The next Tory leader should commit to ditching net zero
‘We’re all Keynesians now,’ Richard Nixon reportedly said in 1971 before ushering in a decade of high inflation. In the twilight of his premiership, Boris Johnson’s chief political legacy to the Conservative party is likely to be cakeism – the political philosophy that denies the existence of trade-offs and asserts you can have it all. And nowhere does that apply more than his embrace of net zero, which has been embraced by virtually all the Tory leadership candidates. Cakeism is the antithesis of Thatcherism, which was about the politics of making hard choices. Cakeism also represents the negation of strategy. In his famous 1996 paper ‘What is strategy?’ the management guru
