INEFFICIENCY is a virtue, and no one exemplifies it better than French peasant farmers, according to the Prince of Wales.

In these troubled European times of the social model versus market forces, he sprang to the defence of the Gallic way of life during an address to music graduates in London yesterday.

A long-time campaigner for the view that a spiritual dimension to life is more important than inventing a better microchip, the Prince sounded a warning that culture was in danger of being sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.

Speaking at an awards ceremony for student teachers at the Royal Academy of Music, in London, the Prince cast an envious eye across the Channel, where he perceived an Elysian field in a country whose endless variety of unpasteurised cheeses has already won his support.

“Sometimes nowadays you get this awful feeling that everything has to be so efficient and relevant that there’s no room in life for the things that make it all worthwhile,” the Prince said in a somewhat oblique plea for more live music.

“Why do so many people nowadays want to go and live and have their holidays in France,” the Prince asked. Not, apparently, for the music.

“They want to make the most of all the inefficiencies of so-called peasant farming life — the wine, the food, the ambiances. We’re in real danger of sucking out every drop of culture of the things that we value as important.”

Although not a peasant, the Prince is a farmer, but only a tolerably efficient one. Last year, his Duchy Originals brand of organic foods, which range from biscuits to bacon, made a profit of £1 million on a turnover of £40 million, which most commercial enterprises would regard as an inefficient return.

The Prince’s theme eventually drifted back towards some direct relevance to his audience. “You are the thin musical line that keeps us sane,” he told the newly qualified teachers. “I still want to make a plea for the continuation of live music.”

That his sympathies were Francophile rather than Germanic became clearer when he recalled his own attempt to become a musician by taking up the trumpet at school.

“We had two lovely ladies who had escaped from the Nazis during the war and were German,” he told his audience. “They taught rather fiercely.”

Adopting a German accent that might have come straight from an episode of ’Allo ’Allo, the Prince continued: “I was playing in an orchestra and one said, ‘Ach stop. Zos trumpets. Stop zos trumpets!’ From then on I started to play the cello.”

He recounted how he had to abandon the cello when he joined the Navy because there was no room for such a large instrument in his tiny cabin on board ship. He switched to painting instead.

The Prince, who was helping the Royal College to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its music teaching certificate, referred to the Duchess of Kent, who recently studied there to become a music teacher. “In her words, they don’t half pick you to pieces.”

During his visit the Prince listened to a recital by the Russian pianist Peter Liminov and heard three 11-year-old girls from Wanborough Primary School, near Swindon, perform a fanfare on their euphoniums. In a properly efficient world, of course, that would be euphonia.

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