“The papers were just going crazy with ‘Free Deirdre’ and I thought: “Sod it, let’s get on this.” As Number Ten’s Press Secretary, Alastair Campbell upended the conventions about how communications work, at least inside government. It’s impossible to imagine John Major, whose three press secretaries were civil servants, commenting on a Coronation Street storyline.
Tony Blair did otherwise – and so it is that Campbell remembers the then Prime Minister, in 1998, calling for the soap’s Deidre Allen to be released from prison. And once one politician starts “getting in on this”, others quickly follow: William Hague, then Leader of the Opposition, echoed Blair. “The whole nation is deeply concerned about Deirdre, Conservatives as much as everyone else.”
So insofar as voters noticed Rishi Sunak’s interventions last week – anti-ULEZ, more North Sea oil and gas licenses, pro-motorist – they may well have assumed that the Prime Minister was simply “getting in on Uxbridge”. That’s to say, seizing on Labour’s failure to win the by-election there to chase after voters hostile to the Net Zero policy that the Government itself supports.
Our own panel of Party members has shown a boost for Sunak’s ratings, but any similar movement among the general public has yet to happen – if it does at all. Politico’s poll of polls shows Labour with a lead of 20 points or so. Perhaps it will shift in the autumn after the party conferences take place and the next general election gets nearer. But there is no evidence that the Prime Minister’s recent tilt has made any difference.
Sunak might protest, truthfully enough, that he isn’t “doing a Deidre” – that’s to say, changing his policy to try and win votes. Those who discussed Net Zero with him, during his days as Chancellor, found him unengaged with the project, much as he was with levelling up.
His February reshuffle, when Boris Johnson was still in place as Uxbridge and South Ruislip’s MP, saw institutional change – with the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero hived off from the Business Department. There was more to the shake-up than changing titles. The Prime Minister wanted to strengthen energy security, the first leg of the policy stool, at the expense of lower emissions, the second, on which Ministers’ attention had been concentrated.
As for North Sea oil and gas, it “simply makes no sense whatsoever to deny our own oil and gas, and instead import it – with twice the embedded carbon – from elsewhere in the world”. So said Grant Shapps in April, three months before the Uxbridge by-election, adding that he “couldn’t be more pro oil and gas”.
So Sunak wasn’t simply “getting in on Uxbridge” when he visited Aberdeen last week. His plan to “max out” North Sea oil and gas extraction has been taking shape since the winter – hence the softening (though not the abolition) of the windfall tax on fossil fuel producers in June. But Boris Johnson isn’t the only occupant of Number Ten during the past few years who wants to have his cake and eat it.
In the wake of the by-election, the Prime Minister refused to confirm that the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars still stands, before then doing so later. The to-and-fro may have reflected a tussle between his own instincts and the Government’s timetable.
Even from the editor’s chair on this political blog, I feel the power of the push for Net Zero. Over two years, in describing “the cynical politics of emissions targets”, I wrote that when capitalism goes green, and its party, the Conservatives, follows. “To make a complex story simple, green technologies mean subsidies, subsidies mean jobs, and MPs want those jobs for their constituents. Who can blame them?”
“Hence the rush of articles on this site, more numerous by our count than on any other subject, from backbench MPs making the case for green technologies that will mean “green jobs” in their seats.” The Net Zero timetable has the unstoppability of a war railway mobilisation plan.
So even were he inclined to do so, Sunak will be unwilling to tear up government targets: there is too much invested in them, in political as well as financial terms, for him readily to do so. Furthermore, the picture is complicated by politics as much as policy – and where the Prime Minister wants his party to be in relation to Labour on energy and climate policy as the next election approaches.
The Conservatives have been banging away for weeks about the connection between Keir Starmer and Dale Vince – the businessman who helps to fund both Labour and Just Stop Oil. Greg Hands has been demanding that the party return the £1.5 million that it has received from Vince.
Downing Street and CCHQ want you to imagine Starmer as one of those fanatics chucking orange powder around the place during, say, the premiership Rugby final. Sunak is trying to carve out a balance between support for Net Zero in principle and opposition to some of its consequences. This is another inheritance from the Blair/Clinton years: triangulation. On the one side, fanatical climate change denialists. On the other, Starmer and Just Stop Oil. In the sensible middle, the Prime Minister.
Starmer, of course, is trying the same trick himself – rushing into the Times this morning to dismiss Just Stop Oil as “contemptible”. On the one side, Just Stop Oil. On the other, Net Zero-betraying Sunak. In the middle, Starmer himself. Fun and games.
Both leaders are wrestling with a problem. On paper, Net Zero is popular with voters, as James Frayne has pointed out on this site. In practice, the Uxbridge result, and voter revolts abroad, suggest that it won’t be – at least when tax rises, bans, and new costs kick in. (Though ULEZ, remember, is at least as much as a health-related measure as an environmental one.) What of the policy itself?
Asking the question takes me back to Blair – now older; perhaps wiser; probably sadder. “Don’t ask us to do a huge amount when frankly whatever we do in Britain is not really going to impact climate change, he told the New Statesman recently. “The number one issue today – and this is where Britain could play a part – is how do you finance the energy transition?
“Because, basically, the developed world’s emissions are going down, but the developing world’s are going up. These countries have got to grow, so how do you finance the transition? Secondly, how do you accelerate the technology?” He’s right. Net Zero itself is one thing; our timetable quite another. And that politicians aren’t willing to alter it doesn’t mean that it will be hit. For example, how likely is that a charging network for electric vehicles will be properly in place by 2030?
This site’s take on the timetable two years ago was that “the landscape ahead looks to be one of conflicting policy objectives, punts in new technologies that won’t always come off, pressure on consumers, business and taxpayers, jobs that won’t always be sustainable – and further damage to the standing of politics”. Little has changed.
Meanwhile, Sunak – charged with “getting on on Uxbridge” while implementing policy he wants anyway – will be frustrated by the stubborness of the polls. It might help were his energy message part of a bigger story about his purpose – what he wants for the economy and for the country. There are signs that he recognises this but time is short. The general election is less than eighteen months away.