24.

I was summoned to a dinner at Clarence House by the Prince of Wales, its purpose shrouded in mystery. All I was told was that it was something to do with the countryside, and HRH was assembling a small group to discuss an issue he felt deeply about.

We were an intriguing party that gathered around the dining-room table, beneath the John Piper paintings and a glorious wartime portrait of the Queen Mother by Augustus John. There were shepherds and sheep farmers, a Savile Row tailor, three fashion designers, Australian and Kiwi wool executives, a Yorkshire mill owner, several Thomas Hardy-style wool merchants, and British Wool Board honchos from Bradford. Little did I know this disparate band would come to play such a part in my life, and for so long.

Nepalese Gurkhas, with Prince of Wales ostrich-feather buttons, served as waiters. The individual butter pats, set before each place, were embossed with the Prince’s feathers. The main course was lamb, which should have been a clue to our purpose.

The Prince was sharing with me his despair at our throw-away society. ‘Young women today, they buy some synthetic outfit or other from a high street chain … H&M or that other one, whatever it’s called, owned by that … man [Topshop, Sir Philip Green] … and when they’ve only worn it once or twice, they throw it away without a second thought and it goes straight to landfill [he pronounced it lendfill], where for all we know it lingers for a thousand years. In lendfill! Never decomposing or biodegrading. Whereas in one’s great-grandmother’s day, women would wear a good dress for years, passing it down through the generations, mother to daughter, and it would be altered – lengthened or shortened – according to the fashion of the day.’

As he spoke about the young women of today, I realized he could easily mean Sophie Coleridge, who was culpable of all these crimes.

‘And the young men are no better,’ he went on. ‘They buy some mobile telephone or other, and it’s still working perfectly well, when Apple or some such invents a new type, which one’s always assured is better, and the young throw away their old one and it goes to lendfill, where the batteries leak forevermore into the soil, contaminating the planet.’

This time it was Alexander, Freddie and Tommy Coleridge he must have had in mind.

The Prince addressed the table on the crisis in the wool industry. The wool price had slumped to its lowest level for decades, to the point where sheep farmers were giving up and quitting the land. Sheep numbers were tumbling. They had halved in Britain since the seventies, and it was a similar story in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The wool price was now so low it cost more to shear a ewe than the value of the wool. Scientists were working on new breeds of sheep without any wool at all, which the Prince considered appalling. Meanwhile, the march of oil-based synthetic fibres such as polypropylene seemed unstoppable. Ninety-seven per cent of the world’s clothes were made from unnatural fibres, and this was increasing. Every one of these garments eventually ends up in landfill, forever. It was a similar story in the carpet world, with real wool carpets being thrashed by man-made ones. The Prince painted an apocalyptic vision of a future world without sheep, altering the landscape of Britain from the uplands of Cumbria to the moorlands of Exmoor.

Gesturing to the man on his right, an amiable Worcestershire countryman named John Thorley, he announced that John had agreed to launch the Prince of Wales’s Wool Project, to fight the good fight. Turning to the man sitting on his left – me – he said he hoped I would support his idea and play a full part. Being British, I instantly agreed.

It should be unequivocally stated that I am an HRH fan. He has been shown to be right in almost all his views and campaigns: on heritage, on architecture, on literacy, on the Prince’s Trust, on the environment, on soil, on plastic bags, on rainforests, on red squirrels, on faith. And he is right about wool. Quite how right, I would learn over time.

John Thorley and I met up frequently in a Worcestershire pub near Malvern, named The Swan Inn at Newland. The impetus of the Prince’s dinner had encouraged the wool boards of Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa to part-fund the project, and there was further support from the Norwegians and the Shetland Isles. We resolved to be a big tent organization, promoting the benefits of wool in all its forms: in fashion, interiors, carpets, insulation, and the built environment. And we dropped the worthy working title the Wool Project for the more aggressive Campaign for Wool. Rather a smart logo was designed, featuring a green sheep. John was the Founding Chairman, and I was his deputy. The Prince was our Patron. We were good to go.

The Campaign for Wool was officially launched in February 2009, in a tithe barn in Cambridgeshire at Wimpole Hall. The barn had been designed by Sir John Soane for the third Earl of Hardwicke, and was certainly the coldest barn in Britain. The breath of the guests on that frozen winter’s morning rose in vaporous gusts. The Prince made a stirring speech amplifying the plight of the sheep farmer, and the environmental peril of synthetics. My own speech contained one good joke: ‘All we are saying is give fleece a chance.’

The campaign gathered steam when we invented Wool Week. Beginning as a London-centric event, it soon became an annual fixture nationally, then internationally, with Wool Weeks running in fifteen cities from Hamburg to Tokyo.

John Thorley was a delightful colleague, seventy years old with a wide roster of interests. He was Chairman of numerous arcane organizations, encompassing Welsh footpaths, independent abattoirs, a British semen export company (cattle semen, not human), and another HRH initiative to promote the eating of mutton. He had recently become a father for the first time, which imbued him with a certain frisky bonhomie. We got on famously.

