Rishi Sunak’s waffle exposed the flaw in Boris’s green agenda

Who pays? It is one of the most important questions in politics, especially when it comes to the sort of expensive zeitgeisty ideas that governments love to take a reputational ride on.

When Margaret Thatcher was Tory leader, she tried to exempt her party from this charge of vulnerability to fashionable notions that come with eye-watering price tags attached, once observing: 

‘The Labour party scheme their schemes, the Liberal party dream their dreams, but we have work to do.’

Nobody who has followed the career of Boris Johnson at all closely would seek to exempt him. Indeed, ‘schemes and dreams’ appear to be what make him tick.

So it is a sign of the baleful groupthink afflicting our political broadcasters that so little effort has been put into pressing ministers on how they propose to fund the Government’s most expensive dream of all: the commitment to deliver net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Presumably, the imperative for reducing emissions to zero is such a fixture of the woke political playbook that even asking how much it will all cost – and who will pay – is judged to be a heresy.