Kemi Badenoch’s pledge this week to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act has not come out of the blue. She’s been striking anti-green poses ever since she first ran for the Tory leadership in 2022. After that, she was a supportive member of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet when it began the process of dismantling Conservative climate policy. Then, when she became party leader, she ramped up her Net Zero scepticism, declaring that the 2050 target to eliminate carbon emissions was “impossible” for the UK to meet.

Her declared intention to scrap the CCA — which provides a legal framework for achieving the 2050 target — was therefore entirely predictable. Equally predictable was the backlash from green-minded Tories such as Theresa May, who condemned Badenoch’s move as a “retrograde step” and, potentially, a “catastrophic mistake”.

Now we’re into the backlash to the backlash. Conservative peer Daniel Hannan reckons that “around 85% of the Conservative Party’s problems can be laid at the door of Theresa May” — an implausible number given May’s non-involvement in the Boriswave or the Truss implosion or last year’s clown-show election campaign. So Badenoch’s announcement has already had an impact: it’s divided the Tories on the eve of their annual conference.

Is that a price worth paying to reunite the Right under her leadership? Leaving aside the dubious morality of party-before-planet, we’d need to see some evidence that Badenoch’s anti-greenery is working and, thus far, there isn’t any. Since she became leader, her party’s poll ratings have sunk from the mid-twenties to the mid-teens. Meanwhile, YouGov polling shows that opposition to Net Zero among current and former Conservative voters is concentrated among Tory to Reform UK switchers.

Badenoch can’t outflank Reform: not with Richard Tice in charge of his party’s thinking on this issue. More importantly, though, she’s overlooking what’s really going on, which is a nationwide collapse of trust in the system. Earlier this week, Reform — as the chosen instrument of popular anger — won a string of local by-elections from rural Kent to Wigan Central. The target is the political establishment in general; its pet projects, from Net Zero to digital ID cards, are collateral damage. So for the Tory leader to pick on particular policies is to miss the point. As long as her party is still seen as part of the system, it doesn’t matter what she says because her target audience isn’t listening.

Instead of actively severing the link to the final five years of Tory government Badenoch has filled her top team with key figures from the Sunak, Truss and Johnson administrations. Even if voters do think that climate policy is mostly to blame for high energy prices — as opposed to the natural depletion of the North Sea or Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or the failure to insulate our housing stock or the UK’s dysfunctional energy markets — the obvious response to Badenoch’s announcement is “why didn’t you do something in government?” And to that she has no compelling answer, because those responsible for the post-2019 downfall of the Conservative Party have never been held to account.

Of course, what should really worry Badenoch is that these arguments don’t just apply to her move against the Climate Change Act. They also apply to the main event of the Tory conference: her declaration that a Conservative government would pull Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights. She’ll have plenty more to say about that in the coming days and weeks. But, again, the voters won’t be listening.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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