“Team World is up against a very formidable opponent in climate change,” Boris Johnson insisted ahead of Cop26 last November. In recent months, however, the same amnesia that led the UK Prime Minister to seemingly forget various “parties” he attended has apparently also wiped his memory of the greatest existential threat facing his country.
The international climate summit was Johnson’s moment in the sun, to prove post-Brexit that Britain still had diplomatic clout. And it worked. The Prime Minister played the role of a concerned statesman, saying and doing the right things, while the Cop26 president, Alok Sharma, his team and UK civil servants played a blinder.
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