Geoffrey Lean: Green guns are Cameron's true-blue weapons

Don't tell George Bush, Norman Tebbit – or even George Osborne – but the environment has long been a Conservative cause. Leftish pressure groups may make most of the noise, but most of the progress has been made by the Right.

Thus it was Ted Heath who set up one of the world's first Departments of the Environment and Richard Nixon, of all people, who established the United States' groundbreaking Environ-mental Protection Agency. The start of Margaret Thatcher's reign revived greenery after five Labour years of torpor, and by the end of it, the Iron Lady had become the first leader to take up the cause of global warming with passion.

Al Gore may have talked big but he did little in office and the Clinton administration disappointed. So did the last, Red-Green, German government: it has been the Conservative Angela Merkel who has led the world in pressing George Bush to shift his obstruction over climate change.

So despite George Osborne's denunciation last week of the Conservative "über-modernisers" who have put green issues at the heart of the Tories' appeal – and the rising of a shroud-waving Lord Tebbit from his political grave to denounce them as "unpopular" – David Cameron has been building on solid foundations in making the environment a Tory cause.

Despite the dismissal of the green initiatives as unpopular by political commentators – notably in the Murdoch press, in defiance of the old man's dramatic rebirth as a climate change campaigner earlier this year – they have so far been working. Cameron's wearing of the green projected a compassionate, progressive image, shot the Conservatives into poll leads for the first time in more than a decade, and even enabled him to win a local election landslide last year under the slogan "Vote Blue, Go Green".

The new Ipsos MORI poll, which we report today on page 2, bears this out. Britons, it shows, back proposals for green taxes, put forward this month by a policy group headed by John Gummer and Zac Goldsmith, by six to one. There are four-to-one majorities for higher taxes on gas-guzzlers and tax breaks for energy efficient homes – and a 49-to-20 per cent endorsement of halting the Government's plans to expand airports. And in almost every case the support among Conservatives exceeds that of the public at large.

The results challenge the almost universal media assumption that the proposals are "vote-losers", "daft" and a Tory rewriting of "the longest suicide note in history" – not to speak of the insistence of Tory right-wingers that they are "anti-Conservative".

Most such comment has focused on a few, far-out suggestions, such as taxing supermarket parking or removing the white lines from roads, but the 547-page "quality of life" policy review is nevertheless an extraordinarily sensible, thoughtful and detailed document. The Ends report, Britain's unexcitable leading environmental policy journal, rightly concluded last week: "Never has a mainstream party considered the mounting environmental crisis so widely or so deeply."

While dropping the supermarket parking tax, and other marginal proposals, Cameron has made it clear that much of the document will appear in the manifesto – and his intimates insist that will not change.

He would be wise to stick to his green guns. Spiking them now would cost him much credibility and – it appears – lose vital support at a time when he badly needs it. And firing them could inflict unexpected damage on a government that is, after all, Brown.