They're not laughing now!

The late, great comic, Bob Monkhouse, coined the memorable one-liner, “They laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian.?Well, they’re not laughing now!”??I rather hope that the Prince of Wales was channelling his inner Bob Monkhouse as the delegates of COP 26 listened to him with rapt attention on the future of our planet.?He’s been saying all this for more than four decades, suffering all the tabloid nonsense of, “The prince who talks to plants etc.”??Now he is surely vindicated.?Unusually, a foreign premier,?Italy’s Mario Draghi invited Prince Charles to address the G7 meeting being hosted in Rome in advance of the much larger Glasgow caravanserai.

All this shows the value of having a mixed economy when it to comes to movers and shakers.?Not just politicians and princes but living saints too like Sir David Attenborough - in their keynote speeches giving it to the delegates between the eyes, rather overshadowing bumbling Boris who, as usual, bluffed his way though, surely questioning his title as communications king.?Tyro saint Greta (Thunberg) repeated her somewhat aggressive “Blah, blah, blah,” trope which hardly added to the sum of global understanding.?What she doesn’t get, or more likely, refuses to admit, is the age-old conundrum facing all politicians.?It’s not that they don’t know what to do.?It’s just that they don’t know how to do it and get re-elected.

By the time you read this, progress will have been made.?Certainly, attitudes are shifting.?People around me “get” the idea of eating less meat to help the planet.?Even a confirmed, savage meat-eater like me found himself ordering a vegetarian lasagne the other day. It was underwhelming.?I know when I eat out in an Indian restaurant I tend to go for the veg rather than meat which can sometimes prove to be of doubtful provenance.

By last weekend the COP had reached agreement on 1.8 degrees as a supportable increase in in global warming, not far off the target set by pointy headed scientists of 1.5 degrees.?All this is against a background of overwhelming acceptance of the principle of global warming.?It looked like we had seen the last climate denier back into his box. I thought we hadn’t heard much for months from Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor and Knight Grand Arch of the Order of Climate Sceptics. Then, up he popped in the Spectator suggesting that it was all climate scaremongering and anyway, it’s good to have a bit of warming as so many people die of cold related conditions.

What COP26 has proved is that this is a time for cool heads.?The arts dominated media, as usual, struggled.?The desperate headline that there are “More delegates representing fossil fuel interests than any individual country,” is pathetically sloppy journalism.?A moment’s thought and you are saying, “Of course there are.”?Fossil fuels are burned in all two hundred countries represented so there will be more representation.?They are part of the problem and, with their resources, they will be part of the solution.?What they are not is the devil incarnate, as ridiculous organisations such as Insulate (more accurately “Irritate”) Britain suggest.?Like Extinction Rebellion, they serve their cause hopelessly by glueing themselves to roads and causing disruption.??Remember the politicians’ dilemma about getting re-elected?

These clowns would be well advised to think things through a bit.?Strange to tell, not everyone has the time or the affluence to get up to annoying antics.?They have children to look after, livings to earn and they don’t like having to negotiate, quite literally, man-made bumps in the road.?Time for these protesters to desist and let the grown-ups get on with fixing things.?They have made their point.?To keep banging on and on will lead right thinking people to believe they’re just one-trick ponies with, just like Ms Thunberg, nothing much more to add to the argument.