All right, I'll go myself: Sunak will attend COP27
After snubbing the global conference in favour of preparing for the Budget, the prime minister has announced that he will attend the UN meeting in Sharm El-Sheikh
Last year, a year late thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, the UK hosted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties, more catchily known as COP26. The international summit was held in Glasgow from 31 October to 12 November 2021, under the dutiful but unshowy presidency of Alok Sharma, a former Conservative cabinet minister. There were some impressive headlines, with 197 countries signing the Glasgow Climate Pact which is designed to halt climate change, more than 140 countries pledging to achieve net-zero carbon emissions and over 100 committing to stop deforestation. The world of environmental politics, however, is full of high-sounding promises and rather less full of specific and measurable actions, so the verdict on COP26 remains mixed.
On Sunday, COP27 will begin in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, presided over by the host country’s veteran foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry. Already headlines have been made by those choosing not to attend. Vladimir Putin, of course, cannot safely leave the Russian Federation, but Xi Jinping, the Chinese president will also be absent, as will Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, teenaged climate activist Greta Thunberg and, as things currently stand, Charles III. Last week, our own prime minister, Rishi Sunak, had announced that he would not attend because of what Downing Street called “depressing domestic challenges” (a Freudian slip?). This was depicted as a choice to concentrate on the everyday business of economics and the cost of living rather than spending taxpayers’ money on attending a grand international summit.
There was immediate negative reaction. The Egyptian government expressed its “disappointment” at Sunak’s decision, while opposition parties in the UK saw an opportunity to harangue the Conservative leader for his lack of commitment to environmental policies. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer tweeted, “Britain showing up to work with world leaders is an opportunity to grasp. Not an event to shun.” Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, said the decision “flies in the face of the UK's proud tradition of leading the world in our response to the climate change.” Even Sharma, the outgoing COP president, said he was “disappointed”.
Now the prime minister has reconsidered. At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, he announced that there was “no long-term prosperity without action on climate change”, and “That’s why I will attend COP27 next week—to deliver on Glasgow’s legacy of building a secure, clean and sustainable future”. Like many U-turns (an overused phrase but this episode clearly qualifies) it was dressed up as a straightforward decision with no hint of hesitation. Instead, the impression given is one of resolute and determined leadership. It seems a sensible decision: the Johnson government made much of the UK’s leadership at last year’s COP26, and spending a few days in Egypt will not harm Sunak’s domestic agenda while it may benefit him overall. But are these international gatherings worth the time?
There is often in politics an analogous scene from Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s masterful Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister series. (I had a colleague who felt very strongly that they had done immeasurable harm to the image of the civil service: something I may return to in another essay.) In the second episode of Yes, Prime Minister, “The Ministerial Broadcast”, Jim Hacker, the eponymous leader, has just returned from a bilateral meeting with the US president in Washington DC. Speaking to his cabinet secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, he reflects on the physical strain of such summits.
“I felt frightfully tired at the White House. I can scarcely remember a thing he said.”
“He didn’t really say much, Prime Minister. He was frightfully tired too.”
“Bit worrying, isn’t? Statesmen such as myself jetting all over the world, attending major conferences on the future of mankind, and we’re zonked?”
“It would be, Prime Minister. Perhaps that’s why negotiations are done in advance by humble servants such as I. They can hardly be left in the hands of the zonked.”
Of course this is played for laughs. But is there a grain of truth in it, a grain large enough, at least, to give pause for thought? And is there additional weight in the age of Zoom and Microsoft Teams, innovations which Hacker and Appleby could not have comprehended? In short, why is Sunak going to Egypt after all?
Cynicism is the corrosive bane of political commentary, especially in the UK. We regard politicians too easily as vain and grasping mountebanks, interested only in self-aggrandisement and self-enrichment; or else we hail those who agree with us as secular saints and our opponents as halfway to satanic status. In that poisonous atmosphere it is easy to suppose that international meetings serve only the basest of purposes, allowing politicians to preen and pamper without making any real difference.
