Good morning, and if you’re in the parts of the UK where temperatures are heading for record highs today, I hope your night’s sleep was less sweat-ravaged than mine. Yesterday afternoon, similarly damp Conservative MPs packed into a sweltering committee room in Westminster to listen to their candidates for leader talk about the climate crisis – and while the meeting did elicit a U-turn from Kemi Badenoch, who finally joined the others by saying she would back the government’s net zero target, to some observers was an air of unreality about the whole thing.
As much of the country wilted under conditions that will only become more common as the planet heats up, and parts of Europe continued to deal with wildfires, backbenchers who support the net zero targets viewed the fact that all five candidates have nominally committed to the UK’s climate targets as a success – but many observers fear that the pledges are only skin deep. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson skipped a Cobra meeting to manage the UK’s response, instead attending the Farnborough airshow.
