King Charles and Queen Camilla faced criticism today for flying from Paris to Bordeaux while preaching about the need to cut carbon emissions to fight global warming.
The 360-mile Paris to Bordeaux hop is no longer permitted on Air France after the French government banned internal flights of less than two hours 30 minutes for ecological reasons.
Instead, travellers can make the journey in just over two hours on a direct TGV high-speed train.
But that option was ruled out for the King and Queen, who landed in Bordeaux on Friday lunchtime to fierce criticism from green activists and parts of the French press.
“This plane trip may seem surprising for a King who has made the environment his priority,” an editorial in La Depeche, the regional newspaper, said.
“In Bordeaux, his visit will be focused on ecology with a visit to an experimental forest and an organic vineyard and a meeting with the personnel mobilised to deal with the wildfires in Gironde [the department that covers Bordeaux] in the summer of 2022.”
Green MP Sandra Regol said it was “very disappointing” to see a plane being used by the royals, especially after Charles made a stirring speech about saving the planet in the Paris Senate on Thursday.
The 74-year-old monarch told the upper house of the French Parliament that France and Britain needed to “strive together to protect the world from our most existential challenge of all – that of global warming”.
His comments came a day after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that the UK would be rowing back on some of its key net zero pledges, including pushing the ban on petrol and diesel car sales to 2035.
President Emmanuel Macron’s government, in contrast, has just successfully introduced new legislation which prohibits “air transport services covering a journey of less than two hours, thirty minutes for which there is a substitutable rail link”.
Charles and Camilla on Wednesday also arrived at Paris-Orly airport by private plane, even though royals have often used the train to get to the French capital.
Green news outlet Repoterre was even more scathing of the King, with an editorial reading: “Two plane trips for a state visit which will last three days. The ecological results of Charles III’s trip to France are not rosy.
“During her last state visit in 2014, his mother Elizabeth II came by Eurostar. A study details that the Paris-Bordeaux journey is 139 times less polluting by train than by plane.”
Organisers of the state visit in turn said that Charles would have preferred to travel by train, but this was abandoned for security reasons.
British officials blamed the decision on the French media leaking details of the couple’s travel plans. Other elements of the visit had to be changed because of leaks as well, they said.
The prospect of a train trip was too much for French officials, already nervous about the visit after it had to be postponed in March amid violent protests against President Macron’s pension reforms.
“It would have been necessary to secure every bridge on the line and every station between Paris and Bordeaux,” a French Interior Ministry source said.
This would have been very difficult on a day when the Pope is visiting Marseille, and thousands of rugby fans are in France for the World Cup, the source added.
But there was another element to it too: the King and Queen have long planned to return to Scotland after the state visit and that meant they wanted to fly directly there from Bordeaux at the end of the official state visit on Friday.
Their decision ruled out the possibility of British media travelling on the royal flight with them – a common practice these days – and added to the carbon footprint of the visit by requiring the royal press pack to each made independent travel plans.
The King and Queen are expected to spend around half a day in Bordeaux, before returning to the UK.
