LONDON — Prime Minister Keir Starmer usually goes out of his way not to annoy Donald Trump. So he better hope the windmill-hating U.S. president doesn’t notice what the U.K. just did. In a fillip for the global offshore wind industry, Starmer’s government on Wednesday announced its biggest-ever down payment on the technology. It agreed to price guarantees, funded by billpayers to the tune of up to £1.8 billion (€2.08 billion) a year, for eight major projects in England, Scotland and Wales. The schemes have the capacity to generate 8.4 gigawatts of electricity, the U.K. energy department said — enough to power 12 million homes. It represented the biggest “wind auction in Europe to date,” said industry group WindEurope. It’s also an energy strategy that could have been tailor-made to rankle Trump. The U.S. president has repeatedly expressed a profound loathing for wind turbines and has tried to use his powers to halt construction on projects already underway in the U.S. — sending shockwaves across the global industry. Even when appearing alongside Starmer at press conferences, Trump has been unable to hide his disgust at the very sight of windmills. “You are paying in Scotland and in the U.K. … to have these ugly monsters all over the place,” he said, sitting next to Starmer during a visit to his Turnberry golf course last year. The spinning blades, Trump complained, would “kill all your birds.” At the time, the prime minister explained meekly that the U.K. was seeking a “mix” of energy sources. But this week’s investments speak far louder about his government’s priorities. The U.K.’s strategy — part of a plan to run the British power grid on 95 percent clean electricity by 2030 — is a clear signal that for all Starmer’s attempts to appease Trump, the U.K. will not heed Washington’s assertions that fossil fuels are the only way to deliver affordable bills and secure supply. “With these results, Britain is taking back control of our energy sovereignty,” said Starmer’s Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, a former leader of the Labour party. “With these results, Britain is taking back control of our energy sovereignty,” said Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. | Pool photo by Justin Tallis via Getty Images While not mentioning Trump or the U.S., he said the U.K. wanted to “stand on our two feet” and not depend on “markets controlled by petrostates and dictators.” WIND VS. GAS The goal of the U.K.’s offshore wind drive is to reduce reliance on gas for electricity generation. One of the most gas-dependent countries in Europe, the U.K. was hit hard in 2022 by the regional gas price spike that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The government ended up spending tens of billions of pounds to pay a portion of every household energy bill in the country to fend off widespread hardship. It’s a scenario that Miliband and Starmer want to avoid in future by focusing on producing electricity from domestic sources like offshore wind that are not subject to the ups and downs of global fossil fuel markets. Trump, by contrast, wants to keep Europe hooked on gas — specifically, American gas. The U.S. National Security Strategy, updated late last year, states Trump’s desire to use American fossil fuel exports to “project power.” Trump has already strong-armed the European Union into committing to buy $750 billion worth of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a quid pro quo for tariff relief. No one in Starmer’s government explicitly named Trump or the U.S. on Wednesday. But Chris Stark, a senior official in Miliband’s energy department tasked with delivering the 2030 goal, noted that “every megawatt of offshore wind that we’re bringing on is a few more metric tons of LNG that we don’t need to import.” The U.K.’s investment in offshore wind also provides welcome relief to a global industry that has been seriously shaken both by soaring inflation and interest rates — and more recently by a Trump-inspired backlash against net zero and clean energy. “It’s a relief for the offshore sector … It’s a relief generally, that the U.K. government is able to lean into very large positive investment stories in U.K. infrastructure,” said Tom Glover, U.K. country chair of the German energy firm RWE, which was the biggest winner in the latest offshore wind investment, securing contracts for 6.9 gigawatts of capacity. A second energy industry figure, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record, said the U.K.’s plans were a “great signal for the global offshore wind sector” after a difficult few years — “not least the stuff in the U.S.” The other big winner was British firm SSE, which has plans to build one of the world’s largest-ever offshore wind projects, Berwick Bank — off the coast of Donald Trump’s beloved Scotland.

LONDON — The U.K. should follow Donald Trump’s example and quit the United Nations treaty that underpins global action to combat climate change, the deputy leader of Reform UK said. Richard Tice, energy spokesperson for Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist party, said the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the linked U.N. climate science body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were “failing British voters.” Asked if the U.K. should follow the U.S. — which announced its withdrawal from the institutions, plus 64 other multilateral bodies, on Wednesday — Tice told POLITICO: “Yes I do. They are deeply flawed, unaccountable, and expensive institutions.” The 1992 UNFCCC serves as the international structure for efforts by 198 countries to slow the rate of greenhouse gas emissions. It also underpins the system of annual COP climate conferences. The U.S. will be the only country ever to leave the convention. Reform UK has led in U.K. polls for nearly a year, but the country’s next election is not expected until 2029. A theoretical U.K. exit from the UNFCCC would represent an extraordinary volteface for a country which has long boasted about global leadership on climate. Under former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the U.K. hosted COP26 in 2021. It has been one of the most active participants in recent summits under Prime Minister Keir Starmer. It was also the first major economy in the world to legislate for a net zero goal by 2050, in line with the findings of IPCC reports. Tice has repeatedly referred to the target as “net stupid zero.” The U.K. government was approached for comment on the U.S. withdrawal. Pippa Heylings, energy and net zero spokesperson for the U.K.’s centrist Liberal Democrat party, said Trump’s decision would “make the world less secure.”

