Ducking green agenda would be disastrous for Tories

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Good morning. Three senior Conservatives have given interviews this week about climate policy that are, to put it mildly, unhelpful to Rishi Sunak — the latest was former international environment minister Zac Goldsmith, who in his resignation letter last month accused the prime minister of being “uninterested” in green issues.

I continue to think that running away from the green agenda is a disaster for the Conservative party. Some more thoughts on that, and what Sunak should run on instead, in today’s note.

Heated debate

There are three reasons why I think it’s a mistake for Rishi Sunak to water down the government’s green commitments, politically speaking. (For the policy argument, here’s our Climate Capital series, which reported the Met Office’s warning today that the UK’s hottest year of 2022 will be considered “average” by 2060 if the world keeps warming.) The first is that climate action is popular, and popular with Conservative voters. The second is that it gives Labour a line of attack that doesn’t touch the areas the Labour leadership fears concerning tax-and-spend.

And the third is that the Conservative party is itself badly divided over the issue. John Gummer, the former cabinet minister and departing chair of the UK’s climate advisory body, has given an interview to George Parker and Camilla Hodgson in which he warned that both parties are “afraid of making the tough decisions” on climate. Alok Sharma has told the Times that Conservatives who think the path to victory lies through abandoning green commitments need to “smell the coffee” in the wake of polling that shows 57 per cent of Conservative voters who plan to switch to Labour think Rishi Sunak hasn’t “gone far enough” on tackling climate change.

And Zac Goldsmith has given an interview to the Guardian’s Helena Horton that is best described as “punchy”. Here he is on Michael Gove:

“Michael is one of the most intelligent people in politics, whether you love him or hate him. He’s got a big brain, and he understands these issues. I don’t think you can understand and care about the gravity of this issue, and at the same time, be willing to take your foot off the accelerator for political expediency. I just think that would require you to be a monster.”

And here he is on Grant Shapps:

“Grant gets very animated when he talks about climate change, and the new technologies. So on one level, he likes to see himself as being at the cutting edge and sort of enthusiastic about this transition. But then, you know, we see him relapsing into a kind of caricature of a climate sceptic. I don’t think he is remotely a climate sceptic. I think he understands the gravity of the situation, so to see this kind of backward step is hugely disappointing.”

Essentially, election strategy is not that deep. You need to fight it, as former Conservative chair Norman Tebbit said of his party’s successful 1987 election campaign, on the ground where you are strong and the other lot are weak. You don’t want to fight it on the ground where the country thinks you haven’t done enough, where your own party is divided and is happy to say so publicly, and where it gives your opponent a breath of fresh air.

Can it work as part of the Conservative attack on “Big Everything”, the topic of Robert Shrimsley’s column this week?

All of which brings us to Big Everything, the outlines of which are already apparent in Sunak’s attacks on Labour. It formalises the Tory assaults against the “blob”, a term that now encompasses all of Whitehall, “lefty” lawyers and judges, the media, green campaigners, regulators, universities and trans-rights campaigners. In short, the woke liberal establishment. Naturally, it is these dark forces rather than any governmental failings that hold back Britain . . .

If the Conservatives can depict Labour as the political wing of Big Everything, a party in thrall to statist interference, climate and liberal ideologues, they have a strategy.

While I enjoyed Robert’s column a great deal, for once I’m not sure I wholly agree with it. It’s true, as Robert says, that an awful lot of British public life is run by liberals, and that the things one doesn’t say in polite company, across much of civic society and the state, are liberal nostrums not conservative ones.

But I just think incumbent governments win by running on their successes. “Big Everything”, as Robert notes, is a sign of Conservative failure. It is not a good reason to re-elect them and if it forms as big a part of the Tory campaign as it has their messaging in recent weeks, the election campaign will be a disaster.

In the case of Rishi Sunak, the biggest successes were his brave decision to raise taxes to meet Boris Johnson’s promises on public spending and the stabilisation of the UK’s reputation among markets and more broadly among governments. Sunak will not have dreamt of making such decisions when he thought about coming into politics. Nonetheless they are the ones he badly needs to talk up if he has any hope of avoiding his election campaign being beset by Conservative infighting and talk of Tory failure.

Now try this

I’m on “workcation” (where you do work from a holiday location) this week. So I read Simon Kuper’s feature on the trend with great interest. I enjoy them, though I am going to take a proper holiday in Pendeen in August. I’m looking forward to Barbara Hepworth’s garden and the Porthminster Kitchen restaurant most of all, but let me know what else I should do while I’m there.