With Theresa May’s exit, UK Conservatives face green leadership vacuum

LONDON — Former Prime Minister Theresa May's announcement that she'll leave Westminster at the election creates a vacancy for a climate leader at the top of the Conservative Party. Nobody is in a rush to apply.

The Tories have had a rocky relationship with the environment over their past 14 years in power, but throughout that time some big names have been willing to embrace the fight against climate change. 

David Cameron famously hugged a husky in the Arctic before he went cold on the whole thing.  It was May who wrote a world-leading net zero target into law as one of her last acts in office. 

Boris Johnson, for all his lack of ideological focus in other areas, was an avowed environmentalist as prime minister, and saw green investment as a route to creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Johnson’s low-key appointment for COP 26 president, Alok Sharma, won plaudits across the world for his efforts at the 2021 summit. 

But the green Tory project is now dying a death. May and Sharma are departing parliament at the general election due this year, and Johnson has already gone. Other green-oriented Conservative MPs — including Chris Skidmore, who worked with May on the net zero laws, and Philip Dunne, chair of the influential Environmental Audit Committee — have either quit the Commons or are set to leave

And nobody is coming through the ranks to take up the baton.

“It is, undoubtedly, a worry that the people most committed won’t be there,” said one former minister who served under Johnson, who like others in this article was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “It’s very hard to see where things will end up after the election.”

Out of vogue

While climate-minded Conservatives might be unsure who will take on the green mantle, they know who definitely isn’t in the running: Rishi Sunak. 

Despite his relative youth and fondness for all things tech, the prime minister has long been deeply ambivalent about the net zero agenda — and last year wound back several key climate targets. 

And as things stand, no one is rushing to confront him over it. The big beasts who were once willing to challenge him on the environment are mostly drawn from the One Nation or centrist tradition within the party, which is currently out of vogue. 

A prominent One Nation MP observed sadly that the group's entire philosophy is not exactly popular with the “in crowd” seen to represent the future of the party.

Rob Ford, professor of politics at Manchester University, predicted that “the parliamentary party will be pulled in the direction of climate-skepticism because there’s no longer anyone balancing out that on the other side.”

He added that the Tory membership is to the right of the electorate on climate change, a point echoed by JL Partners pollster Scarlett Maguire, who predicts the next leader will “take the party in a more net zero-skeptical direction” in a bid to win back disaffected voters on the right of the party.

A second former minister from the One Nation grouping said: “If [the party] tacks further rightwards and goes down this rabbit hole even further, there will be some MPs who think: ‘I never signed up for this.’ 

“It’s not just climate, it’s a whole worldview about our economy and how the U.K. sees itself. Who will want to stay to fight the cause?”

Green shoots

Not everyone of green Tory persuasion shares this view.

Sam Hall, director of the Conservative Environment Network (CEN), the party’s green caucus, noted that, as well as tackling climate change, there are self-interested reasons not to forsake green activism. 

“It will be essential for the party’s political fortunes that it continues to champion bold action on the environment, especially important for appealing to younger voters,” he argued.

Rachel Wolf, director at public opinion consultancy Public First and co-author of the 2019 Conservative manifesto, went further, saying that abandoning net zero would leave the party “doomed to failure … [D]emoralized parties sometimes chase issues that please tiny numbers of activists, but usually the Conservatives are more pragmatic.”

Hall admitted that May’s departure “will be a loss to Conservative environmentalism” but insisted “there remain many strong supporters” of the cause.

Hunting the next green leader

Treasury Minister Bim Afolami and Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho are considered by some MPs and Conservative advisers as potential green standard-bearers of the next generation.

Coutinho is generally regarded as too much of a Sunak loyalist to push him into tougher action, however. As energy secretary, she has fully signed up to the prime minister’s “pragmatic” approach to net zero, focusing as much on reducing the cost burden as she does on accelerating emissions cuts. But before becoming a minister she was an active member of CEN and hailed the green agenda of Johnson’s government in her 2020 maiden speech in parliament.

Others predicted that net zero purists would recede in importance next to the subset of Tories who see green infrastructure as a path to higher growth, such as former Leveling Up Secretary Simon Clarke. 

Clarke told POLITICO he was happy to be seen as a standard bearer for net zero, which he said was a “huge opportunity” to be seized. “All the new jobs on Teesside [in the North East] are in clean energy: hydrogen, carbon capture, new nuclear, offshore wind.”

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A few Tory candidates in winnable seats, such as Marisa Heath and Jane MacBean, have a track record in environmental campaigning — but they are far from household names.

Yet some green-minded Conservatives are already weighing up the credentials of a different type of leader altogether: Labour’s Keir Starmer and his Shadow Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband, who could be in power before the year is out.

“Given Labour are highly likely to win, and win big, the real priority is making sure they are strong and reliable,” said the first ex-minister quoted above.