Boris Johnson at the launch of COP26 Chris J Ratcliffe/PA Wire/PA Images

Oops, he did it again. The most pressing global issue of our time has again been reduced to a tawdry political row. When Boris Johnson failed to show at a TV debate on climate change during the 2019 UK general election, the fallout wasn’t days of talk on the best ways to slash emissions, but whether Channel 4 had conspired to block the Conservative party and if the channel should lose its public funding.

Yesterday, a prime ministerial speech to launch the UK-hosted COP26 UN climate summit in Glasgow this November – the most important climate talks since COP21 in Paris in 2015 – was again overshadowed by political Punch and Judy. Johnson’s top adviser sacked the president of COP26, Claire O’Neill, leading to a withering broadside in which she accused Johnson of “not getting” climate change.

Johnson failed to answer journalists’ questions yesterday on who would succeed her. Last night, we learned that former prime minister David Cameron has rejected the job, as has former foreign secretary William Hague, seen by veteran climate change campaigners as an ideal candidate.


But to reduce this to a reshuffle politics story is to utterly miss the big picture. The world is dangerously off track from the top Paris goal of holding warming to 1.5°C. We are in for 3°C or more of warming, which would be devastating for us and the ecosystems we rely on. The Glasgow meeting is meant to elicit tougher carbon-cutting plans from the nearly 200 countries signed up to the Paris deal, to close that calamitous gap.

“This is not about me, it’s not about the prime minister,” said O’Neill yesterday. “What the world needs us to do is break out of this incrementalism and start us moving forward on where we need to be, which is in a really rapid decarbonisation way.” I couldn’t agree more.

Unfortunately, we found out more about the state of preparations for COP26 in a letter from O’Neill to Johnson than the official launch of the summit – and the picture isn’t pretty.

There has been no meeting yet of a subcommittee of the UK cabinet on the summit, which Johnson promised to chair, despite 30,000-plus people being due to descend on Glasgow in November. There is also a stand-off between the UK and Scottish governments over use of the Glasgow science centre for COP26. I’m told talks are “constructive”, but there’s no deal yet.

O’Neill suggested Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, be given a role at COP26, but Johnson rejected that in “salty terms”. Yesterday Sturgeon offered to send her environment minister to attend UK cabinet meetings. There has been no official response. Budgets are reportedly ballooning. Altogether, the agenda for COP26 is “miles off track”, said O’Neill.

It is clear the UK is a long way behind where France was ahead of the Paris summit, partly because of the general election, partly because preparations simply started too late. But there are reasons to think this supertanker can be turned around. There are around 150 people in government working on COP26. The Foreign Office last night hosted 140 foreign diplomats who, while no doubt gossiping on this week’s revelations, were also briefed on the UK’s climate leadership ambitions.

It is in Johnson’s hands whether the fiasco this week is “a blip in the road or a major problem” for COP26, according to Nick Mabey at the E3G think tank. The test will be whether the UK can navigate its new place in the global geopolitical landscape, such as its relationship with the European Union and China, to unveil new carbon-cutting plans before Glasgow and elicit action from other key players such as India.

The European Climate Foundation’s Laurence Tubiana, the former French climate ambassador who played a key role in Paris, tells me she has faith the UK will deliver on COP26, but time is short and the challenge is bigger than the Olympics. “Success will require engagement from all of government from the prime minister down,” she says.

The first priority must be appointing a political heavyweight as COP26 president. Some climate experts say Michael Gove is one of the last people left in the frame with the skills necessary, given his success at raising the profile of environmental issues while environment secretary.

The urgency to get the summit back on track couldn’t be greater, as the planet keeps reminding us. The world just had its warmest January on record, Australia has been ablaze and there are warnings we could temporarily breach the 1.5°C threshold before 2025. We need COP26 to succeed, for all our sakes.