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.”

BRUSSELS — Tropical forest loss rocketed to a 20-year high in 2024 as climate change-fueled wildfires tore through some of the planet’s most important natural carbon sinks. Close to 7 million hectares of primary tropical forests were destroyed last year, with nearly half of that due to fire, said a report from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the University of Maryland published Wednesday. Wildfires also swept through boreal forests — in particular in Russia and Canada — leading to 30 million hectares of trees being lost globally in 2024, and resulting in an estimated 4.1 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions. It came as the European Union decided to delay anti-deforestation rules and wind back other environmental protections in a bid to boost economic competitiveness. “This is a dangerous feedback loop we cannot afford to trigger further,” warned Peter Potapov, research professor at the University of Maryland. “If this trend [of fire-driven forest loss] continues, it could permanently transform critical natural areas and unleash large amounts of carbon — intensifying climate change and fueling even more extreme fires.” Climate change and El Niño (a cyclical weather phenomenon that exacerbates global warming’s impact) created hotter and drier conditions last year, helping make 2024 the hottest year on record. That elevated the risks of larger and more widespread fires, the researchers noted. Latin America “was particularly hard hit, reversing the progress we saw in Brazil and Colombia in 2023.” The Congo basin saw notably high primary forest loss, while deforestation decreased in Indonesia and Malaysia last year. Even with the sharp rise in wildfire damage, agriculture was still the main driver of global deforestation over the last 24 years, according to the report. The overall picture is hurting forests’ capacity to absorb and store carbon, which helps mitigate climate change. It also means that the world is off track to reach its objective of halting and reversing global deforestation by 2030 — a goal more than 140 countries pledged at the Glasgow COP26 climate summit in 2021. “This should be a wake-up call,” said Elizabeth Goldman, co-director of the WRI’s Global Forest Watch, noting that to reach this 2030 goal, global deforestation would need to decrease by 20 percent every year until the end of the decade. EU REGULATION LOOMING The data comes as companies are getting ready to implement new EU rules requiring them to police their supply chains and ensure they’re deforestation-free. Under the EU Deforestation Regulation, companies selling coffee, cocoa, palm oil, soy, rubber, beef and timber on the EU market will have to prove they sourced the commodities from areas that haven’t been cleared to make space for agriculture. The new rules kick in on Dec. 30. But a group of centrist and right-wing European Parliament members is pushing to delay the rules further and tweak them to reduce red tape for European farmers and land managers. The legislation risks “placing disproportionate burdens” on small companies “without delivering the intended results” and “imposes technically unrealistic demands for tracing and verifying the origin of commodities,” complained Veronika Vrecionová, a Czech MEP of the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists and the chair of Parliament’s agriculture committee, in a letter obtained by POLITICO. The missive, sent May 14 to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall, also calls for delaying the new rules once again. EU policymakers agreed late last year to postpone the legislation’s implementation by a year, from Dec. 2024 to Dec. 2025. “We fully support the aim of combating deforestation, but we believe that a framework with such systemic shortcomings may ultimately fail to identify actual illegal activity,” Vrecionová wrote, warning that “it could hinder legitimate EU-based producers and compromise the competitiveness of our agri-food and forestry sectors.” The letter also shows that right-wing forces are not giving up on their attempt to modify the regulation. Late last year, the center-right European People’s Party — the largest group in Parliament and von der Leyen’s political family — failed in its push to amend the legislation and label the EU a “no risk” area, shielding small European farmers and foresters from the rules. Vrecionová’s letter reiterated that demand.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President António Costa and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola took what may be one of the shortest official flights on record last Friday. The trio flew from Brussels to Luxembourg and back aboard of a charter flight, a journey that would have taken approximately two and a half hours by car. According to Commission chief spokesperson Paula Pinho, the decision to charter a flight was made due to conflicting schedules among the leaders and Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Luc Frieden. “The idea was that the three presidents … wanted to celebrate Schuman Day together with Prime Minister Luc Frieden in Luxembourg. Due to scheduling constraints of all the three presidents and the prime minister, the only traveling option to allow all of them to attend the commemoration of the Schuman Declaration together was to take a charter flight,” Pinho said during a daily briefing on Monday. “This is justified because it was really exceptional and it was the only way of making sure that the three presidents could be present,” she added. “And obviously it is indeed considerably faster than if you take the car.” This is not the first time EU leaders’ use of private jets has drawn criticism in Brussels, especially as the EU promotes greener transport and aims to reduce institutional emissions in line with its climate goals. In March 2023, German media outlets Bild and Der Spiegel reported the Commission president had taken 57 private flights in just two years. Before taking on his current role as Council president, Costa faced similar scrutiny in Portugal. In June 2023, opposition parties questioned his use of a Portuguese Air Force Falcon 50 jet for a trip to Brussels, alleging it may have served personal purposes. The government responded that the aircraft was used appropriately for official transport of high-ranking officials. In March 2023, POLITICO revealed that former Council President Charles Michel had used chartered air taxis on 28 of the 46 foreign trips he made during 2022, including to the COP27 talks in Egypt in 2022 and to the COP26 summit in Glasgow in 2021. Unlike many national governments, the EU does not maintain its own fleet of aircraft to transport officials. Instead, it relies on commercial airlines or chartered flights for official travel, making such arrangements more visible and controversial.

