Which former British prime minister described the climate emergency as “a clock ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines … quilting the Earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2”?

The florid style gives it away. You’d guess Boris Johnson even if you’d forgotten that the master of Brexit bombast also had a sideline in net zero evangelism. It wasn’t the most memorable part of his repertoire and it didn’t catch on as a Conservative catechism.

Subsequent Tory leaders abandoned Johnson’s rhetorical urgency over carbon emissions and repudiated Theresa May’s targets for cutting them. Kemi Badenoch acknowledges that the science of global heating is real but only as an afterthought, once she has finished complaining about the costs of a green transition and the improbable timetable set to achieve it.

As in most matters, the Tories are flattering Nigel Farage with pale policy imitation. The Reform UK leader calls net zero “lunacy” that destroys jobs and drives up household bills. Reform’s policy is to scrap carbon targets entirely and tax renewables.

Farage needs a vehicle for economic and cultural grievance to replace his old anti-European bandwagon. It served him so well but was immobilised in multiple collisions with reality. He wants climate-scepticism to be his second crusade, rallying demoralised, alienated voters against arrogant metropolitan elites. “This could be the next Brexit, where parliament is so hopelessly out of touch with the country,” the Reform leader said over the weekend. (He seems to have dropped an earlier demand for a referendum on net zero.)

The Tories are too beaten, too drained of intellectual autonomy, to do anything but tag along behind Reform.........

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