Boris COPs up his host city

And so COP26 ended, not so much with a bang, but rather a whimper. Alok Sharma’s tears aside, there was a muted feel to the unveiling of Saturday’s Glasgow protocol, at which countries agreed merely to ‘phase down’ rather than ‘phase out’ coal. That sense of anticlimax was only enhanced by yet more strike action at the conference close, with the RMT union ensuring the cancellation of all sleeper trains back to London – just two days after the Foreign Office admitted Liz Truss took a domestic flight to the summit after the cancellation of her train.

Still, Boris Johnson has never been one to let facts get in the way of a good story. And yesterday afternoon the PM ensured just that, telling a hastily-assembled press conference that COP marked the ‘death knell’ for coal – news, presumably, to the National Grid which had to rely