LONDON — Fresh from another pasting at the ballot box, Britain’s Conservatives are searching for a comeback plan. After being booted out of national office in July, a spate of local election defeats last week has left them licking their wounds — and wondering if the success of Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK renders them irrelevant. The results are a world away from when the seats were last fought in 2021 under Boris Johnson — the controversial Eurosceptic who helped the Tories bounce back from a Farage surge last time around, before blowing himself up in office. Back then, Johnson was master of all he surveyed: an 80-seat Commons majority, a “vaccine bounce” from the fast deployment of Covid-19 jabs and a Labour opposition at that point failing to prove it was electable. Four years on, that bubble has well and truly burst — and some Tories are now pining if not for Johnson himself, then at least for a rekindling of the flame he lit under the Tories. “These results are sobering,” said one Tory MP, granted anonymity like others quoted in this article to speak candidly. “The coalition we built in 2019 was powerful because it tapped into a sense of national renewal and pride. That energy hasn’t disappeared, but we do need to reconnect with it.” BLUE SKY THINKING Johnson made “leveling up” his government’s defining theme, a boosterish vision of national renewal that promised to spray investment, jobs and opportunities around the U.K., and not just in traditional Tory heartlands.  That aspiration, alongside a clear pledge to “Get Brexit Done,” helped the party smash Labour in its former industrial strongholds. Now, that’s all turned to dust. Five years on, the Tories have just one MP in northeast England and only three northwest parliamentarians. At the general election last year, Labour reclaimed almost all the seats they lost and rebuilt much of the “Red Wall” Johnson prided himself on knocking down. Since then, “leveling up” has vanished from the Tory agenda. In a sign of their downgraded ambitions, the Tories launched their local election campaign in Buckinghamshire, the epitome of Home Counties safety for the party. “Leveling up is how we win the next election,” said former Tory MP Robert Goodwill, who retired from parliament last year. He believes his former Yorkshire seat could be regained from Labour by tapping into Johnsonian ideas about investment and renewal. “Leveling up was probably the most conservative thing that the last government did,” argued a second backbench Tory MP. “Conservatives understand the fortunate have a responsibility to the less fortunate.” Translating this rhetoric into reality is far harder. Reform UK came second in 60 northern English Labour seats last year, meaning the right-wing insurgents are seen as the beneficiaries of frustration with the government, not the Conservatives.  “They realize that the red wall isn’t particularly fertile territory for them,” Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary, University of London, said of the current Conservative operation. He highlighted how the Tories “never really built up any infrastructure” in seats won for the first time in 2019 — and then didn’t grow their local membership. It’s little wonder Reform have spied an opening. “It’s all looking pretty grim,” a Conservative shadow minister said. “[The] trouble is, Reform correctly identify the problems, but fail to identify the solutions (or at least workable solutions).” “Most thoughtful Conservatives recognize the battle is to reoccupy the post-Brexit ground,” the second backbench Tory MP quoted further above said. “That’s what we have to recapture … the spirit of 2019.”  DAMAGED GOODS Even if Johnson’s political vision has a hearing among beleaguered MPs, there is no looming desire to welcome the former PM himself back to the front line.  