Leading on Bluster

It appears that our increasingly unreliable planet has reached so profound a state of unreality that a thing can be true even when Zac Goldsmith has been saying it. A ridiculous little racist who once campaigned for mayor of London by telling the city's Hindus that Sadiq Khan was a Muslim terrorist hell-bent on stealing their bling, Goldsmith was rebuked for trying to undermine the Commons privileges committee's inquiry into the National Johnson; whereupon he suddenly noticed the past thirteen years of Government enthusiasm for exacerbating the climate emergency and flounced out of office on a voice-of-the-people verbiage dump. With his usual adroitness, Fishy Rishi has countered the charge by reneging on plans to resume building onshore windfarms, which were banned eight years ago by Britain's glistening pink Head Boy in one of his pre-referendum panderings to the far right. Almost significantly less than a decade later, a few vague qualms are starting to break out among Conservative MPs, though more on the grounds of wounded patriotism than of mere looming environmental catastrophe. Ukraine has installed nine and a half times more turbines than England since the Russians went in, which may possibly have contributed to dawning suspicions that - even taking into account its plucky defiance of invading small boats - Global Britain no longer seems quite the world-beater that it was when Mr Churchill won the war.