Every household has the occasional awkward family dinner, and Buckingham Palace may be in for one as the Prince of Wales and his father enter the fray from opposite sides in the national debate on environmentalism.
Prince Charles voiced his concern for the environment in a special edition of Countryfile yesterday, saying that people owed it to their grandchildren to protect the natural world.
On Wednesday the Duke of Edinburgh will host the first annual lecture celebrating the life and work of David Bellamy, a renowned climate sceptic, who was sacked as president of the Wildlife Trusts after dismissing global warming as “poppycock”.
While the two royals have previously expressed differing views on the environment, the separate interventions reveal an apparently stark divergence of opinion.
In Countryfile, BBC One’s weekly rural affairs show, Prince Charles did not directly address climate change but indicated his broad concern. “We need to think about what kind of world we’re handing on to our successors, particularly grandchildren,” he said.
“If you think of it in those terms, it should make us reflect a little bit about the way we do things so we don’t ruin it for them.”
He made a similar point while speaking last month in a speech to the European Parliament, where he lambasted climate change deniers for playing “a reckless game of roulette” with the Earth’s future.
The Duke of Edinburgh is understood to take a more sceptical view and previously caused controversy by describing wind turbines as “absolutely useless”.