LONDON — The U.K. will break China’s stranglehold over crucial net zero supply chains, Energy Minister Chris McDonald has pledged. McDonald, a joint minister at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Department for Business and Trade, told POLITICO he is determined to bolster domestic access to critical minerals. Critical minerals like lithium and copper are used in essential net-zero technologies such as electric vehicles and batteries, as well as defense assets like F35 fighter jets. China currently controls 90 percent of rare earth refining, according to a government critical minerals strategy published last week. McDonald said China’s dominance of mineral processing risks driving up prices for the net zero transition.  The U.K. has made a legally-binding pledge to reduce planet-damaging emissions to net zero by 2050. McDonald fears China has become a “monopoly provider” of critical minerals and that its dominant role in processing allowed China to control the costs for buyers. “We want to capture this supply chain in the U.K. as part of our industrial strategy. To do that … means, ultimately, we’re going to have to wrest control of critical minerals back into a broad group of countries, not just China,” he said. The government’s critical minerals strategy includes a target that no more than 60 percent of U.K. annual demand for critical minerals in aggregate is supplied by any one country by 2035 — including China. “So, if there is an investment from China that helps with that, then that’s great. And if it doesn’t help with that, or it sort of compounds that issue that isn’t consistent with our strategy, then we judge it on that basis ultimately,” McDonald said. Additional reporting by Graham Lanktree.

LONDON — Keir Starmer loves to play the climate leader. But only when his political advisers (and the powerful Chancellor Rachel Reeves) tell him he’s allowed. The green-minded U.K. prime minister flies into the COP30 summit in Brazil Thursday, armed with undeniable climate credentials. His government is pressing ahead with a 2050 net zero target, even as right-wing political rivals at home run away from it. It is about to hand 20-year contracts, laden with financial guarantees, to companies developing offshore wind farms. Just by attending COP, Starmer has shown he’s willing to publicly back the faltering global climate cause, despite furious attacks on the green agenda by close ally Donald Trump. But his claim to global leadership comes with a catch. Action on climate change is also tied to the political agenda back home, where Starmer and Reeves insist they are focused on bringing down bills and driving economic growth. As the prime minister flies in and out of Brazil this week, those key themes dominate. In a speech on Tuesday, Reeves pledged to “bear down” on the national debt and focus on the cost of living — even it requires “hard choices” elsewhere. Climate is no exception. SHY GREEN It was Starmer’s “personal decision” to go to Brazil, U.K. Climate Minister Katie White told a pre-COP event in London on Tuesday. It was reported in the run-up to the summit that he would skip Brazil, amid concerns among his top political aides about the optics of a jaunt to South America to talk climate while voters — disillusioned with Starmer and Labour — struggle with the cost of living at home and brace for tax rises expected in the budget. In the end, Starmer opted to go. But the absence of a full traveling press delegation, the norm at previous COPs, means his visit will generate less media coverage. (Government officials insisted the decision not to take a full press pack was purely logistical.) Starmer, while not an expert, is instinctively supportive of climate action, said one government official. But not so much so, countered a Labour MP, that he has “his own ideas about things.” “He wants to do the right thing, but would be steered as to whether that’s talking about forests or clean power or whatever. I suspect [No 10 Chief of Staff] Morgan McSweeney didn’t want him to go,” said the MP, granted anonymity to give a frank assessment of their leader. JOBS AT HOME GOOD, TREES ABROAD BAD The COP30 leaders’ event is taking place in Belém, the Amazon port city near the edge of the world’s greatest rainforest. But in a symbol of how domestic messaging trumps all else, Starmer will use that global platform to talk about a somewhat less exotic port: Great Yarmouth in East Anglia. It’s one of three U.K. locations — along with Greater Manchester and Belfast — where new, private sector clean energy deals are being announced, securing a modest 600 jobs. The COP30 leaders’ event is taking place in Belém, the Amazon port city near the edge of the world’s greatest rainforest. | Mauro Pimentel/AFP via Getty Images If COP’s Brazilian hosts were hoping for a grander global climate vision, they are about to be disappointed. The U.K. won’t be stumping up any taxpayer money for a global fund to support poorer countries to protect their tropical rainforests — key carbon sinks that, left standing, can help slow the rate of climate change. The Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) is supposed to be the centerpiece of the summit for Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, but Lula has not been able to rely on even his close, left-wing ally Starmer — with whom he likes to chat about football — to weigh in with a financial contribution to match Brazil’s $1 billion. The U.K. played a role in establishing the concept of the TFFF. An energy department spokesperson said the government remained “incredibly supportive” of the scheme. But, with Reeves warning this week that her budget would deal with “the world as we find it, not the world as I would wish it to be,” her Treasury officials won a Whitehall battle over the U.K.’s financial backing for the