The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

Back in 2021, the lucky few thousand attendees of COP26 (aka the 26^th final chance to save the world) were to be thoroughly entertained by our spiffing prime minister, the now legendary Boris ‘No Rules Were Broken’ Johnson. Just judge for yourself — read this extract from his introductory speech and tell me you are not entertained:

Good afternoon everybody, welcome to COP, welcome to Glasgow. And to Scotland, whose most globally famous fictional son is almost certainly a man called James Bond. Who generally comes to the climax of his lucrative films strapped to a doomsday device, desperately trying to work out which coloured wire to pull to turn it off, while a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation which will end human life as we know it.

Gripped? Good, in that case I’ll let Boris continue:

And we’re in roughly the same position, my fellow global leaders, as James Bond today. Except that the tragedy is this is not a movie and the doomsday device is real. And the clock is ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines with which we are pumping carbon into the air faster and faster, record outputs, and quilting the earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2.

I wasn’t there, but I’m guessing his audience was lapping this up. And once Boris had finished with his warm up act, His Royal Highness was on hand to pitch in with his own brand of colourful exaggeration:

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us just how devastating a global cross-border threat can be. Climate change and biodiversity loss are no different – in fact, they pose an even greater existential threat, to the extent that we have to put ourselves on what might be called a war-like footing.

A war-like footing? Surely not. Ah but yes, because apparently, “time has quite literally run out” – yet again!

Since Trump’s commitment to making America great again has now placed the world on an actual, real-life war footing (not one of Charles’s pretend ones but one involving nuclear warheads and shit) we can now look back fondly on such rhetorical gaiety and see it for what it was – eschatological theatrics.

Regrettably, Russia wasn’t in Glasgow to enjoy Boris’s performance; it seems it had better things to do. And it looks like the USA is unlikely to be buying tickets for any future show, so it may be that the annual COP jamboree could finally be running out of steam. A new realpolitik seems to be emerging which seeks to accurately footlight the net zero melodrama. Why, even Boris’s own party seems now to be waking up to the dawning reality. Take, for example, the Rt Hon Robert Jenrick MP, who back in October 2024 had this to say during his leadership campaign:

I would go back to the Climate Change Act. I would change it so that we remove these crazy, interim, binding legal targets – the carbon budgets. I would certainly fight against Ed Miliband’s mad plan to phase out gas by 2030. No serious person believes that’s possible without doing immense harm to working people.

He could have got away with simply saying that no serious person believes that’s possible – period. But the fact that he spoke of causing immense harm does raise the interesting question of moral duty. Whilst I’ve never been a student of ethics, I did pick up the idea somewhere in the past that causing immense harm was a bad thing to do. As indeed is lying to the public. This is what Jenrick’s own website said on that particular subject recently:

As we have seen across Europe the public are sick of systematic dishonesty by the political class about what net zero entails. To reckon with the public will not only bring more people onside-it will force policymakers to balance net zero against our security and economy in a more responsible and pragmatic way. Until then politicians will keep driving political instability that blows back painfully in their faces.

He is, of course, having a dig at Labour and its net zero lunacy — and I say good on him. It’s just a shame that he wasn’t as forthcoming when his illustrious leader was holding forth in Glasgow, conjuring images of doomsday devices and James Bond. Back then it was just a case of snipping the right coloured wire, but as Jenrick knew all along and now admits:

Reaching net zero by 2050 requires us to overhaul the material foundations of our economy in just three decades. There is no historical precedent for such a change. It constitutes an eye-wateringly radical revolution; a bet on scientific progress in technology that doesn’t yet exist.

In its day, Team Boris was engaging in ‘dangerous fantasy green politics unmoored from reality’, but it wasn’t until long after the COP26 revelry had subsided that Jenrick finally chose to use that very phrase when describing every climate sceptic’s favourite Bond villain, Ed Milliband.

And now we find Rishi Sunak (remember him?) getting in on the act, telling the BBC that making net zero targets a legal thing was always a bad idea (duh?). I should be able to substantiate this finding by providing the link to the BBC’s own write-up of that ‘wide ranging’ interview. Only, they somehow forgot to include the legally-enforcing-net-zero-was-always-bonkers revelation, preferring instead to focus mainly upon Rishi’s contrition over the stop-the-boats debacle.

That’s strange, don’t you think? It’s unlike the BBC to edit out stuff they don’t approve of. You don’t suppose they could be part of the dangerous fantasy do you? I understand the BBC is a very idealistic organisation, so you just never know.