Allegra Stratton leads by example in saving the world… she doesn’t fancy it just yet
‘I don’t fancy it just yet,” said Allegra Stratton, the No 10 press secretary turned prime minister’s climate spokesperson, when she was asked about getting an electric car. She preferred her old diesel, thank you.
If this was merely the most memorable in a series of suboptimal comments from the person hired to communicate the urgency of Cop26, the climate summit, you couldn’t fault it as a summary of Boris Johnson’s position on decisive climate action. He doesn’t fancy it just yet.
Indeed, if Johnson ever pictured the UK’s hosting of this session as more significant than an extended posturing opportunity, he would hardly, earlier, have identified the home team as a perfect depository for spare or discarded staff and even (according to Dominic Cummings) as a usefully timeconsuming distraction for his now wife. Last week, it belatedly entered Johnson’s head, by way of concealing some recent incivility, to offer Nicola Sturgeon a starring role at Cop26 (he’d forgotten saying she shouldn’t be “anywhere near” the proceedings, in Glasgow).
If anyone involved in Stratton’s climate redeployment did attempt to brief her on the unfamiliar territory, it evidently did not extend to suggesting a review of her own arrangements, lest through any example of exceptional ignorance or entitlement she exposed the government’s climate messaging to ridicule. Though had Stratton’s diesel embarrassment been a one-off (or explained by something more persuasive than her children’s toileting needs), it might not have secured her a place in the PR hall of fame alongside jeweller Gerald Ratner’s immortal (on one of his products) “it’s total crap”.
Alas, Stratton’s “I don’t fancy it just yet” came only days after she’d urged civilians to attempt “micro-steps” that will, assuming a lifestyle not unlike her own, make them, too, One Step Greener. Although her top tip – “Did you know, you don’t really need to rinse your dishes before they go in a dishwasher?” – is likely to become a classic, there were strong contenders on planet saving via bread (had anyone else discovered not letting it go mouldy?) and ecological know-how: “Does your brand of plastic bottle shower gel come as a bar in cardboard packaging?”
“I bet it does,” Stratton persisted, presumably confident that the sort of people who’ve never heard of soap would be unlikely to suggest there are more pressing actions, pre-Cop26, let alone recall that her employer has the environmental rectitude of an urban fox.
We can’t be certain, admittedly, that Stratton hasn’t tried the Johnsons with some bespoke tips on being One Step Greener. It wouldn’t be hard. “Did you know you don’t really need to entirely refurbish an inoffensive company flat with insanely vulgar new wallpaper and sub-colonial effects? I bet you don’t!”; “Save on Daylesford packaging: try cooking your own meals!”; “Think – do you really need that new boat?”; “Impress visitors by using a pre-loved space for briefings instead of splurging £2.6m on that ‘modern press facility’!” She might have added that the biggest challenge facing humanity is, according to one distinguished Cop26 attendee, overpopulation: “It is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country and on this planet.”
This fertility-phobic savant is, of course, the father of seven or so, Boris Johnson; though writing in 2007, when he’d only contributed around four additional Johnsons to a problem that threatened, he warned, to hideously overwhelm the planet: “You have a horrifying vision of habitations multiplying and replicating like bacilli in a Petri dish.” So, practise contraception? Nah. He doesn’t fancy it just yet.
Supposing a reformed Stratton addressed her habit of patronising people who, deliberately or not, have a smaller carbon footprint than members of her own circle, her legacy in trivialising action on the climate emergency and in depicting it as fully as upsetting to libertarians as to the impoverished may already be difficult to reverse. Among those last week applauding her defiant “I don’t want anybody to be telling me tomorrow that I need to spend thousands on a new car” was – writing in the same paper where she’d cast doubt on plate-rinsing – Bjørn Lomborg, the prominent “sceptical environmentalist”. He congratulated her for so capably undermining the official government message. “Maybe we are better off looking at what climate spokespeople like Ms Stratton do.”
A prime minister who was serious about Cop26 might at this point concede, even if it recalled the unedifying circumstances of Stratton’s original appointment, that it’s probably un
helpful for a climate spokesperson to compromise the summit’s president, Alok Sharma’s pronouncements about its “particular urgency”, yet more so actively to reinforce public complacency.
