James Cleverly should be allowed to speak about net zero

Yahoo

3 days ago

There will be a great wailing and a gnashing of teeth in parts of the Conservative Party tonight when former foreign secretary, former home secretary and former Tory leadership candidate James Cleverly takes the stage.
Speaking at an event organised by the Conservative Environment Network, Cleverly will don the mantle of moderate conservatism and make the case for his party to embrace the drive towards net zero. This is a direct challenge to the party leader, Kemi Badenoch, who has been trying to woo Reform supporters back to the Tories by rejecting the Government's ambition to achieve a fully carbon-neutral UK by 2050.
It's an act of political courage by Cleverly, who, had it not been for last-minute strategic shenanigans by his fellow MPs in the final round of voting in last year's leadership election, might now be sitting in the leader of the opposition's offices at Westminster. Cleverly already has a USP as a Tory politician: he sounds reasonable, down-to-earth and self-effacing, and was one of the party's more effective ministers in government.
Taking a brave and principled stand in the face of public and party opinion doesn't necessarily make one right, however. But give Cleverly his due: no other MP has dared raise the standard for moderate conservatism since the party's well-deserved humiliation at the polls last year, despite its long and honourable tradition of centrism. It was only Margaret Thatcher's arrival as leader in 1975 that transformed the former 'one nation' Conservatives into a more radical, Right-wing, ideological and – for a time, at least – electorally dominant party.
That moderate tradition, most recently and effectively represented by the former chancellor and three-times leadership contender, Ken Clarke, remains a serious and respected strand within the party. Without it, the Tories might as well rebrand themselves 'Reform' and invite Nigel Farage to take over as leader. The last Conservative leader of the opposition to succeed in becoming prime minister was that well-known 'green' Tory, husky-hugging David Cameron. True, he only won the keys to Number 10 with the help of the Liberal Democrats, but he also won 37 per cent of the electorate's support – significantly more than the victorious Labour Party won last year.
Alas, I fear, for Cleverly, times are very different today. The Conservatives still need to be a broad coalition that includes the likes of Cleverly sitting alongside, not behind, Badenoch on the green benches. But the nation's focus has shifted in the last 15 years, hence the apparent advance of Farage and his party. In 2010 there was a degree of consensus across the main parties that the science of climate change was unarguable and that the outcome of elections would decide to what extent we might avoid global catastrophe.
Cynicism has set in since then. People still believe the science, but have heard the increasingly dire warnings so often that they no longer believe there's much that mere mortals in Whitehall can do about it. There is certainly a much higher degree of scepticism in the UK about the wisdom of sacrificing personal income (in the shape of higher taxes), jobs and our standard of living in order to slow a chemical process that is largely being caused by much larger countries who are doing much less to prevent it.
Even Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister, has warned that net zero is 'doomed to fail' and that it was wrong that people were 'being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal'.
Arguably, when Cleverly has deliberately chosen to ally himself with the Government's chief net zero evangelist, climate change secretary Ed Miliband, 'courageous' is understating the case. Still, Cleverly is a big beast in the political jungle of Westminster, and the Conservative Party, reduced to barely 120 Commons seats, can hardly afford to reject his counsel entirely.
Voters are naturally suspicious of parties that confine themselves to a narrow bandwidth of political opinion – it restricts their ability to appeal to as broad a slice of the electorate as is necessary to win elections. Thatcher solved that problem by having the likes of Jim Prior and Ian Gilmour in her cabinet. Cameron did it by keeping colleagues such as Iain Duncan Smith and Liam Fox within his centrist embrace, as well as Ken Clarke himself.
Strategically, I suspect Cleverly is wrong and Badenoch is right on net zero: public anger about domestic bill prices is real at a time when the government is making life ever more difficult and expensive for our domestic oil and gas industry. That is a political reality that would still exist even without challenge on the Conservatives' Right flank from Reform, and there seems little public appetite for more concessions by UK consumers to compensate for the inaction of the US, China and India.
Some will criticise Cleverly for timing his intervention on the eve of the Hamilton by-election for the Scottish Parliament. I hate to break it to them, but not only were the Conservatives never in contention in this former Labour heartland seat, but they are nowhere near challenging for office at next year's Holyrood elections. The best the party was ever likely to do in tomorrow's contest was to trail in fourth place, behind the SNP, Reform and Labour. Cleverly's choice to delay his speech would not have changed that outcome.
But the Braintree MP is an asset to the party and ought to be seen as one. He's wasted on the back benches. If his disagreement with his leadership over net zero cannot be navigated and accommodated, the Conservative Party is in an even worse condition than I thought.
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