Why didn’t King Charles & Queen Camilla take the train to or within France?

When the President of the United States travels, the Secret Service pack up “the Beast,” the armored Cadillac with all kinds of James Bond-like security functions. The Beast – or sometimes several Beasts – go with POTUS everywhere. But that’s the president, who arguably faces the highest security threat in the world. While I don’t doubt that King Charles and Queen Camilla need security and special security provisions, it does seem like Charles once again refuses to practice what he preaches when it comes to environmentalism. For Charles and Camilla’s three-day tour of France, there were several options for their travel to France and within France. They chose to fly everywhere and bring their own Bentley. From the Guardian’s coverage last week:

King Charles, who is on his 35th visit to France, and Queen Camilla landed at Orly airport on a British Airways flight and were met on a red carpet by the prime minister, Élisabeth Borne. Their mode of transport was in contrast to Elizabeth II, who had travelled to Paris by Eurostar train in 2004 and 2014.

The king and queen were driven from the airport in their own Bentley, which was transported from the UK. But the king accompanied Macron down the Champs-Elysées in the presidential Citroën DS7 convertible accompanied by 136 horses of the republican guard.

[From The Guardian]

Again, why bring the Bentley if it’s not a security issue to travel in a presidential convertible down the Champs-Elysees? Why travel by plane when QEII used the Eurostar with no security drama? It’s weird. So was Charles’s travel within France:

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.

[From The Daily Express]

I’m sure there are security issues and what have you, but here’s my thing – if I had the choice between traveling by plane versus high-speed rail in Europe, I would take the train every time. Even if Charles has access to his own (taxpayer-funded) plane, flying is such a f–king hassle. Charles should practice what he preaches, especially since his mother made a point of using public transport while visiting Britain’s French neighbors.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.