Joined-Up Thinking

The Tories have a dodgy record on the environment. Cameron briefly saw it as a selling point, hugging huskies alongside gay marriage as a sign that they were modern and lovable, but when Osborne signals that it’s time to get down to business, they ditch the “green crap” and sabotage a really good scheme for promoting solar panels, putting some good firms out of business.

But now we have Boris and Carrie, and the one fact that everyone repeats about Carrie is that she’s a passionate environmentalist. So now, with Brexit done and the world uniting to cope with Covid and confront global warming, it’s a great time to be chairing COP 26 and demonstrating that he’s a world leader.

But nobody’s told Grant Schapps. He’s got a whole lot of road-building schemes which need to go ahead, and he’s not having pettifogging environmental reviews getting in the way of business. Get on with it, chaps, forget that nonsense. Except that, at some point, the “thinking about the future” bit collides with the “making money, business as usual” bit, and one of them has to give. That’s where the leadership comes in. Does Johnson know that? And if he does, can anyone guess which way he’s going to jump?