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A protester dressed as Boris Johnson
Boris Johnson was lampooned by many of the protesters at Cop26. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images
Boris Johnson was lampooned by many of the protesters at Cop26. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Mung beans, bunnies and the Muppets: PM’s green rhetoric ‘insulting and divisive’

This article is more than 2 years old

Boris Johnson’s choice of words was just one bone of contention as his attitude to climate issues came under fire

Boris Johnson took the stage at Glasgow as the Cop26 summit neared its conclusion last Wednesday, aiming to galvanise the conference into a deal that would stave off climate breakdown.

Instead, confronting the world’s media immediately afterwards, he faced a barrage of questions about Tory sleaze, the global problems of the climate crisis eclipsed by a sordid Westminster scandal.

Even as the prime minister was forced to deny that the UK was a corrupt country, unknown to him or his closest aides, the real international statesmanship was going on in windowless rooms barely 100 metres away in the windswept conference centre.

John Kerry, the US climate envoy, and Xie Zhenhua, China’s head of delegation, were putting the finishing touches to a statement by the world’s two superpowers that would set the tone for a Glasgow climate deal.

Xie and Kerry laid out the details of their pact on Wednesday evening in the same press conference room where Johnson had sweated under close questioning a little over an hour beforehand. Downing Street was blindsided, having played no part in the announcement, hailed as “game-changing” by observers.

For some of those following the talks, it was just the latest in a long series of prime ministerial misses, absences and gaffes. Most of the past year has been marked by Johnson’s long silences on climate issues, punctuated by a few set-piece occasions.

“Johnson has been largely a bystander,” says Tom Burke, veteran climate adviser to governments and co-founder of the E3G green thinktank. “He has not imposed his stamp on this issue. He has not put in the hours. He has not been spending the time he needed to, meeting his peers in other countries, which you have to so that you build up those key relationships.”

Johnson chaired no meetings on the climate even as the UK was preparing to host the talks, from the end of the previous Cop in Madrid in 2019 to the launch of the UK’s presidency in February 2020. He participated in a joint UK-UN-French celebration of the five-year anniversary of the Paris agreement in December 2020, then was largely silent for months until a White House climate summit in April.

After that, while the UK cabinet minister and Cop26 president Alok Sharma conducted a hectic round of diplomacy from 9 Downing Street, almost nothing was heard on the climate from No 10 until Johnson hosted the G7 in Cornwall in July, a meeting dominated by rows over Brexit and sausages.

Boris Johnson leaves the stage after delivering a speech during the opening ceremony of Cop26. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters

Along the way, there have been scandals that angered green experts far more than any rows over MPs’ second jobs. The protracted decision, still ongoing, over a potential new coalmine in Cumbria outraged climate scientists early this year; new licences for oil and gasfields in the North Sea gave a poor signal to other countries, whatever the government said about allowing them only if there was a “climate test”; the decision to slash overseas aid looked ill-judged, coming as the UK was exhorting other countries to offer billions to developing nations in climate finance.

Downing Street appeared not to realise how damaging these gaffes were. “Johnson was not paying enough attention,” says Burke.

Seen from abroad, the UK has performed well on the organisational aspects of Cop26 and on climate diplomacy, but Johnson himself has been a puzzle.

His rhetorical flights of fancy involving “mung-bean munching” and “bunny-hugging” – references to the supposed activities of environmentalists – were judged “divisive and insulting” by green experts in the UK, while many outside the country struggled to follow. “It is easy to be green,” he told the UN general assembly, a Muppets quip that left his fellow world leaders nonplussed.

“The messaging was confusing – mung beans, Kermit the Frog, that this was an environment agenda rather than a [global] safety and health and survival agenda,” says Rachel Kyte, formerly a top climate official at the World Bank, now dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University in the US. “Saying he gave [Cop26] a six out of 10 chance of success as he arrived at the UN general assembly was odd.”

Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton-era White House climate adviser, now with the Progressive Policy Institute thinktank in Washington DC, says the UK performed well logistically and diplomatically, but that Johnson’s role was always going to be limited by the realities of geopolitics.

“Realistically, Johnson himself was never going to be the key negotiator or creator of innovative diplomatic or technical breakthroughs. The US, China, India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and a few others – these are the nations where policy positions have played the largest roles, as usual.”

But he gives Johnson credit for being a Conservative politician who has seen the importance of the climate agenda when some on the right have sought to deny or obfuscate it.

“Johnson’s genuine climate advocacy as a leader of a centre-right political party has been important to setting an atmosphere of ambition on urgency. The question is, will he continue to push China, Russia and other climate laggards, and also double down on UK domestic commitments after the television crews have left Glasgow?”

Although Cop26 has ended, under the UN rules, the UK will remain Cop president for the next year, until Egypt takes over at Cop27 next autumn. That gives Johnson a year in which to press ahead with this agenda and secure a global legacy of climate action to ensure the outcome of the summit is carried through into policies and measures around the world.

Shaun Spiers, of the Green Alliance thinktank, says: “This is an opportunity to present Global Britain to the world. But the last two weeks have shown that climate diplomacy requires sustained attention. This must be a whole government effort.”

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