scheme. Ministers say only that they will try to drum up private sector investment. ‘KEIR, SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE’ The decision neatly captures the Starmer approach to climate action. If it suits the domestic economic and political agenda, great. If not then, then there is no guarantee of No. 10 and Treasury support. Taxpayer-funded international aid spending, a vital part of the U.K.’s global climate offer, has been slashed. At the same time, despite stretching emissions goals, one of the world’s busiest airports, Heathrow, will be expanded — because of its potential benefits for growth. Ministers are looking at watering down a pledge to ban new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, amid a sclerotic economy. The Treasury is considering easing the tax burden on fossil fuel companies. The bipolar approach risks bringing Starmer and Reeves into conflict with the U.K.’s energetic, committedly green Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, who will lead the country’s delegation to the COP30 conference and the formal United Nations negotiation. “On all of this, there is Ed on one side, Rachel on the other, and Keir somewhere in the middle,” said the government official. Starmer largely subcontracts his climate and energy policy to Miliband, said an industry figure who frequently interacts with government. Many MPs wish Starmer would act more like Miliband and embrace his green record more exuberantly. They point to the recent surge in support for the Green Party, which is making some in Labour nearly as nervous as the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to their right. OUTFLANKED In that context, it was a “no-brainer” for Starmer to go to COP and appear “visibly committed to climate action,” said Steve Akehurst from the political research firm Persuasion UK. “In so far as there is any real backlash to net zero in the U.K., it does not exist inside the Labour electoral coalition,” he said. The Greens are now “competing strongly for those votes.” A second Labour MP put it bluntly. “Starmer is so politically weak that to not attend would open up yet another front on his already collapsed centre-left flank,” they said. Before getting on the plane to Brazil, Starmer met sixth-form students at 10 Downing Street to talk about the summit and the environment. There was a flash of the green, idealistic Starmer that some say lurks beneath the political triangulation. He took the opportunity to remind the teenagers of the “obligation we undoubtedly have to safeguard the planet for generations to come.” “But also,” he added, it’s about safeguarding “hundreds of thousands of jobs in this country.” Additional reporting by Abby Wallace.

LONDON — The U.K. government is not moving fast enough to slash planet-destroying emissions from aviation, former Prime Minister Tony Blair has warned.  Governments in Westminster and elsewhere must step up progress in developing cleaner alternatives to traditional jet fuel, according to a report today from Blair’s think tank, seen by POLITICO.  “Aviation is and will continue to be one of the world’s most hard-to-abate sectors. Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) mandates in Europe and the U.K. are ramping up, but the new fuels needed are not developing fast enough to sufficiently reduce airline emissions,” the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) said, referring to policies designed to force faster production of cleaner fuel.  The U.K. has made the rollout of SAF central to hitting climate targets while expanding airport capacity.  It is the third intervention on U.K. net-zero policy from the former prime minister this year.  Earlier this month, the TBI urged Energy Secretary Ed Miliband to drop his pursuit of a clean power system by 2030 and focus instead on reducing domestic bills. This followed a report in April claiming the government’s approach to net zero was “doomed to fail” — something which caused annoyance at the top of the government and “pissed off” Labour campaigners then door-knocking ahead of local elections.  Aviation contributed seven percent of the U.K.’s annual greenhouse gas emissions in 2022, equivalent to around 29.6 million tons of CO2. The Climate Change Committee estimates that will rise to 11 percent by the end of the decade and 16 percent by 2035.  SAFs can be produced from oil and feedstocks and blended with traditional fuels to reduce emissions. The U.K. government’s SAF mandate targets its use in 40 percent of jet fuels by 2040 — up from two percent in 2025.  Chancellor Rachel Reeves said in January that U.K. investment in SAF production will help ensure planned airport expansion at Heathrow —  announced as the government desperately pursues economic growth — does not break legally-binding limits on emissions.  The TBI urged Energy Secretary Ed Miliband to drop his pursuit of a clean power system by 2030 and focus instead on reducing domestic bills. | Wiktor Szymanowicz/Getty Images The TBI said that, while it expects efficiency gains and initial SAF usage will have an impact on emissions, a “large share of flights, both in Europe and globally, will continue to run on conventional kerosene.” A spokesperson for the Department for Transport said the government was “seeing encouraging early signs towards meeting the SAF mandate.” They added: “Not backing SAF is not an option. It is a core part of the global drive to decarbonise aviation. SAF is already being produced and supplied at scale in the U.K., and we recently allocated a further £63 million of funding to further grow domestic production.” The TBI said carbon dioxide removal plans should be integrated into both jet fuel sales and sustainable aviation fuel mandates, placing “the financial responsibility of removals at the feet of those most able to pay it.” 

