I had a premonition that Rishi Sunak was about to do something deeply ungreen. I didn’t know exactly what, and definitely couldn’t have named which oil and gas licences he wanted to issue, but I knew that, whatever it was, it would spell the end of our commitment to net zero. I figured it would shift our international alignment away from the countries taking the climate crisis seriously, because it’s right in front of them and they are not psychopaths, towards the countries strutting their indifference to it, for the complicated but demonstrable political mileage in the message: “Follow me to hell – it’ll be fun there.”
It was written right there in his holiday house. Why would a British prime minister have a second home in California? It’s such a forceful statement – I don’t care how rich I look, I don’t care how much I fly, I don’t care what eco-nerds think – and so unforced. He could have sold it, waited till he was no longer the prime minister – he must have known it wouldn’t be for ever – and bought a bigger one.
Once you are looking through that lens – that he sees environmentalism as dross to be jeered at – the man makes a lot more sense. When he says he is anti-woke, he probably means it. When he waves through sadistic policies on asylum seekers, he isn’t being regrettably outflanked by ministers to his right, he is enjoying it.
It’s possible that this guy, steering our sorry country in its hard-right direction, is actually quite rightwing. It doesn’t change anything in practical terms. From their hard right to their soft centre, the Conservatives have proved destructive – and no new version would make their demise in the interests of society any less pressing.
But I still find it monumentally weird how Sunak got away with it. He came off like a technocrat, a smooth and reasonable man, not especially ideological in any direction. He self‑presents like the Macron of the right: maybe he doesn’t actively care about your predicament, perhaps he would always put his own first; yes, he spent enough money on sliders and coffee-warmers to mark himself out as a pretty unserious person, but he camouflaged himself effortlessly as practical, unencumbered by anything as unwieldy as a big idea. He absolutely did not read as a man with enough programmatic self‑belief to drive us all off a cliff. He seemed like a respecter of cliffs.
This magnificent misdirection was only possible because we had had too many prime ministers in too short a time. David Cameron should have been a red flag, since he also used this pragmatic, polished carapace to hide his radical vision for a much less equal society, but by the time that was obvious to everyone he was on the way out.
By the time Theresa May was leader, she had only one problem. You can’t really fathom any structure of belief from someone just trying to figure out Brexit; it’s like trying to guess someone’s religion from watching them play Jenga.
Boris Johnson got us used to a prime minister with no fixed convictions on anything at all.
Then Liz Truss gave this glorious Technicolor display of what a Tory ideologue looks like. You can spot one because they want to go to war with France and your mortgage payments have doubled. You can see them a mile off by their fearless rhetoric and your collapsing currency. Her successor seemed so mild by comparison, so equable. How was it possible for him to have a worldview that was even worse?
It was a whistlestop route that gave us a sitting prime minister who is probably the most rightwing since Margaret Thatcher, yet passing as the least.
I am not saying they planned it. None of this looks planned.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
