Three weeks ago, I noted on these pages that Rishi Sunak “is in the increasingly common position of having to worry about being outflanked on the right by Sir Keir Starmer”.
Prime Minister, fear no longer. With one sweeping U-turn, Sunak has blasted a wedge between himself and the Labour Party. It’s that special sort of U-turn, where a Conservative leader tries a quick side-curtsy to the 1922 Committee, tumbles a step backward and ends up fully prostrate at the feet of Norman Tebbit.
Sunak, like David Cameron before him, has “cut the green crap”. Gone are the flagship pledges with which the Conservative Party promised Britain would reach net zero by 2050.
Policies ripped up include the target to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2030; the phasing out of gas boilers from 2035; the imposition of new energy efficiency regulations on landlords.
Policies conjured into being solely so that the Prime Minister could announce he had vanquished them include an imagined tax on meat; a threat to outlaw solo car journeys; and a diktat that would have supposedly seen Britain subordinated to a tyrannical regime of recycling, its people a hive of humming drones fully occupied by sorting our refuse between seven – count ’em, seven – household bins.
This isn’t the first time that Westminster has been spooked by the shadow of a rogue rubbish-bin system. In 2012, questions started being asked at Tory grassroots events about an urban legend: a council so left-wing it was rumoured to have imposed a nine-bin system on its beleaguered residents. The story turned out to be real. The council, however, turned out to be Newcastle-under-Lyme – led not by Labour, but a Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition.
Our first millennial Prime Minister may also have been drawing on old episodes of The Simpsons for his fantasy of eco-despotism.
For generations of 90s children, the future of the nanny state was a bossy Lisa Simpson, barking at her beleaguered parents with the catchphrase “don’t mix polyethylene with polyurethane!”
Listen to Sunak’s speech on Wednesday, and you could hear the Prime Minister and his pollsters clearly define their target voters, not as Lisa, but as Marge and Homer Simpson: blue-collar, struggling and far too exhausted to bend to the haranguing of their Generation Z children.
(Lisa Simpson, that proto-Greta Thunberg, was surely a Generation Z-er ahead of her time.) Psephologically, he’s not wrong.
Place aside for a moment one’s hopes and fears for the planet – we will get back to that small matter shortly – and Sunak has made an intelligent political move.
The party over which he presides is divided, fretful and heading for a general election defeat. Britain may or may not have faced the recent threat of a national garbage heptarchy, but no recycling chore could be as Sisyphean a task as sorting the Parliamentary Conservative Party into a mere seven political factions. There are dozens forming as the prospect of a leadership contest post-Sunak looms.
Two weeks ago, the “One Nation” caucus gathered in London to imagine a future beyond the next election; in 10 days’ time, prospective Sunak-successors will be schmoozing potential donors at the annual party conference.
In the past, Sunak has failed to leverage his own party’s divisions to his advantage. Late in the day, that may have changed.
Sunak’s team has bet heavily on opening up a pre-election wedge between itself and Labour on green issues. It’s a tactic that worked at the Uxbridge by-election, when hostility to London mayor Sadiq Khan’s ultra-low emission zones was credited with getting Tory voters to the polls. The real trick of Wednesday’s announcement, however, was that it also allowed Team Sunak to outmanoeuvre a troublesome predecessor.
Post-Brexit, it has rarely been easy for Tory rivals to outflank Boris Johnson on the right. But Johnson wasn’t always a populist, and ever since his days as the mayor of London, there has been one policy area on which Johnson has always been at odds with the Tory grassroots.
Long before he married Carrie; even long before he recruited ex-Ecologist editor Zac Goldsmith to his inner circle, Johnson was always a champion of interventionist, heavily regulatory green policies. If there was an external influence to blame or credit for this, it was his father Stanley.
This month, the Tory party is in the middle of another round of selecting its parliamentary candidates. Reports from local association meetings – where centrally approved candidates are being quizzed on whether they would like to see Boris back in charge – suggest that there’s still a membership base loyal to Johnson and suspicious of the current PM.
But it’s Sunak, not Johnson, who has given Tory members back their diesel cars for another five years. Sunak, not Johnson, who has gifted landlords a reprieve from energy regulation, even if renters (much less likely to vote Tory) pay the consequent cost of continuing energy waste.
Sunak, not Johnson, who has reaffirmed a basic Tory principle: that prosperity comes first, and social solutions wait until we can pay for them.
Johnson and his allies were reduced to accusing Sunak of “lacking ambition” for a low-carbon future. The Business Secretary, Kemi Badenoch, was unleashed on a grumbling Goldsmith, telling LBC radio that the former minister had “way more money” than ordinary taxpayers and thus could not understand the true cost of net zero.
Her comments will resonate with many Tory MPs – there has always been a solid core who resented the former Tatler regular’s gilded path to the party’s upper echelons. Both Badenoch and Neil O’Brien were quick to point out that it is the poorest in this country who are most dependent on their cars.
Sunak’s surprise move will also cause trouble within Labour ranks. Khan’s commitment to Ulez has caused a rift with Starmer, who recognises its potential for electoral damage. Shortly after the Uxbridge by-election, Tony Blair rowed in on the Labour leader’s side by suggesting that the British public should not be forced to carry the “burden” of net-zero. As he pointed out, “one year’s rise in China’s emissions would outscore the whole of Britain’s emissions for a year”.
In coming weeks, we can expect Team Sunak to reiterate this focus on China’s responsibility for climate change – if only to force further Labour figures into backing or rejecting Blair’s remarks.
Sunak has made one last Hail Mary pass. Where commentators like myself have accused him of being too passive a leader – reacting to news, not making it – he has finally proved he can set the political weather.
Is it ethical? Is it right for the future of the planet? Just as Sunak was speaking on Wednesday, epidemiology researchers were unveiling a warning about the next pandemic: yellow fever, which we could see carried to London every summer as climate change drives plague-bearing mosquitoes to the shores of Britain.
When we are all twitching with yellow fever in 30 years’ time, perhaps we will comfort ourselves by remembering that thanks to this week’s speech, the Tory right graciously let Rishi Sunak stay in power for another six months.
But while it’s easy to sneer, Sunak has laid down one challenge to his critics. It’s the Tony Blair problem – and it’s a problem for Labour. What does significant climate change intervention look like, in a world where China can make British sacrifices feel worthless in a year of emissions? Why should taxpayers – Tory or Labour – pay the price?
