Rishi Sunak’s own-goal launch of his election campaign with the slogan: ‘No We Can’t’

Tom Peck watches in amazement as the PM sets fire to his future on live television in a bizarre bonfire of his party’s commitment to net zero

Is it possible to feel sorry for Rishi Sunak? (Getty)

Most people, these days, watch the news with the sound off. It’s just there, on some muted TV in the corner of the office.

For anyone who happened to glance up at the prime minister on Wednesday afternoon – perhaps on their way to an airport departure gate – and saw him wearing a look that could have been painted on by whichever Disney animator it is that specialises in drawing baby animals learning that their mother has sadly died, they may very well have texted friends to ask why it was that Rishi Sunak was resigning.

But he wasn’t resigning. This was, in fact, the prime minister launching a flagship policy. The thing that he reckons can change the narrative, turn back the tide.

The British people have seen far too many of these two specific kinds of speeches in recent years. Specifically, the Big Launch and the Big Apology. The former is supposed to involve whooping and hollering, sometimes even strobe lighting and the promise of free broadband for all.

Yet here was Rishi Sunak, carrying the countenance that summons forth that sense of weary deja vu. What was it this time? Cheese and wine party? Tractor porn? Some sort of groping?

No. No, not at all. Whole new climate policy, actually – and this one’s definitely going to win us the election.

By the time Rishi got going, everyone knew what was coming. Indeed, by the time he got going, what was coming had already been publicly disowned by half of his own MPs. Some of them were in New York, theoretically attending “Climate Week” sessions at the United Nations, though they may have instead opted for a long morning and afternoon hiding in the toilets.

What transpired was a wholesale bonfire of all of his party’s ambitious targets on net zero. A firm rejection of the very last thing that might compel anyone under the age of 40 to ever vote Conservative again.

It came with some remarkable framing. “Things”, he said, “have to change.” For too long, it’s been quick fixes, short-term politics. For too long, politicians have worried about whether or not people are going to vote for them. Well, not any more. That stops now. (I do, for the avoidance of doubt, paraphrase very slightly.)

Rishi Sunak certainly hasn’t stopped worrying, but there’s a point at which worry just makes it worse. The point, specifically, when the graphs are so damning, be they carbon parts-per-million in the atmosphere or, in this case, Westminster voting intention, that a tipping point is crossed, and crucial systems that were once a safeguard against further degradation go into reverse and start inflicting even more damage.

Once, for example, left-leaning, Conservative-loathing pundits would talk on their podcasts and say things like: “Well, actually, the UK is a global leader in the fight against climate change. Say what you like about the Tories, but they’ve overseen drastic reductions in our carbon emissions, we’re at the forefront of renewable technology, and their targets on the way to achieving net zero are some of the most ambitious in the world.”

But not any more. Now, heat pumps can do one. Electric cars can wait. Wait, specifically, far beyond the point at which they actually become cheaper.

Is it possible to feel sorry for Rishi Sunak? In some ways, his short stint as prime minister may come to feel like a late-stage Attenborough documentary. Fifty-five minutes of unrelenting doom, then a little bit at the end where he suddenly declares: “But if we act now, there is hope!” Except that nobody actually believes it. They just go upstairs, place a loving hand on the side of the cot, and have a little cry.

That last five minutes began two months ago, when the Conservatives clung on to Uxbridge by 400 votes, by trying to turn it into a referendum on London’s new clean-air zone. So now Sunak has concluded that what the people want, at the end of the hottest year in recorded history, when people in major US cities tripped and fell on to the red-hot asphalt and died of third-degree burns, is to burn the world that little bit faster.

Who of us can say what’s going on in the prime minister’s strategy meetings? Just how do you strategise a way back in to the game when you’re 25-nil down in the 88th minute?

Sunak’s Australian strategist, Isaac Levido, is very keen on “wedge issues”, which are meant to be policies that drive a wedge between you and the opposition. But the idea isn’t to drive a wedge right down the middle of your own party.

And it’s not even down the middle. The wedge appears to have gone between Rishi Sunak and absolutely everybody else. Not just his MPs, but massive car and energy companies (Ford and E.On have both released damning statements), Al Gore, and… well, the list grows by the second.

He wants to differentiate his party from Labour, but by pursuing policies that are incredibly unpopular. Another ‘wedge issue’ of this particular kind would be to announce the slaughter of the first-born, or to summon the TV cameras to Downing Street solely to tell them about your own very personal struggles with halitosis compared to “minty-fresh” Keir Starmer.

Naturally, he talks like a man desperate for the credit for taking the tough decisions, which, in this case, are actually the easy ones. He wants to be lauded for being prepared to say: “No, it can’t be done!” He said it to Liz Truss, after all, and he was right about that.

And who knows, maybe it really is possible that the guy who brought us 40 new hospitals, 20,000 new police officers, a social care plan “ready to go on day one”, “world-beating” Test and Trace, £350m a week for the NHS, and all the rest of it, may also have brought us an entirely unachievable, mainly vibes-based set of climate targets that absolutely cannot be done.

But it is just faintly possible that it won’t work. Voters, generally like to hear “Yes We Can”, ideally from a guy coming along promising to change everything. A party that’s a decade and a half in, announcing “No We Can’t”? Political predictions are never easy, but this kind of thing has never really worked.