It is, of course, not true. There are examples of international meetings where the personalities of leaders, and their interaction, have made a real difference. An obvious example is the extraordinary chemistry which existed between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They probably first met in 1972, when Reagan, then governor of California, was entertained in Downing Street by Edward Heath, but the first dedicated face-to-face encounter was in April 1975, by which time Thatcher was the new Conservative leader and Reagan, having just left office after eight years in Sacramento, was looking to the wider political stage. There was a rapport straight away, and it blossomed into warm friendship after 1981, when Reagan was president and Thatcher prime minister. They became close allies, and Thatcher punched well above the UK’s diplomatic weight, able to encourage and persuade the president, even with a slightly nannyish manner. Reagan, as relaxed an occupant of the White House as there has been, let it wash over him.
There was something of the same sense of closeness between Tony Blair and George W. Bush. It was not obvious at first that it would be so: Blair had connected easily with Bush’s predecessor Bill Clinton, a fellow left-of-centre politician and smoothly able communicator. But Blair was determined to forge a friendship with the Republican president who was sworn in in January 2001, and had the ideal matchmaker in the suave, sharp-witted UK ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer. He had been sent to the US in 1997 with clear instructions from Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff: “We want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there.”
The two leaders bonded, perhaps, over the shocking acts of violence which rocked geopolitics on 11 September 2001. While Bush began to see the world in Manichaean terms and identified an “axis of evil”, Blair saw the UK’s role in this new atmosphere as to support the US unstintingly. This partnership, reinforced by the particular nature of each man’s Christian faith (both adhered to a belief in an especially personal relationship with God), led to the two countries pressing ahead with the military intervention in Iraq in March 2003. For the rest of Blair’s premiership (until May 2007), close alliance with the United States would be a sine qua non of British foreign policy.
If these relationships had a profound effect on global politics, others have had a similarly important effect due to their lack of warmth. Margaret Thatcher’s policy towards German reunification in 1990 was heavily influenced by her distaste for the bear-like federal chancellor, Helmut Kohl. The German’s traditional device for courting fellow leaders was to invite them to his home in Oggersheim outside Ludwigshafen, and dine on a traditional dish of Saumagen, or pig’s stomach; it didn’t work on Thatcher.
Equally, Sir Anthony Eden, several times foreign secretary before becoming prime minister, had a strained relationship with President Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson. The stiff and arrogant Connecticut lawyer hated Eden’s feline, aristocratic manner, and especially his tendency to call people—even Acheson himself—”my dear”. (Even for a now-distant age, Eden’s habits were more like those of a Noël Coward character than standard personal interaction, though his successor Macmillan had a similar style.)
Most famously in recent times, Boris Johnson, held in affection by many voters for his friendly, bumbling (and wholly manufactured) manner, had strained relations with several world leaders. On paper, it should not have been so. Johnson is cosmopolitan, born in New York, raised partly in Brussels and with a Turkish great-grandfather, and speaks French, Italian, German and Spanish with differing levels of fluency. But he wrote critically of Barack Obama’s removal of a bust of Churchill from the Oval Office, “a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire—of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.” He had also said in print of Obama’s rival and eventual secretary of state, “She’s got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.”
Of the German chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel, he wrote, “She numbly decided to kowtow to the demands of Erdogan, a man who is engaged in a chilling suppression of Turkish freedom of expression.” And an off-hand remark for wholly domestic consumption offended an Asian country: “For 10 years we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing.”
These were, of course, ill-considered witticisms by a man for whom amusing copy was all; but they mattered. They lowered the temperature in negotiations with some of the UK’s key allies, and probably (though one can never tell) did not represent the prime minister’s considered opinions. But what Johnson saw as a refreshing disregard for tedious diplomatic niceties was felt by his interlocutors. There is particularly painful footage of his visit as foreign secretary to Burma when, visiting a Buddhist temple, he began to recite Kipling’s poem The Road to Mandalay. The UK ambassador, Andrew Patrick, was aghast.
“You’re on mic, probably not a good idea.”
“What, The Road to Mandalay?”
“No. Not appropriate.”
Patrick must at least have been comforted by the fact he cut Johnson off before he reached the couplet “Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud/ Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd.”
One can assume that Rishi Sunak, a Hindu son of Punjabi-descended parents born in Kenya and Tanganyika, will not make the kind of colonial-era blunders of his predecessor. Indeed, he is something of an unknown quantity on the world stage. In a tribute to the new prime minister’s appointment, President Biden referred to him as “Rashid Sanook”. As he held office as chancellor mainly during the pandemic, when travel opportunities were limited, Sunak will not have met many of the leaders he will encounter in Egypt. But a lack of preconceptions can be an advantage. He now has an opportunity to make his own impression as a calm, controlled leader with a firm grip on policy, his supposed forte, as he mixes with his counterparts over canapés.