Numerous MPs POLITICO spoke to said the current leader, Kemi Badenoch, is the right person to hold the fort (a view shared, ominously, by Farage). Johnson’s reputation was tainted by his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, and he resigned from parliament in 2023 after a damning report into lockdown-breaking Downing Street gatherings during the pandemic. He now spends his time writing newspaper columns and campaigning for Ukraine. A political comeback doesn’t feel imminent. Johnson’s reputation was tainted by his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. | Andy Rain/EFE via EPA “A lot of Conservatives have finally woken up to the fact that he’s as much a liability as he is an asset,” said Bale, citing Partygate’s unpopularity. “He doesn’t, at the moment, appear to many people to be the solution to the problem.” Pollster Joe Twyman highlighted how Johnson divided Tory members even as his legacy “cast a shadow” over the party. “The Conservatives have with Boris Johnson what I would describe as a ‘Life of Brian’ problem,” the Deltapoll co-founder said, referring to the famous Monty Python film. “There is a proportion of its supporters, particularly its members, and also some of its MPs, who believe that Boris Johnson is the messiah, and there’s another group of, particularly MPs and, to a lesser extent, supporters and members who believe he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.”  Not everyone is sold on Johnson’s actual policy record, either. His premiership saw net migration surge from 254,000 in 2021 to 634,000 in 2022 — a move critics on the right are dubbing the “Boriswave.” Tory frontbencher Priti Patel’s recent attempts to defend her party’s approach to border control under Johnson didn’t go down well. “The perception is that we didn’t control immigration,” Goodwill admitted. “The challenge is to ensure that we are training enough people to do the jobs that people need skills to do.”  Conservative MP Martin Vickers, who supported Johnson’s leadership bid in 2019, defended the need for immigration, but recognized it remains a “massive issue” for voters.  “We have to face the reality that we do need some immigrant labor to carry out many crucial jobs,” the backbench MP argued, claiming there were not enough skilled workers in the British workforce for the jobs needed. Vickers also called for his party to “counter the simplistic nonsense” from Reform UK on the issue of deportations. “If Boris Johnson himself were asked in an interview about that, I imagine he would be able to give an explanation, excuse [or] justification that would go down relatively well with his supporters,” said pollster Twyman on immigration. But Twyman said that while it was the hot-button “chink in the armor” for Johnson, Rishi Sunak was the PM more remembered for failing to stop English Channel small boat crossings.  It is unsurprising, then, that Badenoch insisted the party is under new leadership.  “Whether it’s in the halls of Westminster or indeed, up and down the country in the Conservative clubs [and] bars, they don’t want the whispers of ‘Boris Johnson would have done a better job,’” said Twyman.  CHANGING THE CLIMATE  Badenoch has already created clear blue water between herself and Johnson on one key policy area: cutting carbon emissions to net zero. The ex-PM championed tackling climate change in office. Badenoch, by contrast, said it was “impossible” for the U.K. to reach net zero by 2050 without reducing living standards or reaching bankruptcy. Twyman said the Tory leader appeared to be acknowledging that people’s support for net zero lessens when they are asked to make specific sacrifices, and trying to “subtly emphasize that the Conservatives will put people first before the environment, at least in the short term.” Badenoch is “finessing our position” on net zero by making it “affordable and deliverable,” Vickers insisted.  However, there was skepticism about whether Reform supporters would really be convinced by the Tory pitch, when Farage himself is offering strident criticism of the entire agenda. “The key to winning back Reform voters is taking a stronger line and coming up with the right policies on immigration,” said John Flesher, the deputy director of the Conservative Environment Network. “The evidence that Reform voters are really hostile to climate and the environment just isn’t there.” Flesher added: “I don’t think she’s necessarily rejecting everything from that era, but it’s inevitable, given where the party is, that we are going to start to look at things differently.”  “The age in which we live demands a fittingly conservative response,” said the second Tory MP. “[Badenoch] needs to be more confident about setting out that vision.” 