LONDON — Former British Prime Minister Theresa May laid into her own political party Monday night, accusing it of taking a populist tilt to the right that risks emboldening Nigel Farage. May criticized the Conservatives’ decision to repeal the Climate Change Act 2008, which requires the government to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050, as an “extreme and unnecessary measure”  that would “fatally undermine” Britain’s leadership on climate issues. The U.K. committed to reaching net zero under May’s administration, something Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch has since called “impossible.” Badenoch has also advocated extensive oil and gas extraction from the North Sea. “This announcement only reinforces climate policy as a dividing line in our politics, rather than being the unifying issue it once was,” May told fellow members of the House of Lords. “And, for the Conservative Party, it risks chasing votes from Reform at the expense of the wider electorate.” May also lambasted the “villainization of the judiciary” by politicians “peddling populist narratives” and said this would “erode public trust in the institutions of our democracy and therefore in democracy itself.” Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, who narrowly lost the Tory leadership contest last year, used his conference speech earlier this month as a tirade against “dozens of judges with ties to open-borders charities” and said “judges who blur the line between adjudication and activism can have no place in our justice system.” Though May recalled “frustrating” experiences coming up “against the courts” as a minister, she urged her party to “tread carefully.” “Every step we take to reduce our support for human rights merely emboldens our rivals and weakens our position in the world,” the former prime minister said. “Those politicians in the Western world who use populism and polarisation for their own short-term political ends risk handing a victory to our enemies.”

LONDON — Britain should scrap its flagship target of cleaning up the power system by 2030 and focus instead on cutting energy costs, according to former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s think tank.  In a new report published Thursday, The Tony Blair Institute (TBI) argued the government risked “getting the balance wrong” and blamed “decades of policy decisions” for Britain’s high electricity costs. It called on the government to shift away from its totemic clean power target, and prioritize making electricity cheap to preserve support for the net zero agenda. “If the transition continues in a way that raises costs, weakens reliability and undermines growth, it will fail both politically and practically,” the report said.  It is the second time the former prime minister, through the TBI, has weighed in on the government’s energy strategy. Earlier this year, Blair argued that global attempts to cut fossil fuel consumption are “doomed to fail” without a reset.  The intervention comes as Energy Secretary Ed Miliband faces increasing pressure to cut energy costs for struggling households, especially after the Labour Party pledged to cut them by up to £300 during last summer’s general election. Just last week, bosses of Britain’s largest energy suppliers warned MPs that the costs levied on bills — used to pay for grid upgrades and other green schemes — could continue to push up electricity bills, even if wholesale costs start to dip. A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said: “This report rightly recognises that clean power is the right choice for this country. This Government’s clean power mission is exactly how we will deliver cheaper power and bring down bills for good. “Our mission is relentlessly focused on delivering lower bills for the British people, to tackle the affordability crisis that has been driven by our dependence on fossil fuel markets.” ‘RECIPE FOR PUBLIC OUTRAGE’ Opposition parties have seized on high electricity costs to hammer the government over its decarbonization plans. Shadow Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho last week accused the government of creating a “recipe for public outrage” over its pledge to cut bills through the clean power plan. The TBI defended the 2050 net zero target and the shift to clean electricity, but does not pinpoint a specific date to achieve the goal. “Circumstances have changed” since Labour set the 2030 target, it argued, while “pushing the system too quickly risks driving up costs and undermining confidence.”  Shadow Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho last week accused the government of creating a “recipe for public outrage” over its pledge to cut bills through the clean power plan. | Rasid Necati Aslim/Getty Images The TBI also proposed a string of reforms to government plans, including cutting some carbon taxes on gas and bringing back a controversial proposal to overhaul the electricity market by slicing the U.K.’s single national wholesale price into different “locational” prices. The report’s authors reckon scrapping the carbon price support levy on gas would save the average household around £20 per year.  The report also called for the government to give Britain’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) a mandate to “monitor net zero delivery for cost-effectiveness,” phase out subsidies for the controversial Drax biomass power plant, and implement “radical reform” to the planning regime.  The 2030 target was “right for its time,” said the TBI’s Energy Policy Advisor Tone Langengen, who authored the report. “But circumstances have changed — the U.K. now needs more than a decarbonization plan, it needs a full-spectrum energy strategy built on growth, resilience and abundant clean electricity.”