But as Johnson’s coal mine gag reminds us amidst lethal floods, record temperatures and forest fires, Stratton is merely amplifying his own climate preferences: performance over policies, every time. The chair of the climate change committee, Lord Deben, recently warned against this procrastination: “If all we do is promise, other people will not take us seriously… it puts the whole process [of Cop26] into jeopardy.”
That was before the climate spokesperson followed up her dishwashing hints with the assurance that One Step Greener is compatible with taking unlimited flights to, say, Cornwall, Mustique, a family place in Greece. “In terms of individual choice, the prime minister believes in it fundamentally,” she affirmed. “And people should make their own informed, educated decisions about where they go on holiday and how they go on holiday.” China, India and Russia probably feel much the same way about fossil fuels.
Is it too late then to contain Allegra Stratton? Or at least shift to a quieter, hybrid version before she sets fire to the entire summit? Even if Sharma’s rhetoric could mitigate the impact of her recent contributions it will take more than words to prevent Stratton’s catchphrase defining the UK’s response, under Johnson, to a planetary emergency: I don’t fancy it just yet.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
omy, increasingly dominated by IRGC interests, should not depend on private sector trade and business with a US dominated west. They aim to eliminate forever the political leverage that sanctions afforded Washington. They don’t want to be friends with America.
Freed from the restraints previously exercised by the vanquished “moderate” opposition, Raisi’s insistence on increased self-reliance also presages an expansion of Iran’s regional sway, not least by reinforcing the “axis of resistance” with allies and proxies in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon. Likewise, closer strategic alliances with China and Russia are in prospect. Tehran recently signed a 25-year trade and military partnership with Beijing. Always quick to spot an opening, Vladimir Putin heartily congratulated Raisi on his election.
The Gulf drone attack on the Israel linked tanker MV Mercer Street, which killed a Briton and a Romanian last week, augurs ill for the Raisi era. As always, Iran denies responsibility. Britain and the US say they can prove otherwise. Tehran’s suspension of talks on an international prisoner swap is another blow, as is the shocking 10-year jail sentence given to a British-Iranian, Mehran Raoof. Richard Ratcliffe, husband of unjustly imprisoned Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, is right to raise the alarm. Foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, must do more.
Alarming, too, is the sudden outbreak of hostilities across the Israel-Lebanon border and now with Hamas in Gaza. Hezbollah, unusually, has admitted launching missiles. This declaration looks like a message for Naftali Bennett, Israel’s untested prime minister, sent with Iran’s approval. After the tanker attack, Israel threatened direct military action. Such a contest between new guys Raisi and Bennett is something the Middle East cannot afford.
Concern grows in Washington, meanwhile, that smouldering conflicts involving Tehran and other regional actors, fanned by the changes of leadership in Iran and Israel, could ignite. Earlier this year, there was talk of an easing of tensions between Iran and its arch-rival, Saudi Arabia. Officials from the two sides met in Baghdad. All that has gone out of the window now. The Saudis snubbed an invitation to Raisi’s inauguration. Back to square one.
The Biden administration also has worries of its own. It pinned its hopes of defusing tensions with Iran on reviving the 2015 nuclear pact that was petulantly abandoned by Trump. It’s chastening to reflect that his foolish decision did as much as anything to assure the ascent of Raisi and the hardliners and the discrediting of Iran’s reformists. Now, US analysts suggest that, even if there’s a compromise and the pact is reinstated, it’s already too late. Iran, they suspect, has gained so much bomb-making know-how in the meantime that the nuclear cat, figuratively speaking, is out of the bag.
This thought understandably gives Israeli leaders nightmares. It should also worry the region and not-so-distant European neighbours. But further chest-beating, sabre-rattling and proxy war-fighting is not the way to respond. The EU sent a representative to Raisi’s inauguration. That was the right thing to do. At this perilous juncture, the US and Britain, too, must strive ever more urgently to keep the door open and advance dialogue with Tehran. For his part, Raisi should stop posturing and show a bit of statesmanship by immediately releasing all the western hostages.