One name stood out yesterday in the Privileges Committee dossier on parliamentarians who had attacked the panel over its investigation into Boris Johnson. Alongside the seven MPs whose comments were criticised was the name of one peer: Zac Goldsmith, the only serving minister on the list and a longtime Johnson ally. Rishi Sunak’s spokesman was forced to subsequently confirm that the Prime Minister retained confidence in Goldsmith as a Foreign Office minister. Goldsmith was, privately, asked by No. 10 to apologise for his comments about the Privileges Committee as they felt they were incompatible with his position as a Minister of the Crown.
Instead, less than 24 hours later, Goldsmith quit Sunak’s administration – and launched a blistering attack on the PM. In his two-page resignation letter, Goldsmith blames the downgrading of environmental pledges as the reason for his departure. The examples cited by Goldsmith include the decision to abandon the Kept Animals Bill and the pledge to sign £11.6 billion of aid on climate and the environment. He criticises a lack of international leadership too:
The UK has visibly stepped off the world stage… too often we are simply absent from key international fora.
Goldsmith jibes that ‘only last week you seemingly chose to attend the party of a media baron rather than attend a critically important environment summit in Paris.’ He concludes by arguing that:
The problem is not that the government is hostile to the environment, it is that you, our Prime Minister are simply uninterested. That signal, or lack of it, has trickled down through Whitehall and caused a kind of paralysis.
How damaging is this to Sunak? Goldsmith was perhaps the last prominent supporter of Boris Johnson serving in Rishi Sunak’s government – it means it isn’t the most surprising departure given recent events. However, it could still lead to a backlash for Sunak from the environmental wing of the party. The Goldsmiths and Johnson families have long-established ties, with both sharing an enthusiasm for green causes and conservative politics. Goldsmith is close to Carrie Johnson too, having hired her more than a decade ago as his parliamentary assistant. During Boris Johnson’s government, Goldsmith was able to exert an outsized influence, working in the Lords to implement a pro-green agenda at Defra.
He, Carrie and Boris Johnson believed that this was a major benefit of Brexit: a chance to introduce more rigorous standards of animal welfare and outstrip Europe on environment issues. There is a tension between those arguments and the likes espoused by Sunak, who campaigned for Leave in 2016 to better support ‘our local farmers.’
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