LONDON — Keir Starmer’s decision to underwrite a major new defense commitment by slashing overseas aid spending was supposed to signal the British prime minister’s seriousness about global security. But along the way it has provoked a ministerial resignation, an internal party row — and left those in charge of the country’s ambitious international climate policies wondering if they, too, have been hobbled. The cut, expected to take more than £6 billion a year from the aid budget from 2027, was announced by Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the end of last month. A full week on, the government is unable to say what impact the cut would have on international climate finance — a key plank of U.K. green diplomacy through which money is invested in poorer countries to help them build cleaner energy systems or protect against the effects of climate change.  “It’s too early to be able to respond,” Energy Minister Philip Hunt admitted to the House of Lords when asked on Monday. Hunt could only point peers to the government’s spending review, due in June, when more detail may be released.  Energy Secretary Ed Miliband last year promised the U.K. would step up and fill “a vacuum of leadership” on global climate policy. But government officials repeatedly refused to say, when asked by POLITICO, whether Downing Street had consulted Miliband or his department before announcing the cuts.  Secretary of State Ed Milliband representing the U.K. at COP29. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images Miliband represents the U.K. at international climate summits and is jointly responsible with Foreign Secretary David Lammy for Britain’s effort to bring the rest of the world along on the road to net zero. His department had the fifth biggest foreign aid spend in the U.K. government, £440 million in 2023. “This cut was made in Number 10,” said Nick Mabey, chief executive of the E3G climate think tank and a former adviser to multiple U.K. governments. “It was a top-level, top-down political decision.” Parliament’s cross-party International Development Committee criticized the impact of the cuts Wednesday morning, citing the hit to “global efforts to address poverty, inequality and climate change.”  The Foreign Office did not respond to queries about the future of international climate finance. Hunt reiterated Starmer’s promise that the U.K. would continue to play a leading role on climate change, as well as delivering humanitarian aid in Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza. In her resignation letter on Friday, former Development Minister Anneliese Dodds said: “It will be impossible to maintain these priorities, given the depth of the cut.” MPs will discuss the impact of the cuts in parliament on Wednesday afternoon, in a debate called by two Labour backbenchers, Sarah Champion and Emily Thornberry. ‘A VERY DAMAGING MOVE’ Climate finance fosters efforts to cut emissions in developing countries and buys the U.K. influence to press its agenda at climate negotiations. But Dodds said in her letter that aid cuts will now weaken the U.K.’s position at those negotiations, while experts warned the cuts will force ministers to retrofit an international climate strategy to suit the prime minister’s new spending priorities. “Though defense spending needed to be increased, this was probably the most diplomatic- and influence-expensive way of doing it,” said Mabey. “It was a very damaging move.” The government has recommitted to its current target to deliver £11.6 billion in climate aid between 2021 and 2026, Hunt told the House of Lords. But it is unclear what happens after Starmer’s overseas aid cut comes into effect in 2027. Labour entered government pledging to return Britain to a global leadership position on climate change. In November, Miliband announced a new target for reducing planet-destroying carbon emissions in the period up to 2035, required this year under the terms of the Paris Agreement. The same month, the U.K. was a key player at the COP29 climate summit in Baku, which concluded with a deal to triple the flow of climate finance to developing countries over the coming decade. “We can’t believe — given the scale of the cut — that the increase in climate finance we were hoping to see following Baku … will be taken forward,” said Mabey. Alok Sharma, a former Tory minister who presided over the COP26 climate conference and now sits in the House of Lords, has asked the government repeatedly in the past week whether existing commitments would remain intact. Keir Starmer’s Labour entered government pledging to return Britain to a global leadership position on climate change. | WPA pool photo by James Glossop/Getty Images That includes the £11.6bn target, set by the previous Conservative government.  Sharma also asked Hunt about several multi-billion pound clean energy partnerships brokered between G7 countries and emerging economies such as South Africa, Vietnam and Indonesia. Neither Hunt, nor a departmental spokesperson when asked by POLITICO, would clarify the future of those projects. JOINING THE CLUB “It is hard to see the cuts as anything but a retreat from the U.K’.s international responsibilities and an unacceptable balancing of the books on the backs of the world’s most marginalized people,” said Catherine Pettengell, the executive director of Climate Action Network UK, a green NGO. They come on the back of enormous and sudden reductions in the U.S. aid program, ordered by President Donald Trump, and follow similar announcements in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Finland, where spending priorities have also shifted toward defense. This will force the U.K. to undertake a long-overdue “radical reform” of how aid money is spent, Mabey argued. Ministers would “get much more value for money out of each pound” by sharing technical and financial expertise, he said.  “All the developing countries we speak to, would really value that,” Mabey added. “They want to talk to the people who run our grid, not someone employed by our development finance [agency] who is a consultant.”

