Nigel Farage wriggles over branding King Charles an ‘eco-loony’
Nigel Farage wriggled over branding King Charles an ‘eco-loony’ during a bruising election interview today.
The Reform UK leader was taken to task over his views on the monarch and the environment as he clashed with the BBC‘s Nick Robinson.
Interviewed for a Panorama special, Mr Farage boasted about his proposal to save £30billion a year by ditching ‘ludicrous’ Net Zero targets.
But Robinson demanded to know whether the Brexiteer stood by his previous jibes about the King when he was still Prince of Wales.
‘You said the King was an eco-loony. Do you still think the King is an eco-loony?’ the presenter asked.
Mr Farage replied: ‘The King, he wasn’t the King then, and I can’t speak ill of the monarch obviously…’
When Robinson interjected that Mr Farage had said the royal was ‘stupid’, the politician continued: ‘He did used to say that carbon dioxide was a pollutant which I thought was a very stupid comment.’
Nigel Farage wriggled over branding King Charles an ‘eco-loony’ during a bruising election interview
The Reform UK leader was taken to task over his views on the monarch, pictured today at Royal Ascot, and the environment as he clashed with the BBC’s Nick Robinson
Five years ago Mr Farage mocked the the Prince of Wales for telling a 2008 EU summit that the North Polar ice cap could disappear completely by 2015.
‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. All I can say is Charlie Boy is now in his 70s… may the Queen live a very, very long time,’ he said.
In 2021 he accused the then-heir to the throne of ‘once again dabbling in eco-loony politics’.
In the interview tonight, Mr Farage said he was ‘not arguing the science’ about climate change being real, but suggested that ‘ever since the late 1980s that perhaps there’s been a bit of hype around this’.
‘No wonder we’ve got people spraying Stonehenge with orange powder, because all we ever talk about is fear rather than solutions,’ he said.
Mr Farage claimed that closing steelworks in the UK was not helping cut CO2 because production moved to India, and ‘all we’ve done is to export the emissions’.
‘Similarly with coal, there’s an anthracite mine up in Cumbria that could be opened,’ he said.
‘We’re not going to open it. We are overtaxing the North Sea. The Tories have done this, not Labour.’
Robinson pressed Mr Farage: ‘You believe David Attenborough was wrong and the King was wrong, we’re clear about that.’
But he responded: ‘No, no, no, that is not – no, no, the King is wrong to say CO2 is a pollutant, that is wrong, clearly.’
In December last year, the King issued a calls to arms in his opening statement to the Cop 28 climate summit in the UAE
As the Prince of Wales, Charles was the country’s longest serving heir to the throne.
During that time, he carved out a role for himself speaking out on issues like the environment, climate change, architecture and farming.
And the King has not shied away from addressing those causes since he succeeded to the throne.
In an historic speech to the French Senate last September, Charles spoke of the ‘existential challenge’ of ‘global warming, climate change and the catastrophic destruction of nature’.
His address came less than 24 hours after PM Rishi Sunak had watered down several of Britain’s Net Zero policies.
In December last year, the King issued a calls to arms in his opening statement to the Cop 28 climate summit in the UAE.
He warned the world remained ‘dreadfully far off track’ in key climate targets from the Paris agreement in 2015 and called for meaningful change.
The Panorama Interviews with Nick Robinson is on BBC One at 7pm and BBC iPlayer.
