Strip away the politics, and the climate crisis debate isn’t complicated. We’re changing the planet in ways that are “damaging and dangerous”, and every country will be affected. “No one can opt out.”

Those quotes might sound as if they came from a leftwing Scandinavian leader, but they are, in fact, from Margaret Thatcher. Speaking to the UN general assembly in 1989, Britain’s then prime minister tore into world leaders and warned that there was “no good squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay”.

Not the obvious place for a Labour climate minister to start, but it matters.

From Thatcher to New Labour’s 2008 Climate Change Act and Theresa May’s net zero target, Britain has benefited on this issue from something usually in short supply: political consensus. There has been a shared belief that the climate crisis is real and that we have a responsibility to play our proper, humble role in tackling it.

It’s never been a hard sell here. This is a country that rinses jam jars, hoards “bags for life” and sells or shares what we no longer need. That instinct to make things last runs deep – I saw it first-hand when I worked at the WWF and Friends of the Earth. Yet, sadly, 2026 is already seeing the political consensus on the climate start to crack. Even as the war in Iran chokes global energy supplies, some pick a fight rather than face the........

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