APIA, SAMOA — One is a consummate politician who mellowed his public views before finally assuming Britain’s top job … and the other is Keir Starmer. King Charles III — who is presiding over a biennial summit of 55 Commonwealth nations in Samoa Friday — and his newish U.K. premier are enjoying their first outing on the world stage as Britain’s latest iteration of a longest-running diplomatic double act: monarch and prime minister.  With the king hosting a luncheon and dinner for Commonwealth leaders Friday, both attended by Starmer, the pair may well need all the diplomatic skills they can muster. Charles, who paused cancer treatment to visit Australia and the South Pacific, was heckled by an indigenous senator in Canberra, while Starmer has tried to rebuff Caribbean nations’ calls for slavery reparations, choosing to focus on growth and climate assistance instead. Charles used his opening speech at Friday’s summit to call for action to combat the “existential threat of climate change,” including “cutting emissions, building resilience as far as possible to both the current and forecast impacts of climate change, and conserving and restoring nature, both on land and in the sea.” CENTRIST PM, CENTRIST KING? At first glance, there is little in common between the PM and king, men only 13 years apart but with upbringings a world apart. Starmer, 62, often speaks of the humble origins of his toolmaker father; 75-year-old Charles’ mother was the most famous woman on earth — and one of the richest. But both wear their roles heavily, occasionally gloomily. Observers note similarities in their style and — whisper it, because constitutionally the king does not have any — perhaps their politics. “My guess is that they would hit it off quite well,” said Jonathan Dimbleby, a personal friend of Charles and author of a 1994 biography. “Starmer is a thoughtful, serious person who can communicate in a way that he, the king, I think would respond well to on issues of substance.” At least it has been easier to present a united front between monarch and premier than at the last Commonwealth heads of government meeting (known as CHOGM) in Rwanda. Charles’ private views on the immorality of then-PM Boris Johnson deporting asylum seekers there were leaked days before the 2022 summit began. (The pair were later all smiles over a 15-minute cup of tea.) By contrast, Starmer scrapped the Rwanda plan and leans into green projects beloved of the king. While Charles has to be strictly neutral on party politics, he has a sense of “compassion, social cohesion,” said Dimbleby. “He uses the phrase ‘a community of communities’ as a way of describing a social environment that is healthy.” Of course, the multimillionaire who spent seven decades as heir to the throne is “not socially a radical,” added Dimbleby. Left-wing ex-Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn “would not have been to his taste, I suspect, as a future prime minister. If he has any politics, I suspect it’s pretty centrist, and therefore he will probably find it pretty easy to communicate in a useful way with Starmer.” SWORDS AND SLEEPOVERS The pair’s first known meeting neatly sums up the British establishment — when Charles knighted Starmer in 2014 for his work as director of public prosecutions. One person who knows Starmer said he and Charles have had a good personal relationship since, speaking periodically after the former became leader of the opposition and when polls suggested he was on course to become prime minister. Keir Starmer, 62, often speaks of the humble origins of his toolmaker father. | Alishia Abodunde/Getty Images Being PM comes with the diary entry of a private audience every Wednesday with the monarch. In April last year, Starmer was invited to the king’s pre-Easter “sleepover” at Windsor Castle, and days before this year’s July election, he was placed next to the king’s Private Secretary Clive Alderton at a state banquet. It is quite a change of tack for Starmer, who said in 2005: “I often used to propose the abolition of the monarchy.” But the person quoted above — granted anonymity, like others in this story, to speak about the sensitive issue — argued that the future prime minister’s views in the 1990s did not define how he felt to his core: “His small-c conservatism comes from growing up in a working-class or middle-class family in Reigate, not from being a radical human rights lawyer in North London.” Charles, too, has mellowed his well-known views on issues such as climate change and housing, at least in public, as part of the strict convention of neutrality that comes with being king.  His style in the past was far from laid back. One former minister recalled Charles, as prince of Wales, inviting them for tea at St James’s Palace, where they found themselves discussing policy for more than an hour. A second ex-minister recalled the future king questioning ministers on the detail of green finance — though never in a way that would lobby for a policy, they insisted. While he would occasionally “raise eyebrows” in private, they said, “what he will do is come up with ideas or offers. He will say, ‘This group of people deserve a pat on the back — would it be helpful to you, minister, if I did an event with them or I send you something on that?’” ‘HE PULLED ME TO ONE SIDE’ George Brandis, Australia’s former high commissioner to the U.K., recalls how the then-prince of Wales was “very eager to see” Australia commit to a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. When Canberra did — days before the COP26 climate summit in 2021 — “Charles was delighted about that. He had made it pretty clear on a number of occasions that he was very much hoping that Australia would do that. In fact, as I read it, [he] was a bit impatient that we hadn’t done so until