He says his rivals are “failing because they have inadequate answers on how and just pivot back to why”, adding: “hysterics are not a survival strategy.” Baker has a structure for campaigning called “why/what/how/what-if”, answering all these questions. They agree with me that the green wing has not yet put out a coherent positive message. While reporting on this, I have been speaking to the Braverman/Baker campaign about their tactics, to try and understand what has happened. Meanwhile, the conversation around climate has been dominated by Braverman and Badenoch. This weekend, I understand it was still trying to find a candidate to sign up to eco pledges that are in the 2019 conservative manifesto. But the green wing was not fighting the same battle.
As Boris Johnson weakened and fell, climate sceptics were working behind the scenes to find a successor who would ditch his green policies. While the anti-net zero faction has been plotting for months, finding candidates who will ditch net zero in return for support, the larger green wing has assumed that net zero is a given. We warned that the Conservatives were slipping into a climate culture war, similar to the one they had over Brexit.Īt the time, some green activists chided me, pointing out that the majority of Conservatives at the time wanted to reach net zero, and that half of all backbenchers are in the Conservative Environment Network, a forum committed to net zero policies and targets.īut while covering the Brexit campaign, I’d seen how a small, nimble alliance of rightwing campaigners can leave a large group enjoying contented consensus in the dust. This rang alarm bells for me, and so in February this year my colleague Matt Taylor and I dug into it and found the group had been lobbying other MPs for months and slowly trying to chip away at climate consensus. They said that they wanted to question net zero and argued that it was too expensive. He then, along with colleague Craig Mackinlay, set up the parliamentary Net Zero Scrutiny Group, launching it in the pages of the Telegraph and getting around 20 MPs to sign up. Baker, who commands the powerful ERG group credited with pushing a hard Brexit, became a trustee of climate-sceptic thinktank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation. But underneath all this, there’s been a slow, creeping campaign by a nimble rightwing group of MPs who have been winning over key colleagues to the climate-sceptic cause.įresh from his Brexit win, MP for Wycombe Steve Baker found another cosy consensus to shatter – that of net zero. Even those in the green space who do not vote Conservative grudgingly said that a lot of the policies put forward were pretty good.
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