LONDON — For years, Labour didn’t want to talk about Brexit. It’s changed its mind. As the 10th anniversary looms of Britain’s vote to the leave the European Union, senior ministers in the ruling center-left Labour Party are going studs up — daring to pin the U.K.’s sluggish economic performance on its departure from the trading bloc. “There is no doubting that the impact of Brexit is severe and long-lasting,” Chancellor Rachel Reeves said in an interview broadcast on Wednesday. “I’m glad that Brexit is a problem whose name we now dare speak,” Health Secretary Wes Streeting, another staunch ally of Keir Starmer, told a well-heeled literary festival audience in the leafy county of Berkshire on Monday. Senior government officials insist the reason for this week’s interventions is simple — rolling the pitch for bad news in Reeves’ Nov. 26 budget. Britain’s productivity over the last 15 years is expected to be downgraded in a review by the Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog. Officials expect it to say explicitly that Brexit had a larger impact than first thought — leaving Reeves with no choice but to talk about the issue. Others in Starmer’s government, though, also spy a link to the prime minister’s wider strategy to challenge Reform UK leader Nigel Farage in a more muscular way. Labour ministers are seeking to paint Tory leaders and Farage — one of Brexit’s biggest champions — as politicians who took Britain out of the EU without answers, contrasted with the (still-limited) deal that Labour secured with Brussels in May. But these strategies, and particularly the way they are voiced, create a tension within government. Some aides and MPs fear they will be perceived to blame Brexit voters, reopening the bitter politics that followed the 2016 vote and driving them further toward Farage. This risk rises, argued one Labour official, when the government line strays beyond a narrow one of attacking the implementation or Farage and into the consequences of Brexit itself. The official added: “You can’t just go around blaming Brexit, because it’s saying voters are wrong.” LAYING THE GROUND Reeves’ intervention this week did not come out of the blue. “I’m glad that Brexit is a problem whose name we now dare speak,” said Health Secretary Wes Streeting, another staunch ally of Keir Starmer. | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Nick Thomas-Symonds, Starmer’s minister negotiating post-Brexit trading rules with the EU, pointedly turned up at the Spectator — a magazine once edited by Boris Johnson — in August to make his pitch for a new relationship. Armed with statistics about the Brexit hit to exports, he said: “Behind every number and statistic is a British business, a British entrepreneur, a British start-up paying the price.” Starmer (who campaigned for a second referendum in 2019) is said to have liked what he heard. In his party conference speech in September the PM went a step further, attacking politicians “who lied to this country, unleashed chaos, and walked away after Brexit,” while also hitting out at those responsible for the “Brexit lies on the side of that bus.” The shift in No. 10 over recent months has been informed by focus groups and polls that show many Britons think Brexit was implemented badly, said one minister. “I think it’s very risky,” the minister added. “But it’s a gamble they’ve decided to take because they can see which way the wind is blowing.” It has also been encouraged by some campaign groups and think tanks. The Labour-friendly Good Growth Foundation shared a report with the government in May saying 75 percent of Labour-to-Reform switchers (out of a sample of 222) would support co-operation with the EU on trade and the economy. One Labour MP added: “It’s totally the right strategy. Just look at the maths. It’s, like, 70-30 for people saying Brexit was a bad idea. It’s just where people are.” (A July poll by More in Common found 29 percent would vote to leave and 52 percent to remain if the 2016 referendum was today. The rest would not vote or did not know.) Supporters of Starmer’s strategy believe the May deal — which will ease some trade barriers and sand off the hardest edges of Boris Johnson’s Brexit — allows the government to sound more positive. The government is “in a really confident position on this” and “actively negotiating” solutions, a second minister argued. Labour officials also believe they can hammer Farage as a man without the answers to complex problems such as returning migrants to Europe. One argued the Reform leader promised to leave the EU for stronger borders and a better NHS, but did not “do the work” to show how it would happen. Labour aides also note that Farage did not mention Brexit directly in his recent conference speech — instead focusing on issues such as net zero, government waste and immigration. (Challenged on this criticism, a Reform spokesperson texted a statement with the party’s nickname for Reeves: “Labour can try any excuse they like, but they can’t escape the reality that Rachel from accounts has the U.K. economy flatlining.”) PITCH TO THE LEFT One group that will lap up any anti-Brexit noise is Starmer’s own party. The first minister quoted above said the pivot had gone down well with their local Labour members, many of whom have long viewed Brexit as a mistake. “There’s been a feeling in the party and in government that we have been alienating our own members a bit by trying to appeal to Reform voters,” the minister said. “It’s not gone unnoticed by our faithful — it’s been seen as something finally for them.” Anti-Brexit activist Steve Bray holds a ‘Stop the Brexit mess’ placard during a protest in Parliament Square calling on the government to rejoin the European Union. | Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Some in Labour also believe that talking about the harms of Brexit could slow a drift of left-wing voters towards the Green Party and Liberal Democrats. The minister added: “If you are looking at younger voters, the polls are saying we’re losing them in their droves to more progressive parties.” But worried Labour strategists want to keep the messaging tight and nuanced, not drift back into a pro-EU comfort zone. This means keeping the focus on jobs, the cost of living and borders — bread-and-butter issues touched by Brexit. “Nobody is suggesting we relitigate 2016,” said the second minister quoted above. This is especially true now that Labour has implemented policies that could not have been done inside the EU, such as economic deals with the U.S. and India — and even the controversial 20 percent Value Added Tax on private school fees. A second Labour MP said: “We’re not going to rejoin, but we can at least say that it went badly and has harmed the economy.” A third Labour MP added: “I think now it’s happened, we can discuss if it was done well. It’s certainly felt like an elephant in the room while there was a general consensus that our economy was amorphously fucked. There is always a danger — but this pretence it was without impact was treating the public like fools.” Nuance can become lost in a world of partisan social media, though. One person who speaks regularly to No. 10 said: “I was surprised that they took that on as a new narrative … it is a risky strategy. You’ve got to be careful about how you frame that — to blame what people voted for, not them.” Farage could also try to turn Labour’s strategy on its head. Luke Tryl, Executive Director of the More in Common think tank, said Brexit voters in focus groups often believe it has gone badly — but tend to blame politicians “rather than saying it could never have worked.” This exposes a flaw in Labour’s policy of attacking Farage, Tryl argued: “It leaves Farage able to say ‘if I am in charge, I will do a proper Brexit and get the benefits.’” OUR FRIENDS IN EUROPE Labour’s stance may, at least, go down well in Brussels. Many in the EU (naturally) also think Brexit has gone badly, and showing a willingness to open up about problems might help Thomas-Symonds — who is in the process of negotiating a deal to smooth the trade of food, animals and plant products across the channel by aligning with EU rules, the boldest step back into Brussels’ orbit yet. Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank, said: “[U.K. ministers] are ramping up the rhetoric, saying we’ve got this, we need to implement it fast … There’s a lot of deadlines coming up, and they want movement, and they want to show a sense of enthusiasm.” But Menon was skeptical about whether it will make any difference. He added: “For all this newfound enthusiasm, actually, the EU aren’t going to let them get much closer. “So it’s probably a doomed strategy anyway.” Bethany Dawson and Jon Stone contributed reporting.