relatively late in the piece.” Brandis added: “He is obviously very conscious of the constitutional limitations of his role as king, and I’m sure that his public or private advocacy of causes will be much less in evidence now that he is on the throne. But nevertheless … I found him very determined to make his views known and to be an advocate for the causes he deeply cares about, particularly environmental ones.” That does not make the king humorless; like Starmer, he is said to be warm and cracks jokes in private. Charles also shows “strong emotions,” more than his late mother, said Dimbleby: “He can get very frustrated, and those around him sometimes see that. They also see his total commitment to issues that matter and his ability to speak in a very informed way about them, and in private he feels perfectly free to do that.” In September 2023, a year almost to the day after his own mother’s death, the king wrote a deeply personal letter to then-Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, who had recently lost his father. Shapps told POLITICO: “He left it on my bed at Dumfries House [a royal residence in Scotland]. It was a beautifully written, hand-annotated letter from the king. Later, when I went downstairs for dinner, he pulled me to one side and said, ‘I know that there are no words that can match losing a parent, but I do hope you found my letter.’ … He is an unbelievably thoughtful man, and it was a heartfelt thing for him to do.” Charles receives a daily private email on politics from a member of the government whips’ office, the vice chamberlain of the household. While Queen Elizabeth encouraged her vice chamberlains to fill their letters with gossip — and would ask ministers about individual staff in the Commons tearoom — people who have dealt with Charles in recent years say he is generally more interested in granular policy. But the true nature of the relationship between Starmer and the monarch is, ultimately, unknown. The Wednesday audience is for the two of them alone, and Starmer’s office declined to even confirm ahead of CHOGM whether they would meet one-to-one.  Starmer, for his part, keeps up his end of the traditional royal secrecy, even amongst his inner circle. “He never talks about the king. He’s very disciplined,” said one Cabinet minister. A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE The relationship between a monarch and their government is a two-way street — as the king is ministers’ ultimate tool of soft power. Charles was expected to hold private meetings with other heads of state at CHOGM, and unlike those between Starmer and heads of government, there would be no readout afterward. This means leaders “can let their hair down a little bit” in the king’s company, said Dimbleby. King Charles III has to be strictly neutral on party politics, but he has a sense of “compassion, social cohesion.” | Carl Court/Getty Images An MP who has worked alongside the palace pointed out that Charles knows the chief executives of oil companies — and when the king invites them in to speak, they are unlikely to say no. His close relationships with figures in the Gulf, where he has drummed up sometimes controversial donations for his charities, are helpful for delicate Middle East geopolitics.  The second ex-minister quoted above said: “He will know people for decades, including high-power people who are moving through jobs. He has more of that continuity than anyone in any government. It is a tremendous help.” Starmer and the king have even walked down the aisle together — literally. At an afterparty for the U.K. investment summit on Oct. 14, the PM escorted Charles down the grand nave of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral. Some of the CEOs and investors waiting under the 18th century dome abandoned their usual poise to whip out their camera phones, said one person present. Those who spoke to the king included executives from the Qatar Investment Authority and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund who chairs the Newcastle United football club. DOWN TO BUSINESS This stardust helped draw focus to the king’s big moment — his speech at CHOGM’s opening ceremony on Friday. He was open about his past campaigning for the climate “for many years,” and appeared to nod subtly to the summit row over slavery reparations. He said: “I understand from listening to people across the Commonwealth how the most painful aspects of our past continue to resonate. It is vital therefore that we understand our history to guide us to make the right choices in the future.” Samoa’s government approved £84,000 to upgrade his accommodation, according to local media. The last time most leaders will have seen him was when he was draped in gold at his coronation. Starmer, who traveled to CHOGM on a separate plane and mostly did separate events, was a bit player by comparison. But that has not stopped the question of whether the king’s realms will shrink further. Of the 55 nations attending CHOGM, 15 (including Britain) have Charles as king. Former member Barbados became a republic in 2021, and Jamaica “remains hopeful” that it will follow in 2025, Foreign Minister Alando Terrelonge told the Independent in April.   Counterintuitively, though, this peeling away could help secure the future of the Commonwealth — by decoupling it from the vestiges of empire and turning it into a forward-looking body on climate and trade. Or so its supporters hope. Samir Puri, an associate fellow at the British foreign affairs think tank Chatham House, argued Charles’ successor Prince William would understand the pace of global change as an “older millennial.” He added: “It would be in his interests … not to turn away from that de-linking of monarchy and Commonwealth, to allow the Commonwealth to survive.”

