Lord Goldsmith has resigned as a minister at the Foreign Office, accusing Rishi Sunak of being “simply uninterested” in climate change.
Lord Goldsmith, who served as Minister of State for Overseas Territories, Commonwealth, Energy, Climate and Environment, in the Foreign Office, had been named yesterday as one the Boris Johnson allies set for sanctions for criticising the privileges committee report.
In his letter of resignation, he said: “The problem is not that the government is hostile to the environment, it is that you, our Prime Minister, are simply uninterested. That signal, or lack of it, has trickled down through Whitehall and caused a kind of paralysis”.
“I will never understand how, with all the knowledge we now have about our fundamental reliance on the natural world and the speed with which we are destroying it, anyone can be uninterested”, he adds.
Yesterday, Lord Goldsmith was one of several Conservative MPs and peers – including former cabinet ministers Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg – criticised by the privileges committee in a special report.
The committee highlighted a tweet Lord Goldsmith retweeted on 9 June relating to the work of the privileges committee. The tweet in question stated: “Exactly this. There was only ever going to be one outcome and the evidence was totally irrelevant to it”.
The report generally highlighted “unprecedented and coordinated pressure” on the committee’s members which had a “significant personal impact on individual members and raised significant security concerns”.
The report read moreover: “An attack on the procedures of the House and on the impartial officers and advisers who support those processes is an attack on the legitimacy of Parliament itself”.
Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow commons leader, explained yesterday: “Rishi Sunak has allowed senior members of his own party to undermine and attack Britain’s democratic institutions. This includes a serving government minister and two former Cabinet ministers.
“It’s yet another example of the prime minister’s weakness and failure to hold his own ministers to high standards that Zac Goldsmith is still a government minister”.
In his resignation letter this morning, Lord Goldsmith said: “But even if this existential challenge leaves you personally unmoved, there is a world of people who do care very much. And you will need their votes. Every survey and poll – without exception – tells us that people care deeply about the natural world, about the welfare of other species, about handing this world in better shape to the next generation.
“And as these issues inevitably grow in importance, so too will the gap between the British people and a conservative Party that tails to respond appropriately”, he adds.
Lord Goldsmith said that he will “forever be grateful” to be put in a position to be able to affect environmental action and that he is proud that in recent years the UK has played a “critical, indeed defining role leading powerful coalitions of ambition and securing world-changing commitments over a very wide range of environmental issues”.
He added that it has been “a privilege to be able to work with so many talented people in government”.
Liberal Democrat treasury spokesperson Sarah Olney, who has twice bested Zac Goldsmith in elections to the commons, responded to the news by saying: “Rishi Sunak should have had the guts to sack Zac Goldsmith yesterday when he was brutally criticised by the partygate watchdog. Sunak is clearly too weak to control his own party.
“His resignation has at least confirmed what we have known all along, that Rishi Sunak’s Government doesn’t give a damn about the environment and animal rights.”
