The capitulation of one of Britain’s grandest car makers was announced last weekend, at the Bentley Drivers Club (BDC) annual dinner, held at the Dorchester hotel. Well, not so much announced, more mentioned quietly over a glass of wine, just before a traditional toast to the company’s founder, “WO”.

The news, from a highly placed source, deserves a wider audience, though: Bentley, maker of perhaps some of the most rip-snortingly unPC cars every to hammer down the outside lane, is planning to introduce an environmentally friendly diesel engine. Details are a little sketchy – I blame the wine – but it will be a V12, probably culled from the diesel at present being trialled in the Audi R8 (Audi, like Bentley, is owned by VW). It could be in production within three years, possibly in the Arnage, although now I’m filling in the memory blanks.

When news of this development reaches the wider Bentley-driving fraternity, it will probably have them choking on their canapés, and maybe even suffering coronaries. Not just because Bentley will be using engines more usually associated with tractors and articulated lorries; the move signals a surrender to what BDC members no doubt regard as lily-livered, liberal tree huggers.

The club was founded on the memory of the Bentley Boys, the wealthy gentlemen racers of the 1920s, who swaggered through the nascent racing scene almost as quickly as they lived their lives outside it. They had names such as Bertie Kensington-Moir, and amid the parties were pretty handy behind the wheel in a Toad-of-Toad-Hall kind of way. Rounding a corner at the 1927 Le Mans, one of them, SCH “Sammy” Davis, an all-round good egg, noticed debris on the track and, as a precaution, slowed from 100mph to 80mph. It wasn’t enough to stop him ploughing into a three-car pile-up, but he extricated himself, nursed his stricken car to the pits, patched it up and went on to win the race. In other words, these were men who would have regarded emissions taxes as balderdash.

Bentley privately admits the new diesel engine will be little more than tokenism, although it dresses this up by saying the power plant would suit some of its less sporty cars. It may be a minor move, but it is symptomatic of the impact that the environmental lobby is having on the types of cars we drive. It’s one thing to strive to clean up the engines in the millions of Fords, BMWs and Citroëns clogging the nation’s motorways, but should niche cars – the sort that sell only in hundreds – be tarred with the same green brush?

Earlier this month, Dean Florez, a Californian state senator who is making a name for himself as a zealous advocate of anticar legislation, has tabled a bill that could have far-reaching consequences. He is pushing to overturn an exemption that allows classic cars – those built before 1976 – to escape an emissions cap that applies to newer cars. The exemption, which also applies in a similar form in Britain and the European Union, protects the (proportionately) tiny number of classic cars that liven up our roads, and recognises their infinitesimal impact on CO2 levels.

And it is not just exotic cars that the eco-bandwagon is killing. The green wash seems to drain the colour out of other effervescent aspects of our lives. In the 1950s we had the Rat Pack, intent on smoking and gambling their way through life. Later, in the 1980s, there was the Brat Pack, with Charlie Sheen on a mission to discover exactly how much cocaine and how many hookers he could take on while behind the wheel of a convertible. Rock stars used to throw TVs out of hotel windows, drive Rollers into swimming pools and direct traffic while dressed as Hitler. Today we have Leonardo DiCaprio driving a Toyota Prius and George Clooney making films about corruption in the oil business. Chris Martin of Coldplay talks about his macrobiotic diet and Radiohead have reportedly refused to play Glastonbury because the festival isn’t good for the environment.

All of which may be laudable in itself. But shouldn’t it instead be us, the Mondeo-driving masses, bearing the mundane cross of do-gooder eco-friendliness?

I know what WO would say.

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