LONDON — It was June 2019, and the president of the United States was taking tea with the future British king.  The meeting between Donald Trump and then Prince Charles was scheduled to last 15 minutes. It stretched to an hour and a half.   Trump could barely get a word in edgeways. Charles did “most of the talking,” the president told a TV interviewer the day after they met.   One topic dominated. “He is …” Trump said, hesitating momentarily, “… he is really into climate change.”  Without global action on the climate, Charles wrote back in 2010, the world is on “the brink of potential disaster.” At the London royal residence Clarence House during Trump’s first U.K. state visit, face-to-face with its most powerful inhabitant, Charles decided to speak on behalf of the planet.  It was tea with a side of climate catastrophe.   Six years on, the stage is set for Charles — now king — to try to sway the president again. A second term Trump — bolder, brasher, and no less destructive to global efforts to tackle climate change — is heading back to the U.K. for an unprecedented second state visit and to another meeting with the king. They meet at Windsor Castle on Wednesday.  In the years between the two visits — with extreme weather events, wildfires and flooding increasingly attributed to a changing climate — Charles’ convictions have only strengthened, say those who know him well.  “His views have not changed and will not change. If anything I think he feels it, probably, more strongly than ever,” said the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, a friend and biographer of the king. “It seems self-evident to me, therefore, that he would regard President Trump’s attitude towards climate change and the environment as potentially calamitous.”   But stakes are higher for the king in 2025 than in 2019. The meeting represents an extraordinary influencing opportunity for a monarch who has spent his life deploying “soft power” in the service of cherished environmental causes. But now he is head of state, any overtly political conversation about climate change risks stress-testing the U.K.’s constitutional settlement between government and monarch.  Charles has a duty, says constitutional expert Craig Prescott, to “support the [elected] government of the day in what they want to achieve in foreign relations.”  And “in a broad sense,” he added, “that means ‘getting on the good side of Trump.’”  The meeting between Donald Trump and then Prince Charles was scheduled to last 15 minutes. It stretched to an hour and a half. | Pool Photo by Toby Melville via Getty Images Labour’s focus on an ambitious green transition, though, gives the king some leeway to speak in favor of international climate action.  Both Dimbleby and Ian Skelly, a former speechwriter for Charles who co-wrote his 2010 book Harmony, expect him to do exactly that.  “I would be astonished if in this meeting, as at the last meeting , he does not raise the issue of climate change and biodiversity in any chance he has to speak privately to Trump,” said Dimbleby.   The king will be “diplomatic,” Dimbleby added, and would heed his “constitutional duty,” avoiding “saying anything that will allow Trump to think there is a bus ticket between him and the British government. … But he won’t avoid the issue. He cares about it too much.”  “He knows exactly where the limits are,” said Skelly. “He’s not going to start banging the table or anything. … He will outline his concerns in general terms, I have no doubt about that — and perhaps warn the most powerful person in the world about the dangers of doing nothing.”  Buckingham Palace and Downing Street declined to comment when asked whether the king would raise climate with Trump, or whether this has been discussed in preparations for the state visit.  HAVE YOU READ MY BOOK, MR. PRESIDENT?  In the time since that tea at Clarence House, the President has shown no sign that Charles’ entreaties on the part of the planet had any impact. (And they didn’t have much effect at the time, by one insider’s account. Trump complained the conversation “had been terrible,” wrote former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham in her memoir.  “‘Nothing but climate change,’ he groused, rolling his eyes.”)  The U.S. has once again withdrawn from the Paris climate accords. Trump’s Department of Energy has rejected established climate science. America’s fossil fuel firms and investors — some of whom helped Trump get elected — have been invited to “Drill, baby, drill.”  With America out of the fight, the world’s chances of avoiding the direst consequences of climate change have taken a serious blow.  Charles, on the other hand, has only grown more convinced that climate change, unchecked, will cause “inevitable catastrophes,” as he put it in Harmony, his cri-de-coeur on saving the planet.  Dimbleby predicted that, this time around, one subtle way allowing the king to make his point would be to gift Trump a copy of that book — a treatise on environmentalism, traditional wisdom and sustainability that diagnoses “a spiritual void” in modern societies, a void which has “opened the way for what many people see as an excessive personal focus.”  “I’m sure [the king] won’t let [Trump] out of his sight before giving him a copy,” said Dimbleby. Chinese Premier (and Trump’s main geopolitical rival) Xi Jinping already has a copy, said Skelly.  But the meeting comes at a time when Prime Minister Keir Starmer — boxed in politically by the need to keep the U.S. on side for the sake of trade, Ukraine and European security — has avoided openly criticizing the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science or its embrace of fossil fuels.  His government will not want the king to say or do anything that upsets transatlantic relations. Even when the president, sitting next to Starmer, trashed wind energy ­— the main pillar of U.K. decarbonization plans — on a July visit to his Turnberry golf course in Scotland, the prime minister mustered no defense beyond quietly insisting the U.K. was pursuing a “mix” of energy sources.  If Trump starts railing against windmills again in his chat to the king, he might get a (slightly) more robust response, predicted Skelly. “The response to that will be: ‘What else are we going to do without destroying the Earth?’ That’s the question he’ll come back with, I’d imagine.”  