It is surprising how rapidly you can absorb an entirely new subject. Prior to the campaign, I would have struggled to identify a Bluefaced Leicester from a Leicester Longwool, but soon I was pontificating confidently on Swaledales, Gotlands and Greyface Dartmoors, particularly when speaking to non-experts. We spent time in Bradford, historic capital of the wool trade since medieval days, still headquarters of the British Wool Board, and surrounded by the warehouses of wool merchants, scourers, spinners and mills. My friend Peter Ackroyd,fn1 a third-generation woolman, introduced me to Shipley and the Victorian model village of Saltaire, with Salts Mill and the millworkers’ cottages. In the evenings, we discussed wool at Akbar’s, the great balti mega-restaurant on Bradford’s ‘Curry Mile’.

The precarious situation of wool can be grasped from this one statistic: before the Second World War, a sheep farmer made half his profit from the meat of his flock, half from the wool. By 2010, he made all his profit from meat and a mild loss on the wool. And yet there were still 60,000 people working in one part of the British wool trade or another, in the long supply chain which runs from farmer to wool board (which collects, classifies and auctions wool in greasy form), then to wool merchants who send it for scouring, casting and spinning, before it eventually becomes a tweed jacket or roll of carpet.

We set about talking up wool to fashion designers and department stores, high street chains and anyone who would listen. Many wouldn’t. But Harvey Nichols and Selfridges got behind the project, as did a host of brands from Jigsaw and Brora to L. K. Bennett. A breakthrough came when first Marks and Spencer, then John Lewis pledged for wool, and almost fifty stores devoted shop windows to Wool Week. Furthermore, they started reintroducing wool into their suits, and John Lewis shifted wool carpets from the back to the front of their departments. It felt like a small triumph.

Not everything ran smoothly. A busload of Scottish sheep farmers travelled down from the Borders, to experience the wonders of the campaign. They were particularly impressed by a display of edgy wool outfits by young designers, at which free drinks were available.

The combination of alcohol and excitement at the campaign’s super-attractive PR team went to the farmers’ heads. Their conduct soon turned inappropriate, with many wandering hands, and they had to be firmly warned off. It was #MeEwe.

We put on wool fashion exhibitions in London, to which designers and fashion people showed up, from Christopher Bailey of Burberry to Paul Smith to Mario Testino. And, not long afterwards, we took over Somerset House for a wool interiors show. Our Patron opened both events, and this encouraged more designers to get behind the campaign. The London Design Centre at Chelsea Harbour staged annual wool installations, designed by my sister-in-law Becca Metcalfe. Several dozen fashion colleges embraced the campaign, and wool hit the curriculum for the first time.

We invented a string of wool stunts. There was the grassing-over of Savile Row, with half an acre of turf and a flock of fluffy Merinos grazing between tailor’s shops. Another was the burying of two sweaters – one pure wool, the other synthetic – in a flower bed at Clarence House, to demonstrate how the wool one quickly and naturally decomposes in soil. The Prince performed the burying task with a silver shovel, and the two jerseys were left to fester for six months. As the day of the unburying drew nearer, I became nervous, in case the big reveal was an anticlimax, with the world’s press looking on. The great day finally arrived. And, lo, the wool jersey had all but disappeared, with a few fat worms digesting the final strands. As predicted, the synthetic one was intact. You could have put it through the washing machine and worn it again.

We set fire to wool and synthetic clothes at Clarence House, to demonstrate the fire-resistant qualities of wool. The synthetic sweater went up in a blaze, while the wool one smouldered and never caught alight. Wool carpets were safely blasted by a flame thrower, synthetic ones erupted like Vesuvius.

I had become Chairman of the campaign, with the excellent Peter Ackroyd as COO. The various wool boards, accustomed to centuries of rivalry, maintained an uneasy truce, though skirmishes could break out at any moment. The Prince of Wales devoted a startling amount of time to his campaign, criss-crossing the country to visit hill farmers. He would arrive in Bradford on the royal train, then tour wool mills and scouring plants.

Peter and I were summoned to Birkhall in Scotland to receive our instructions from the Patron. A big black Land Cruiser met us at Aberdeen airport, for the drive to Ballater. It is possible we felt a bit smug, being whisked along in this tip-top royal vehicle.

Thirty miles from Aberdeen, the car drove over a rusty nail, blew a puncture and jolted to a halt. We climbed out and stood on a grass verge, while lorries thundered past. It began to rain. The driver attempted to change the tyre, but the armour-plated car was too heavy. He rang Birkhall, who said they would organize a local taxi to collect us.

It grew dark. The lorries drove closer to the verge. The rain intensified. We retreated backwards against a fence. As we stood there, a pony stuck its head over the gate and grabbed a mouthful of my suit.

The taxi appeared. It was battered and reeked of cigarette smoke. Across the windscreen was a ‘Say Yes to Independence’ sticker.

‘Where to?’ the cabbie asked in a broad Scottish accent.

‘Er, Ballater?’

‘Not to the royals’, I hope?’ He drove on in brooding disapproval.

We staged a Wool Conference at Dumfries House in Ayrshire, with several hundred international wool experts, environmentalists and retailers. A great charter was unveiled by the Prince – the Dumfries House Declaration – which established global standards of animal welfare and environmental best practice. By the end of 2017, it had been signed by more than 500 organizations representing half a million wool workers around the world.

Has the campaign made any difference? Most farmers think a big difference. Ten years in, the Australian and South African wool industry is booming as seldom before; in Britain and New Zealand, it remains a perpetual slog.

I have met people through the campaign I would never otherwise have met, and learnt things I would never otherwise have known. And, at the very least, I can distinguish the sheep from the goats.