It is true that a lot of groundwork and detail is carried out by officials. They are invaluable support. When John Major was negotiating the details of the Maastricht Treaty with other EEC leaders, the UK’s permanent representative to the European Communities, the razor-sharp, chain-smoking Sir John Kerr, hid himself under the table at which the leaders were seated and passed notes to Major from underneath the tablecloth. Effective ambassadors, like Meyer, mentioned above, will lay much of the groundwork for high-level encounters and keep relationships on an even keel on a day-to-day basis; Sir Nicholas Henderson, hauled out of his brief retirement by Margaret Thatcher to serve as envoy to the US from 1979 to 1982, was a key player in courting US friendship, as he and his wife were hugely popular in Washington society and he befriended President Reagan from the very beginning of his presidency.
But decisions are made by those who turn up, and they are the ones who have influence. Of course, the Number 10 media handlers will have an eye on the publicity potential of Sunak’s trip, as foreign engagements can enhance the prestige of a prime minister (as Thatcher understood profoundly, for example in her March 1987 visit to Moscow, a few months before a general election). For better or worse, these are the international counterparts with whom Sunak and his government will have to deal over the next months and years, and appearing as the hosts of the previous COP will be no bad thing.
The whole issue of climate change is a fiercely sensitive one for a certain portion of the Conservative Party. Only four per cent of party members think that reaching net-zero carbon emissions is a top-three priority for the government, and some right-wing MPs have conflated support for business, unhappiness about the scale of the Covid-19 lockdown and a deep suspicion of climate change targets into a strange sort of isolationist, anti-leftist, “no-nonsense” ideology. Although a bare majority of Conservative Members of Parliament (55 per cent) think any economic recovery must be “green” in nature, nine per cent of them do not accept the scientific consensus on climate change, while a third do not believe that climate change has any connection to extreme weather events.
Few would dispute that the immediate crisis in the cost of living and energy prices must be the focus of government policy. But sheer managerialism, even supposing it can be carried out successfully, is not (if it ever was) enough to inspire voters and tempt them towards supporting a fifth Conservative victory at the next general election. The prime minister and his party must also look upwards and ahead, and define clear objectives and ideas which will be the hallmark of a continued administration.
The Conservative Environment Network already has the public support of over 100 Tory MPs. It emphasises what Margaret Thatcher told the party conference in 1988: “The core of Conservative philosophy and of the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth.” It highlights the contribution of John Major at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and dwells heavily on Boris Johnson’s characteristic and ebullient optimism before COP26 last year, where he described the dangers of letting climate change proceed unchecked but spoke warmly of the opportunity the conference presented.
While COP26 will not be the end of climate change it can and it must mark the beginning of the end. In the years since Paris the world has slowly and with great effort and pain, built a lifeboat for humanity. Now is the time to give it a mighty shove into the water, like some great liner rolling down the slipways of the Clyde, take a sextant sighting on 1.5c, and set off on a journey to a cleaner, greener future… so let’s get to work with all the creativity and imagination and goodwill that we possess."
There is a leadership role still to be grasped. The government did not quite grab the banner of environmentalism in the way it could have in Glasgow, but it has some important foundations on which it can build. The UK has decarbonised more quickly than any G20 country since 2000, it is the largest producer of offshore wind energy in the world, it supports nearly half a million jobs in the low carbon sector and its supply chain, and it has enshrined in law a net-zero target of 2050.
The prime minister’s attendance at COP27 is important. He will endure short-term embarrassment from the opposition for his initial reluctance, and that was avoidable, but every government makes mistakes, and the most important thing is to remedy them quickly and move on. Grant Shapps, the cabinet minister responsible for energy, and his junior minister handling climate change, Graham Stuart, must understand the bigger picture, and work with colleagues across government to make sure that policy is coherent, directed and effective. And Sunak must see that the climate change agenda matters to two-thirds of the public, half of whom worry about it regularly. Here is a chance to find a cause which resonates across the political spectrum, and which is, if one accepts the scientific consensus, existential. It also offers huge opportunities for innovation and technical and industrial leadership. A week in Sharm El-Sheikh will not save the planet. But it may prove a good start.