HOW TO TALK TO TRUMP ABOUT CLIMATE  Some who have worked with Trump think that, because of the unique place Britain and the royals occupy in his worldview, Charles stands a better chance than most in getting the president to listen.  “President Trump isn’t going to become an environmentalist over a cup of tea with the king. But I think he’ll definitely hear him out — in a way that maybe he wouldn’t with other folks,” said Michael Martins, founder of the firm Overton Advisory, who was a political and economic specialist at the U.S. embassy in London during the last state visit.  “He likes the pageantry. He likes the optics of it. … Engaging with a king, Trump will feel he’s on the same footing. He will give him more of a hearing than if it was, I don’t know … Ed Miliband.”  Trump has even declared his “love” for Charles.  The royal admiration comes from Trump’s mother. Scottish-born Mary Anne Trump “loved the Queen,” Trump said in July. The ratings-obsessed president appears to consider the late monarch the ultimate TV star. “Whenever the queen was on television, [my mother] wanted to watch,” he said during July’s Turnberry visit.    The king could benefit from an emotional link to First Lady Melania Trump, too. She was present at the 2019 meeting and sat next to Charles at the state banquet that year. In her 2024 memoir, Melania says they “engaged in an interesting conversation about his deep-rooted commitment to environmental conservation.”  She and Trump “exchange letters with King Charles to this day,” Melania wrote. TAKING TEA AT THE END OF THE WORLD  The king will have plenty of chances to make his case.   A state visit provides “quite a lot of time to talk” for monarch and president, said one former senior British government official, granted anonymity to discuss the royals and their relationship with government.  There will be a state banquet plus at least one private meeting in between, they said. Charles may also be able to sneak some choice phrases into any speech he gives at the banquet. Trump’s chief U.K. political ally is Nigel Farage, whose anti-net-zero Reform UK currently lead opinion polls. | John Keeble/Getty Images The king receives regular briefing papers from the Foreign Office. As the meeting looms, the same person suggested, he may be preparing thoughts on how to combine a lifetime’s campaigning and reading with those briefings, to shape the opportunity to lobby a president.  “He will be reading his foreign policy material with even more interest than normal. He will probably be thinking about whether there is any way in which he can pitch his arguments to Trump that will shift him — a little bit — toward putting his shoulder to the climate change wheel,” the former senior official said.    “He won’t say: ‘You, America, should be doing stuff.’ He will say, ‘Internationally I think it is important we make progress on this and we need to be more ambitious.’ Or he might express concern about some of the impacts of climate change on global weather and all these extreme weather events.”  However he approaches it, 2019 showed how tough it is to move the dial.  After that conversation, Trump told broadcaster Piers Morgan that he thought Charles’ views were “great” and that he had “totally listened to him.” But then he demonstrated that — on the crucial points of how fossil fuels, carbon emissions and climate change are affecting the planet — he totally hadn’t.    “He wants to make sure future generations have climate that is good climate, as opposed to a disaster,” Trump said. “And I agree,” he added, before promptly pivoting to an apparent non-sequitur about the U.S. having “crystal clean” water. It was a typically Trumpian obfuscation. Asked about the king’s views during the Turnberry visit, Trump said: “Every time I met with him, he talked about the environment, how important it is. I’m all for it. I think that’s great.”  In nearly the same breath, he ranted about wind energy being “a disaster.”  GOOD LUCK, CHARLIE  “It is difficult, if not impossible, to see [Trump] change his views on climate change, because they’re not informed by his understanding of the science or consequences, but rather by naked politics,” said leading U.S. climate scientist Michael Mann in emailed remarks.   And Trump will come to the meeting prepared, said Martins, the former U.S. Embassy official. “Trump will receive the full briefing on the king’s views on environment. He won’t be going into that blind. He’ll know exactly what the king has said over his career and what his views are on it and how it affects American interests. I don’t anticipate him being surprised by anything the king says.”   He added: “Bashing net zero and President Biden … gets [Trump] political wins.”    To Charles’ long-standing domestic critics, it all highlights the pointlessness of his position.  Donald Trump has even declared his “love” for King Charles III. | Pool Photo by Richard Pohle via Getty Images “He is bound by these constitutional expectations that he does nothing that will upset the apple cart [in U.K./U.S. relations],” said Graham Smith, chief executive of campaign group Republic, which calls for the abolition of the monarchy. “If he was elected, he’d have a lot more freedom to say what he actually wants.”  “Soft power is a highly questionable concept,” added Smith. It’s only useful, he argued, when backed by something Charles lacks and Trump has by the bucket-load: “Hard power.”  And time may be running out for Charles to deploy even soft power in the climate fight.   Trump’s chief U.K. political ally is Nigel Farage, whose anti-net-zero Reform UK currently lead opinion polls. If British voters pick Reform at the next election, Charles’ potential advocacy would be restrained by a government opposed to action on climate change.  So how far will Charles go to seize his moment?  He wrote in Harmony: “If we continue to be deluded by the increasingly irresponsible clamour of sceptical voices that doubt man-made climate change, it will soon be too late to reverse the chaos we have helped to unleash.” He feared “failing in my duty to future generations and to the Earth itself” if he did not speak up.   Skelly, the former speechwriter who co-wrote the book, predicted that Charles would walk a fine diplomatic line — but was “not someone to sit on his hands or to remain silent.”   “He was warning about these things 30 years ago and nobody was listening. … He feels increasingly frustrated that time is running out.   “I’d love to be a fly on the wall — because it will be a fascinating conversation.”

