The government’s contempt for the climate was put on full show this week after the prime minister rowed back on the party’s green pledges and his deputy flew to New York in a near-empty 158-seat plane.
Rishi Sunak announced plans to renege on climate change commitments on the same day world leaders met at a UN climate summit, saying that he believes “we risk losing the consent of the British people” for net zero policies without a change in approach and denied he was “watering down” green targets.
It comes on the same day world leaders gathered for discussions on preventing future pandemics and tackling the climate crisis at the UN General Assembly (Unga) in New York and Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ Climate Ambition Summit.
Oliver Dowden took his place and travelled to the States in some style to be there.
He took a 158-seat RAF Voyager with only a few advisers and defence personnel, sources said.
The aircraft is usually used to transport senior ministers with large delegations of officials, journalists and occasionally business executives.
Reacting to the news, Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney general, said: “Oliver Dowden may think that deputising for Rishi Sunak means replicating his private jet lifestyle, but it is wrong on every level for him to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money using the biggest government plane to fly to New York, when there were any number of scheduled services he could have used instead.
“That is wrong on cost grounds, wrong on environmental grounds and wrong on the basis of the ministerial code. It just shows that this is a government no longer interested in doing right by the British people, and no longer serious about net zero, but just set on enjoying the trappings of power at taxpayers’ expense for as long as they still can.”
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