Zac Goldsmith ‘defecting to Labour’ will send chills through the party (the Labour Party)

News that the election-blowing eco Tory peer is cozying up to your party would be enough to terrify any leader, writes Tom Peck. But it also asks the deeper question – what on earth is Goldsmith up to?

If Goldsmith has sussed you out, you might be in even bigger trouble than you realise (AP)

“Zac Goldsmith is ‘very tempted’ to support Labour at next election.” The headline will have sent waves of panic through party headquarters.

Labour Party headquarters, that is.

There are, in modern politics, few more certain ways to lose an election than to have Zac Goldsmith involved, in any way. He is the Tory Wario. There may exist no politician who, during a full decade and a half of rule by his own party, can have lost quite so many elections in quite such spectacularly self-inflicted fashion.

Eight years ago, in act of highly principled attention seeking, he promised to stand down as MP for Richmond Park if permission was ever given for a third runway at Heathrow. By the time permission was indeed given in 2016, he was very happy to say, in countless interviews, that he would never have made the promise if he’d thought he’d ever have to keep it. Then he did keep it. He stood as an independent, but lost to the Lib Dems on an entirely different point of principle altogether: Brexit.

Mercifully, there was a general election a year later, allowing him to return to the government he had just resigned from on a point of principle. Which would be embarrassing for most politicians, but not for Goldsmith, whose campaign for the London mayoralty involved targeting British Indians with leaflets claiming Sadiq Khan would steal their jewellery.

On the night of the 2019 landslide, Goldsmith quietly lost again, a humiliation that his good friend and occasional rent-free Marbella villa borrower Boris Johnson was able to rectify with a seat in the House of Lords, from where the voters could never trouble him again.

So yes, news of Goldsmith’s intention of support would be enough to terrify anyone with an election to win. But it also asks the deeper question – what on earth is he up to? Two months ago, Goldsmith resigned from the government, and criticised Rishi Sunak for not caring at all about the environment or green issues. Goldsmith’s credentials as an environmentalist are real, (his credentials as a politician are not). It is hard to work out whether this turning on Sunak is motivated more by Johnsonian loyalism or by actual environmental concern. It can of course be both.

And it also must be said that what he actually said, regarding Labour, is that he would be (very tempted) to support Labour, or indeed anyone with a meaningful plan to put the natural world at the heart of environmental policy. That there is, in short, more to green life than carbon; that there is no pathway to net zero that doesn’t involve a massive program for restoring nature. In the same interview, with the BBC’s Hard Talk programme, he does also declare that he is “not a tribal politician”. Having quit his own seat and run against his own party, this may be technically true, but he is a cultist one. At the top table of Johnsonian loyalism, only Nadine Dorries dines above him.

But he’s also, whether chiefly politically motivated or not, completely correct to say that Rishi Sunak doesn’t care about the environment. Boris Johnson is no longer prime minister mainly because he lied and lied his way to a position where he could never be trusted again by anyone – a position from which it is impossible to lead. But he cared a lot about COP26. Sunak, meanwhile, initially announced he couldn’t be bothered to attend COP27, before the backlash talked him around.

Johnson launched meaningful consultations to come up with meaningful policies about how and when to phase out boilers, expand airports and ban new petrol and diesel cars.

Sunak, meanwhile, has leapt at the chance to use green policies as a wedge issue, spurred on by a single by-election victory in an outer London borough, to the point where he appears to have genuinely pointed his party back in the direction of climate change scepticism – a profoundly depressing outcome.

The Tories, of course, do have one man with a worse campaigning history than Goldsmith, and that is Sunak himself.

The only meaningful campaign he has ever fought in his life was for leadership of the Conservative Party, and he lost to Liz Truss. His most memorable moment was allowing himself to be filmed bragging to Tory party members in Tunbridge Wells about how he’d been diverting money to them, having taken it away from “deprived urban areas” in the North – the very places, specifically, that won the party the election in 2019. It is distinctly possible that we will soon discover that Sunak, who in the middle of a cost of living crisis has this week been dining at a restaurant in Disneyland where a table for a family costs about £12,000, is actually his party’s greatest liability.

If Zac Goldsmith has sussed you out, you might be in even bigger trouble than you realise.