I’ve never met Allister Heath and thus can’t decide if he’s a crazed ideologue or a brilliant satirist. His devotees will long treasure his panegyric praising the batshit financial statement that brought Liz Truss’s premiership to an untimely end (“the best budget I have ever heard”). And they will doubtless have savoured his Telegraph column on Thursday in which he urged us all to welcome climate change and build more swimming pools.
For those not in the fan club, Heath is the Sunday Telegraph editor whose apocalyptic columns make Jeremiah or Cassandra read like the Chuckle Brothers.
The theory that these are works of satirical genius was leant weight when the New World newspaper created an Allister Heath Headline Generator . You give it a few prompts—let’s say, “Burnham + death tax + climate change”—and it will instantly produce a startlingly plausible catastrophising headline for a Heath column: “The Burnham climate change death tax plot is the most successful Marxist infiltration in history.” Boom!
Compare this with the “real thing”. “Impotent, useless Britain is the weakest it has been for 500 years,” he warned in January. Or, from March 2023: “Net zero is a Trojan horse for the total destruction of Western society.” Or, from August 2023: “The lunacy of climate change fanatics is driving humanity to extinction.” And one more from January 2025: “Starmer must sack lunatic Miliband to save Britain.”
You can see why some regard Heath as a parodic genius—up there with Craig Brown or Marina Hyde. Having consistently argued against doing anything about so-called climate change for years now, Heath arrived at the logical conclusion in Thursday’s column: “We’ve lost the war against climate change. Time to scrap net zero.”
Critics will carp and say it is a little too derivative of the subtitle to Kubrick’s brilliant 1964 black comedy, Dr Strangelove: “How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.” But Heath’s column is enjoyable as a standalone artefact.
Now that we can ditch “the despicable con that is net zero,” he wrote with exquisite timing, as much of France and Spain were incinerated, “we can learn to cope with, and whenever possible, even enjoy, a warmer, drier, more volatile Mediterranean climate, if that is indeed to be our fate.”
Note the sly last clause, which suggests that Britain—perhaps by virtue of the English Channel, which has protected this sceptred isle over so many centuries—may prove to be immune from continental fads like extreme heat.
But if it does come, let’s roll out the welcome mat. “Construct more pools… plant more Mediterranean vegetation,” urged Heath, his tongue surely firmly in his cheek. “Many in Britain would enjoy the kind of warmer climate predicted by modellers… In the era of refrigeration, greenhouses and reverse osmosis, southern regions of the world are blossoming economically and geopolitically, from Dubai to Florida to South East Asia to Israel.”
Of course, the best satire has to be just about believable, and here Heath perhaps lets himself down. Most of us can still remember April 2024 when Dubai received roughly a year to a year and a half’s rainfall in less than 24 hours, overwhelming roads, homes and the world’s busiest international airport.
Florida evokes memories of multiple destructive hurricanes, storm surges and “sunny-day flooding;” and reminds us that many insurers have withdrawn from parts of the state, or have sharply increased premiums because of mounting climate-related losses.
Perhaps Heath missed the numerous monsoon floods and tropical cyclones that have devastated the South East Asia region in recent years? Or Israel’s longer and more intense heatwaves which are creating huge water stress and drought? Still, let’s crack open a chilled lager and go and lounge the pool.
Telegraph readers, confused as to whether or not this was a hilarious spoof, may well have ended this week with their heads spinning. Each day the main op-ed column has dealt with the issue of climate change; and two of them were strikingly sane.
On Monday Tim Stanley penned an elegant critique of how the contemporary right had unthinkingly become trapped in a distinctly unconservative pattern of climate scepticism. He cited Kenya’s high proportion of renewable electricity and Pakistan’s rapid adoption of rooftop solar as evidence that clean energy is spreading for practical and economic reasons, not simply ideological ones. They can’t get to net zero fast enough.
And on Wednesday Ambrose Evans Pritchard went further, arguing that Kemi Badenoch risks destroying the Conservative party by allowing opposition to net zero to become an ideological litmus test instead of embracing the market-led clean-energy revolution.
These columns, by respected Telegraph writers, will have disorientated many readers, who have been groomed over many years to think the precise opposite. Some reassurance was offered on Tuesday and Friday, with counter-arguments from respected Brexit guru David Frost and Kemi Badenoch.
Badenoch, evidently stung by Evans Pritchard, also wrote a letter to the paper in which she described net zero as a “political fiction.” Badenoch has famously decided to ban anyone from being a Conservative candidate if they are unwilling to repudiate the UK’s statutory 2050 net zero target. It’s a funny old world in which even Grant Shapps, who still believes in the target, has been blocked from being an MP. You might say it’s beyond satire.
Who are the climate fanatics now?
A sober letter from Sir Brian Hoskins in the Times in late June reminded us what net zero actually is. Sir Brian, a fellow of the Royal Society and someone who has studied climate change for most of his professional life, knows what he’s talking about when he writes: “Net zero is not an arbitrary slogan, rather it is dictated by the laws of physics. To halt warming, net greenhouse gas emissions must stop. Pretending we can safely slow the transition ignores the certainty of escalating climate costs, which will fall most heavily on vulnerable, lower-income households.”
He’s right, isn’t he? These are the laws of physics, not crazy, woke political fictions from people with (right-wing catchphrase of the month) “suicidal empathy”. And yet, as terrifying fires rage beyond control outside Bordeaux and Madrid, the real climate fanatics are clamouring to start drilling again in the North Sea.
But you have to hand it to the Jonathan Swift de nos jours. Head to the pool. Stop worrying and learn to love the burn. Lol.
