PM fiddling around while the UK burns

IN Yosemite National Park, California, giant sequoias have grown for thousands of years.

They’re the some of the oldest living things in the world.

And they are being threatened by wildfires brought on by unusually dry, hot conditions.

In Spain, the second heatwave in a month is ongoing.

Italy has drought and long periods of intense heat, and glaciers in the mountains are collapsing.

Almost 90 cities in China are on heat alert - with Nanjing opening air-raid shelters for locals.

Here, we are going through our first-ever extreme heat warning.

Infrastructure is collapsing, the NHS is on alert, and emergency meetings being called.

Officials at St Andrews, where the Open is being played, fear coastal erosion could threaten the future of the famous golf course.

Serious

Climate change is everywhere. It is serious. Expanding deserts, widespread drought, refugee crises on a scale we’ve never seen.

For any potential Prime Minister not to be taking the threat seriously is beyond belief.

Leadership contender Penny Mourdaunt accepted two £10,000 donations from a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

This think-tank was branded “the UK’S most prominent source of climate-change denial”.

Action to protect our environment should be near the top of an incoming PM’S to-do list.

The crisis is unfolding before our eyes and we need people at the top we can trust to handle it.

Ms Mourdaunt is not, to be fair, being set the best example.

Current Prime Minister Boris Johnson yesterday swerved a Cobra meeting, preferring to fiddle in Chequers, even as the country burns.