LONDON — Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is being advised by a think tank which denies the science of climate change and claims the U.K. government wants to use electric vehicles to control its citizens. Lois Perry, U.K. and Europe director of the Heartland Institute think tank, told attendees at Reform’s annual conference last week that she was “very grateful to be able to consult and influence the Reform Party at the highest level.” The Heartland Institute confirmed to POLITICO this week that it has “held conversations with policymakers within Reform UK.”   The Institute — which is closely aligned with U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-climate policies — has cast doubt on global warming and branded climate change policies a “hoax” and a “scam.”  Earlier this year it backed Trump’s decision to pull out of the U.N. Paris Climate Agreement and to roll back Joe Biden-era clean energy projects.  The organization was invited to an event in the White House Rose Garden when Trump announced plans to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement during his first term in office in 2017.  “The reality is this, we’re not facing a climate crisis,” the organization’s President James Taylor told a Heartland-sponsored fringe event at Reform’s party conference in Birmingham Saturday.  Lois Perry told Reform’s chairman Zia Yusuf on a Heartland online show that she had talked the party’s Deputy Leader Richard Tice into ditching net zero policies. | Carl Court/Getty Images He added: “We cannot have a climate crisis predicated on the notion of global warming when temperatures remain unusually cold.”  The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is unequivocal that human-induced climate change is “already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.”  The organization launched its U.K. and EU arm in December, at a London event attended by Farage as well as former Prime Minister Liz Truss.  A spokesperson for Reform UK did not deny that the party had been in discussions with Heartland. “Reform UK meets with organisations from across the political spectrum with the view of developing a wide-ranging policy platform,” they said.  ‘HAVE A LOOK AROUND YOU’  Speaking at the same conference fringe event, Perry — a former leader of UKIP — said: “There’s nothing wrong with CO2. CO2 is not a pollutant.”   She said that government net zero policies are “bad for the environment” and had been introduced “to control us. It’s to tax us. It’s to take our money and it’s to take our liberty.”  Perry added: “They want us in electric cars. Electric cars can be remotely controlled. Again, not a conspiracy theory. These cars can be shut down.   “Imagine during Covid. Imagine your car is disabled remotely. You have no control over it, because it’s an electric car. And that’s if you can afford an electric car. There’s a reason why this neo-Marxist, communist, shambolic government wants us in electric cars. It is so that we have no freedom whatsoever.”  One person linked to the Reform-friendly Centre for a Better Britain think tank said it had not yet met Heartland but would be happy to do so.  Earlier this month, Perry told Reform’s chairman Zia Yusuf on a Heartland online show that she had talked the party’s Deputy Leader Richard Tice into ditching net zero policies. “In that case, hats off and credit to you too,” Yusuf replied.  Reform has pledged to scrap the U.K.’s net zero target, promising this will bring down sky-high household energy bills. Reform UK seeks to professionalize and present itself as a party ready for government. | Leon Neal/Getty Images This February, Farage also told an event it was “absolutely nuts” to claim CO2 was a pollutant. In 2024 he said he didn’t want to get into “any debate on the science.” Tice has expressed views at odds with climate science. He owns a Tesla electric car, which he describes as an “amazing piece of kit.”  It comes as Reform UK — consistently topping the national polls — seeks to professionalize and present itself as a party ready for government. “I promised you a year ago, I would professionalize the party. Have a look around you,” Farage told conference attendees in his speech Friday.   Pollsters warned there were electoral risks for Reform in engaging with climate denial groups, at a time when voters are wary of all politicians’ aims with regard to net zero. “The primary focus for all voters is energy costs,” said Julian Gallie, head of research at Merlin Strategy. “However, pursuing an anti net zero agenda motivated explicitly by climate skepticism can be as deep a turn off as those who are pursuing a net zero target regardless of price costs.” Additional reporting by Dan Bloom.