“The young are very concerned about the future we’re creating for them,” John Gummer says of the world’s slide towards a three-degree temperature rise. “Just think about what 1.1°C means already: at this moment, there’s 11.5m acres on fire in Canada; there were just floods in Emilia-Romagna of a kind never seen before in Italy.” Not far away, “the Spanish can’t produce much soft fruit or salad because there’s no water; at the same time, vast areas of Pakistan are submerged, with millions of lives disrupted…”
It’s an alarming assessment from the Thatcher-era minister once best known for a show of intergenerational nonchalance: feeding his daughter a beefburger—on camera—early in the BSE crisis. The spritely 83-year-old, now Lord Deben, has spent 11 years chairing the Climate Change Committee (CCC) that holds the UK to account. He blends relaxed affability and urgent moral conviction. “You shouldn’t be drinking bottled water,” he tells me with only half an avuncular chuckle, as we Zoom—“particularly at home.”
Through his long CCC chairmanship, the big plus has been the politics: “As I look back, I wouldn’t have thought we’d get as far: Paris, Glasgow, the whole world signed up.” The negative, unfortunately, has been the science. “As I look forward, I see what the scientists feared is happening at the very top of their range” for speed. British emissions have fallen. But as “the European Union, the US and indeed China” step up the transition, we are moving “far, far too slowly”, and slipping from leader to laggard.
His chargesheet is long. There’s the new Cumbrian coalmine: “How can we possibly ask African and Asian countries to phase out coal if we’re digging more?” The lack of adaptation to warming already in train, with a failure to fund a repair of our flood defences. And “we’re building homes unfit for the future in terms of insulation and ventilation.”
By contrast, he cuts Labour some slack. “Be careful of criticism: it often comes from [hostile] newspapers.” His main complaint is merely that Keir Starmer is vague. Alleged backsliding on green investment doesn’t worry him. “They were never going to spend all that in the first year. They’re now more realistic.” Tapping approved North Sea fields while banning new exploration might be a “reasonable” balance, if Labour insists all production will be run to the best standards, matching Norway. All told, this Tory peer sounds almost keen on regime change.
Yet he remains a true Conservative, venerating Thatcher. She was seized by the climate problem early, but—as I’d understood it—later viewed climate action as a socialist plot. Gummer isn’t having it: he absolves her of the denialist “Nigel Lawson nonsense”, insisting her argument was never with environmental ends, only dirigiste means.
He’s equally (if controversially) adamant that Thatcher would have opposed Brexit. (Back in the 1960s, the young Gummer published a pamphlet: “Europe: No other choice.”) Leaving wasn’t just impractical but “morally wrong”, vacating as we did an international forum where we might “do good”. Opposition to “unilateralism” is one Gummer constant. Despite having no personal objection to women priests, in the 1990s he insisted the Church of England had no “authority” to create a Christian schism by ordaining them, and so converted to Rome.
True blue greens like Gummer save us from the paralysing partisanship of the American and Australian climate debates. His commitment is total. What plans after the CCC? “Climate. Cardinal Newman said, ‘Everybody has a vocation in life, the fortunate know what it is.’ I’m lucky, I know what it is: to continue this battle.”
