Meat Tax? Compulsory car sharing? Seven different bins? All scrapped! But hold on…

…these were real announcements by a real prime minister with real graphics – and they are all totally unreal. Sunak’s climate speech was dead on arrival, writes Tom Peck, and his BBC interview with Nick Robinson was its open casket funeral

The PM has weakened a host of net zero pledges (PA)

It must be assumed to have been Team Sunak’s idea to usher the BBC’s Nick Robinson into the “Thatcher Room” at Downing Street. It could hardly have been a more generous act of hosting, providing as it did a truly unimprovable introduction to a 15 minute interview that only went further downhill from there.

Last week, when Rishi Sunak announced he wasn’t going to bother going to the United Nations General Assembly – as almost every prime minister before him has done, every year – a very old clip started to do the rounds of Margaret Thatcher, addressing said General Assembly 30 years ago, telling the world it had to come together and take drastic action on climate change.

And here was Rishi Sunak: not in New York, but in Downing Street, doing his best to try and place some kind of limit on the catastrophic consequences of his decision the day before, to announce he was cancelling the only thing for which an almost unanimously hostile public still gives him and his party credit – its ambitious targets for decarbonisation.