each – is an accounting trick done by loading all the overheads on to these two trips.
If the Royal Family had instead used it 100 times, the cost per journey would be far smaller. So why didn’t they use it more? It is
wonderfully secure. The public love to see it out and about and it is the only really dignified form of transport there is. My guess is the whole lot of them selfishly prefer cars and helicopters and jets.
Does the King, for all his supposed concern for the planet, hate railways? Is Charles a long-term petrolhead of the Jeremy Clarkson type, a goggled Mr Toad who longs to roar down the highway in some glittering monster of steel and glass while his subjects look on in admiration?
Well, the evidence is strong. He has simpered publicly about his vintage Aston Martin, saying ‘it is one of the great cars. I adore the design and the lines. They are special… it was always the car to have’.
Well, it may be the car to have if you are a King, have never experienced a traffic jam and can generally count on an escort of police outriders.
And I’m sure there’s a lot of Clarksonian joy to be had if you can get the great racing driver Graham Hill to show you how to drive it on the Thruxton circuit, as he did. But it is still a car, the curse of the environment that Charles claims to love so much.
It is cars that have laid waste to our countryside and cityscapes with hideous concrete scars for the past 70 years. If he were really as Green as he claims, he would discourage their use. The fact that the King’s official cars are now powered by extracts of old wine and cheese – with a splosh of unleaded petrol to provide va-va-voom – makes no real difference.
The truth is that the King’s love of greenery is a pose. Real concern for the planet involves trying not to harm it. It involves living so as to do as little damage as possible.
But lately environmentalism has turned into a strange faith – in which you can roar about in cars, helicopters and private jets, but still be counted sinless if you noisily support net zero and windmills.
Charles, like so many pampered elite figures, worships in the Temple of Greta Thunberg.
He’ll find it will not save him from his enemies, who continue to despise the Crown. But he seems to think it will.
Trains are the cleanest, safest, quietest, most energy-efficient, fastest and most up-to-date form of ground transport ever invented. They are not a relic, which is why they now flourish in much of the advanced world, while our Government ceaselessly tries to strangle them here, the country which invented them 200 years ago.
The King, if he was any good, would not scrap the royal train. He would have two.
One would be a lovely brassy, steam-hauled vintage treasure with which to progress around the country, offering trips aboard it to distinguished citizens.
The other would be a 190mph super-express, adorned with royal symbols, speeding through the Channel Tunnel to the capitals of republican Europe, there to make them regret that they got rid of their monarchies, and make us realise why we should keep ours.
Oh, if only.
How Left-wing Cherie was chuffed to ride like royalty (but my old Blairite bosses buried the story)
The scrapping of the royal train reminds me of one of the strangest episodes in many years of working for newspapers.
In May 1998 I was toiling for another paper, which had been Tory for a century but had just been taken over by supporters of the Blair regime.
News came to me that Cherie Blair, the very Left-wing wife of the Premier, had been using the Queen’s train. No politicians or politician’s wife had ever done this before. It was during a G8 summit and she had been hosting a get-together with the wives of other world leaders.
This was dynamite, but the wrong sort of dynamite for my new bosses, who wished it had not come their way.
After a lot of dithering, they stuck one of the most dramatic news stories I have written at the bottom of page 31.
It was so well-hidden, a rival ran the same story, as if it was new, several months later under an ‘exclusive’ banner.
No 10 wouldn’t even respond, but I have always wondered whether the announcement – that evening – of the planned release of two British nurses from prison in Saudi Arabia was a coincidence. It certainly drove everything else off the main news pages of all papers.
I constantly wonder how many other important events disappear in similar ways.
BBC is blind to justice for Letby
One major obstacle to the reopening of the Letby case is the BBC. It hates admitting that
Ms Letby’s convictions have been seriously challenged by heavyweight experts. On Tuesday it wrongly reported that she had lost two appeals against those convictions, giving the impression that the courts have been far more generous to her than they have been. She has not. She has twice been refused leave to appeal.
Amazingly, they have now admitted their mistake but only on their website. It’s time they started treating this case with due impartiality.
