Zac Goldsmith’s turncoat moment could usher in a Labour government

Things can only get better: Goldsmith, a Tory peer, has hinted about defecting to work with Keir Starmer. Could this be 1997 all over again, asks John Rentoul

Goldsmith, in his interview with BBC News’s ‘Hardtalk’, urged Starmer to show ‘the kind of commitment that we saw when Boris Johnson was the leader’ (PA)

You do not need Google Translate to understand the many meanings of Zac Goldsmith’s warm words about the Labour Party. “If” he heard a “real commitment” from Labour “to protect and restore the natural world” on its way to net zero, he said, “I’d be very tempted to throw my weight behind that party and support them in any way I could”.

There is the surface meaning: green Conservative peer puts pressure on Keir Starmer to hold the line on environmentalism. Goldsmith’s climate-change activism is focused on wildlife rather than what he called “carbon, taxation and regulation”, but he wants greater green efforts rather than the “proportionate and pragmatic” approach favoured by the prime minister.

The first subtext, not far from the surface, is the Boris Johnson Revenge Factory. Goldsmith is a friend and ally of the former prime minister and of the former prime minister’s wife, and he is part of an operation to prove that the Conservative Party made a terrible mistake getting rid of its one and only true leader.