Don’t lecture us from your seat in club class

TOUCHING down from Rio after a wearisome flight and a curtailed holiday, the passengers troop disconsolately towards a nondescript Heathrow hotel for ten days of quarantine at their own expense.

All except one. For Alok Sharma, president of the Cop26 climate conference, it’s a chauffeur-driven limousine, a short drive to his elegant Berkshire home and perhaps a reviving dip in the pool.

Not for him the tedium of quarantine. As the Mail revealed yesterday, he has visited 31 countries this year – six on the red list – and not had to endure a day of isolation.

So he stands accused not merely of hypocrisy, but double hypocrisy.

How can he have the brass neck to tell others to cut their emissions when he has a carbon footprint the size of a yeti?

And if quarantine is compulsory for the rest of us on safety grounds, why not for him and his ministerial colleagues?

He joins a growing list of powerful figures – Dominic Cummings, Matt Hancock, pingdemic-dodging Boris and Rishi – who don’t believe the rules apply to them.

This newspaper is passionate about the environment, as campaigns to cut plastic, mobilise a litter-picking army and plant hundreds of thousands of trees show.

So we share Mr Sharma’s desire to make this climate conference a success. But these egregious double standards will only undermine the message.

He should be leading by example. Not brazenly flouting restrictions and earning a reputation as Air Miles Alok.