Reckless Rishi has turned his back on eco-Britain

Betrayal” is an emotive term, and ought not to be deployed lightly, but it feels fitting at a moment when Rishi Sunak abandoned his party’s green agenda, fractured a precious and fragile cross-party consensus on net zero, and relinquished Britain’s leadership role in the battle against climate change.

Grievous as all that is, it is not even clear what political (let alone economic) benefit he will derive from his move. Rarely has statesmanship been ditched in favour of recklessness for so little.

Even Boris Johnson, a world-class charlatan, didn’t panic as badly as Mr Sunak has in the face of resistance to these planet-saving policies. As the former prime minister remarked: “Business must have certainty about our net zero commitments. This country leads on tackling climate change and in creating new green technology. The green industrial revolution is already generating huge numbers of high-quality jobs, and helping to drive growth and level up our country.”

The Conservative administrations since 2019 don’t have much in the way of credit to put by their name, but the Cop26 conference and allied efforts were at least something of a verdant fig leaf. Now it seems to be succumbing to this chill autumn of Tory ambitions.

Forced to bring forward his calamitous U-turn by a well-timed leak (presumably by one of the figures around the prime minister who is still in possession of an environmental conscience), Mr Sunak made an unconvincing show. On his best days, the prime minister can sound reasonable, sober, and persuasive. Now he appears to be spinning like an offshore wind farm, but generating little sense.

He purports to be engaged in “long-term” decisions, yet the decision to postpone key policies on electric vehicles and home heating has obviously been made in the short-term electoral interests of the Conservative Party.

Mr Sunak speaks of telling the British people hard truths – and, he has hinted, abandoning the comforting but delusional cakeism of Mr Johnson. Yet he has now pledged not to pursue policies to save life on Earth – surely a transcendent cause – lest they force any inconvenience on the voters.

He insists that net zero by 2050 remains his solemn aim, but shrinks from the intermediate targets that would make such an aim even remotely practical. The incontrovertible fact is that the less we do to fight climate change now, in the 2020s, the more we must sacrifice in the 2030s and 2040s. Mr Sunak, as the old phrase has it, wills the end of net zero, but is reluctant to introduce targets for electric vehicles and heat pumps for homes that would make it so.

It might be understandable (albeit still cynical) were there much of a prospect that it would win him the next election. Mr Sunak points out that net zero has to be achieved via consent. He made some welcome proposals about improving incentives to adopt the new technologies and support people along the way. Some homes and families won’t be able to move to a home heat pump. None of that, however, is any reason to give up on leadership, or on winning the argument, or to ease up on necessarily demanding deadlines.

But politically – which is the point of these changes – they won’t help Mr Sunak. For one thing, he has opened up yet another front in his party’s permanent civil war. Though beleaguered in a party that harbours a depressingly large faction of climate sceptics there are some strong critics of Mr Sunak, led by Mr Johnson. They are not going away.

Mr Sunak also seems to be operating under the assumption that when he draws his new political “dividing lines”, Sir Keir Starmer will remain rooted to the spot, like the “useless bollard” Mr Johnson once called him. If recent experience is anything to go by, Labour will soon adopt the most electorally appealing aspects of Mr Sunak’s agenda, such as the enhanced boiler-scrappage scheme.

The Labour leader doesn’t seem like the kind of man who would force someone on a modest income, living in a Victorian terraced house, to shell out vast sums for heat pumps and insulation that wouldn’t even work. A political dividing line only works if your opponent doesn’t react. Labour will be wise to this tactic, though the party is, for the moment – rather bravely – standing by the 2030 deadline for ending the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.

In any case, Mr Sunak’s shift now means that the broad agreement on the primacy of climate change has been destroyed. That is one of the real costs of tearing down the cross-party consensus on climate measures. It obviously also creates more uncertainty for business, investors and consumers; and it dilutes the UK’s claim to global leadership that proved so valuable at Cop26.

The chances are, then, that this visible weakening in the government’s resolve will yield “net zero” political advantage. The voters have mostly stopped listening to Mr Sunak and his colleagues, and see only flip-flops and U-turns.

Mr Sunak was probably right to look again at his net zero policies, because there is public disquiet. But once again, he failed to make the case for investment, and for green energy – which would have slashed energy bills before the current crisis, and made heat pumps and electric cars far more viable.

The prime minister didn’t even try to defend the Tories’ failure to invest in onshore wind and nuclear power over the last decade – an era of historically low interest rates. If they had chosen to go down that path, green infrastructure would now be yielding plentiful cheap, clean energy.

As in so many areas, Mr Sunak has the misfortune to be prime minister at the end of a long period of rule predominantly by one party, when the mood for change is powerful. Realistically, he can’t do much about anything in the short time left to him, but he could at least have held on to one of the few things that has brought credit to his party.

Instead, just as with the pioneering early switch to electric cars, he has scrapped it.