LONDON — Britain is finally moving into the … 20th century? Hereditary peers, who sit in the country’s House of Lords by birthright, soon face abolition under a plan being pushed by the new Labour government. Thanks to titles handed down over generations, these aristocratic members of the House of Lords can still debate, amend and vote on legislation in the upper scrutiny chamber by a simple accident of birth. It’s a democratic anachronism the British government argues is well out-of-date — and it’s drawn up a bill to end the practice. The last gasp of the hereditary peers is a big moment in Britain’s constitutional history. Let POLITICO take you through five features Westminster-watchers will secretly miss after they’re gone. 1) MAVERICK CHARACTERS Britain’s hereditary peers sure are an eclectic bunch. There’s John Attlee, the 3rd Earl Attlee. He’s the grandson of post-war Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee. But while John’s the spitting image of his Labour titan grandad, there’s a twist: this one’s a Tory. One of the biggest critics of the plan to scrap the aristo lawmakers is Tom Strathclyde, the 2nd Baron Strathclyde. He’s argued the government should instead prioritize removing peers with low attendance rather than those there by birthright, and is a dab hand at punchy attack lines. Labour’s plans are “high-handed, shoddy [and] political,” he said. His full name? Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith. Margaret Alison of Mar — that’s the 31st Countess of Mar, to you — retired in 2020. But she moonlighted as a farmer and is a former specialist goatscheese-maker. She served as deputy Lords speaker several times, so at least put her time wrangling unruly animals to good use. 2) NO EXPENSES SPARED Hereditary peers, who descended from Britain’s landed gentry, aren’t likely to be short of a penny or two. But that hasn’t stopped many of them claiming the flat rate attendance allowance of up to £361 a day simply for … showing up in parliament, regardless of whether they speak or vote. A Sunday Times investigation found hereditary peers had cost the taxpayer almost £50 million since 2001, while the average hereditary had spoken just 50 times in the previous five years compared to 82 times for life peers (these ones are appointed, rather than getting a place by birth). When they did speak, they were 60 percent more likely to mention their own personal or business interests, the paper found. 3) BYE BYE BY-ELECTIONS Whisper it, but hereditary peers are actually the most democratic part of the Lords — and it’s all because Labour never really finished the job last time it was in government. Under Tony Blair, Labour removed nearly all of the hereditary peers. But, in a bid to get the plan through, a compromise was reached allowing 92 of them to stay on — they’d just have to scrap for it. Now, when a vacancy arises among the 92 due to a death or retirement, a by-election is held to choose their replacement. The electorate is … pretty small. If a Conservative peer departs, only fellow Conservative hereditary peers can vote on their successor, although 15 of the peers are chosen by the whole House. Power to the people! Candidates hoping to bag a seat in the Lords get to make a 75-word statement as part of their campaign. Given the small word count, the results have been … mixed. One plucky peer-to-be provided a link to their own YouTube channel (which didn’t work). Another highlighted their time representing Ireland in “target shooting.” And one boasted that Stephen Sondheim invited them to his home to play a musical. 4) RELICS OF A BYGONE ERA When you’re less progressive than the royal family, you might be in trouble. In 2013, British law changed to end succession to the crown based on gender. It meant boys no longer had first dibs to the throne even if they were born after their sisters. But the House of Lords never got with the times. While it’s been six decades since women were granted the right to sit in the House of Lords, just under a third of its current members are women. The problem’s even more acute for the hereditaries. Labour’s 1999 reforms, which whittle down the numbers of hereditary peers, left just five female hereditaries in place — and the last one still in place after that, the aforementioned Countess of Mar, retired in 2020. According to the House of Lords library, no women have been admitted to the House through the by-election process for picking new hereditary peers. Despite calls to change the rules, no updates happened. So while Westminster may not exactly miss this one, it’s one heck of an historical holdout. 5) BIG ISSUE CAMPAIGNERS Despite the immense privilege they enjoy, many hereditary peers have used their position to fly the flag for issues otherwise being ignored in Westminster. Crossbench peer Charles Wellesley, the 9th Duke of Wellington, helped force the government to get tough with sewage-dumping water companies. The late Tory peer Anthony Hamilton-Smith, 3rd Baron Colwyn, championed the use of  fluoride in water and banged the drum for better dental care. Margaret Alison of Mar (the goatscheese lady) became a champion for people with chronic fatigue syndrome after suffering from the condition herself. While Labour’s massive majority means its plan to scrap the hereditaries is all-but-certain to succeed, plenty of the aristocratic lawmakers think the way the government’s gone about it has the whiff of class warfare — and could end up making the government’s wider plans to reform the House of Lords a whole lot harder. Esther Webber contributed to this report.

