A minor hazard of writing a column which sits next to the paper’s leading articles is that readers get in touch to complain to me about something that The Sunday Times has published, imagining I could have done anything about it. Even friends can make this mistake. As one did, having detonated over his breakfast while reading last Sunday’s front-page scoop by our royal editor, Roya Nikkhah. Roya had accompanied Prince William to the UN’s climate conference in Belem, Brazil, where the heir to the throne let rip over his disappointment with British business’s contribution to mitigating climate change.

He said many of our biggest companies were “falling short”, lacked “courage” and should “step up to the plate”. The friend who rang me up is on a number of British company boards but also has pretty good royal connections (or did). He was sulphurous: “This is appalling. What does William know about the strains on British businesses, how much many of our balance sheets are wilting under the costs of renewable energy obligations? His future subjects are much more worried about the cost of living than they are about global warming. He and his father don’t see it; this is just about their brand.

William seems to want to replace his future role as head of the Church of England with being the leading evangelist for net zero. Apart from anything else, it’s a constitutional monstrosity.”

The reference to William’s father is on point. In 2009 Charles also travelled to Brazil, to make a speech in which he warned that the world had “only 100 months to avert irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse”. Some years after the world failed to come to an end, on the eve of the Cop26 summit in Glasgow in 2021, Charles renewed his projection of apocalypse: “If we do not confront the monumental challenge head-on and fast, the world as we know it will be done for.” Speaking to the Cop30 conference last week, his son engaged in some family recycling: “We are edging dangerously close to the Earth’s critical tipping points.” Yet again.

There is nothing in the projections put out by the IPCC that suggests we are headed for ecological extinction. A fact put into thoughtful perspective by the planet’s greatest philanthropist, Bill Gates, before the Belem shindig. In 2021 the co-founder of Microsoft had taken the apocalyptic line that climate change, by 2100, could be “five times as deadly” as Covid-19. But now the ferociously data-driven Gates declares: “Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare … it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

Hitherto the British political establishment has embraced the position Gates took a few years ago: that included the Conservative Party, notably under Theresa May and Boris Johnson (something they could agree on). It’s especially true of the present administration, with the messianic Ed Miliband as energy and climate change secretary. As my Times colleague Patrick Maguire wrote: “Not for nothing did the King recently tell another Labour politician that he loved the energy secretary’s work.”
In that sense, while what the King and his elder son preach is increasingly contentious, in terms of British public opinion, it is not in contradiction with the government’s policy. There is no constitutional conflict between their mission and that of the King’s ministers.

That could change, shatteringly. As things stand, the next election would return a Reform UK government, with Nigel Farage as prime minister. He and his Reform UK deputy, Richard Tice, regard the net zero agenda as a scandalous betrayal of Britain’s interests, industrially and economically. As a friend who spent some years at the interface between Downing Street and Buckingham Palace pointed out to me, after Prince William’s remarks in Brazil: “A Reform UK government would bring in a whole heap of problems for the royal family.”

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We got a slight foretaste of this when Boris Johnson was PM. Before the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Rwanda, Charles, then Prince of Wales, let it be known he regarded the scheme to deport asylum seekers to that east African nation as “appalling”. He also made noises about reparations for slavery being “a conversation whose time had come”.

In an uncomfortable encounter Johnson confronted the Prince of Wales over his remarks about the Rwanda scheme, telling him, “We both know your people could ring the newspapers and kill the story.” The PM added: “I wouldn’t talk about slavery or you’ll end up being forced to sell the Duchy of Cornwall to pay reparations.”

Can you imagine how Farage would react as PM if the Commonwealth pushed this agenda? He’d simply walk out. It would make the tension between the late Queen and Margaret Thatcher over the latter’s policy towards South Africa and the Commonwealth look trivial by comparison.

Farage has already fired a broadside at the monarch, during the state visit of President Macron. On his GB News programme he rebuked the King for saying that “between our countries we know no borders”. The Reform UK leader told his viewers: “I’m not a republican … but I think the King is making a mistake in saying this, because absolutely what his subjects want is for there to be very strong borders between us and France.”

Farage also said, last summer, that while his relationship with the King was “not nasty”, they had disagreements: “It’s climate change and stuff like that.” But it could get nasty, if Farage were actually in power. I could imagine a Chancellor Tice, if he heard noises from the Palace critical of his own anti-wind farm policies, pointing out how the Crown Estate’s ownership of the coastline — and highly profitable sale of wind farm leases — resulted in an increase in the taxpayer-funded grant to Buckingham Palace, over the past year, from £86 million to £132 million.

Charles, as monarch, has shown he well understands how to advance his government’s policies (notably in schmoozing a royalty-struck Donald Trump over the need to support Ukraine). But by 2029, when Reform might first be in power, it could be King William V in Buckingham Palace. How would that monarch react to a government which would expect him to say nothing even implicitly critical of its policy on climate change? As one who knows William pointed out to me: “He is of the generation which says you should be your authentic self, bring your whole self to work.”

If he does, under a Reform UK government, there will be a constitutional crisis.