LONDON — Liz Truss pushed through $1.15 billion in U.K. taxpayer support for a Mozambique gas project now embroiled in allegations of abduction, murder and rape. Truss’ moves to back the project as trade secretary in the spring of 2020 were opposed by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and many of her Conservative Cabinet colleagues. Britain’s new Labour government is now weighing whether to continue to offer taxpayer-funded direct loans and guarantees to U.K. exporters and banks supporting French energy major TotalEnergies’ $20 billion liquefied natural gas project in northern Mozambique. Last month POLITICO reported that a Mozambican military unit operating out of TotalEnergies’ gatehouse at the gas site in Cabo Delgado massacred at least 97 civilians. The security of the region had been deteriorating since at least 2019 when ISIS-affiliated militants calling themselves al-Shabaab forced notorious Kremlin-linked Wagner Group mercenaries out of the area. By June 2020 when Truss and her Cabinet colleagues were making their decision “it was clear to any reasonably well-informed observer … that the conflict was escalating and that the exploitation of gas reserves was one of the key drivers,” said Wolf-Christian Paes, a senior fellow in armed conflict at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. But a former high-ranking official in Britain’s trade department, granted anonymity to speak candidly, recalled that while the Cabinet was concerned about the environmental impact of the project, and civil servants were “equivocal,” Truss was insistent. She told civil servants to “find me a way to make it happen,” the official added. RAPED, TORTURED AND KILLED Just 10 months after Truss’ intervention, in April 2021, the project was brought to a halt as militants swept through the region, massacring more than 1,000 people. In the summer that followed, a Mozambican commando unit, led by an officer who said his mission was to protect “the project of Total,” accused fleeing villagers of being Islamic insurgents and separated the men — a group of between 180 and 250 — from the women and children. At least one woman was gang raped. The prisoners were then held in shipping containers on the TotalEnergies’ site for three months. They were beaten, shot, suffocated, starved, disappeared, tortured and killed. Only 26 survived. “Mozambique LNG has no knowledge of the alleged events … and has never received any information indicating that such events took place,” TotalEnergies said in a statement. This is “the latest news of atrocities to emerge from an area where the project is helping fuel an insurgency that has killed thousands and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes,” said Tony Bosworth, an energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth. The NGO launched a failed legal challenge against U.K. government backing for the project in September 2020. Just 10 months after Liz Truss’ intervention, in April 2021, the project was brought to a halt as militants swept through the region, massacring more than 1,000 people. | Camille Laffont/AFP via Getty Images “There can be no doubt that the U.K. Cabinet was aware of the security situation in Cabo Delgado at that time,” said the IISS’ Paes. “Investing in an active zone of armed conflict is an extremely risky proposition.”  As Truss was considering backing the project in the spring of 2020, there was “a big debate at the time” within Cabinet about moving ahead with the $1.15 billion funding, the former senior official said. Those arguments were said to center on climate change. The U.K. was about to host the U.N.’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow the following year and the project “became a totemic battle between those in government who wanted to proceed and those who didn’t,” the former senior official said. On one side were Cabinet ministers who argued “‘the U.K. is a country committed to COP, to battling climate change, and it’s therefore not appropriate [that] taxpayers money be spent in this way,'” the official explained. “The other camp was saying, ‘no, no, [UK Export Finance] should be able to finance whatever it likes … lots of other countries are proceeding with this.'” Truss “was very keen for this to go ahead,” the former official said. At the time, the trade secretary argued the U.K. “would be missing opportunities,” they said, if it didn’t back the project and that China would back it if Britain didn’t. “Liz was like: ‘no, no, we do this.’” Truss declined to comment for this article. ‘A REPUTATIONAL RISK TO THE UK’ On June 10, 2020, Truss, with then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s approval, signed off the $1.15 billion in funding for the TotalEnergies LNG project. The support, which has not yet been drawn down, would be delivered by UK Export Finance, which underwrites loans from banks to U.K. firms working on the project and in some cases has also offered its own direct financing to those firms. Truss’ decision to approve the project came after a flurry of letters of opposition from Cabinet colleagues, including Britain’s top business and international development ministers, according to documents released as part of a legal challenge. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab warned of the project’s “reputational risk” to Britain given the nation was due to host COP26 the following year and was seeking to encourage other nations to move away from fossil fuel investments. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab warned of the project’s “reputational risk” to Britain given the nation was due to host COP26 the following year. | Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images Boris Johnson was “bounced” into approving the scheme as it was too advanced to cancel when he was told about it, The Times reported. “The PM was pretty furious and immediately asked for a review of UKEF’s policy on fossil fuel,” the newspaper cited a source as saying. Johnson did not respond to a request for comment. But by December 2020 — months after Truss approved U.K. backing — Johnson ended future government finance for similar overseas fossil fuel projects. Talks are now underway for force majeure — a contract clause which removes obligations on parties in the event of a disaster — to lift on the TotalEnergies project. The region is more stable now than in 2021, said Paes, following a military campaign by various Southern African Development Community nations supporting Mozambique’s government. TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné has said he wants to restart the project by the end of 2024. “We are currently in talks with project sponsors and other lenders regarding the latest status of the LNG production project in Mozambique and the potential for the force majeure situation to lift,” said a UK Export Finance spokesperson. Campaigners continue to press for the money to be withdrawn. “This project is a carbon time bomb that’s being associated with mass killings, rape and torture,” Friends of the Earth’s Bosworth said. “It’s unconscionable for the U.K. government to have anything to do with it.”