Boris ally Zac Goldsmith ‘very tempted’ to back Labour at election

Former Conservative minister Zac Goldsmith has said he is ‘very tempted’ to back Labour at the next general election. The Tory peer and key Boris Johnson ally – who recently quit Rishi Sunak ‘s government in a blaze of acrimony – attacked his own party for not having ‘a clear answer’ to climate change . Lord Goldsmith said he was seriously considering switching his support to Labour if Sir Keir Starmer emphasised his ‘commitment’ to reaching net zero carbon emissions. ‘The simple truth is there is no pathway to net zero and there’s no solution to climate change that does not involve nature, massive efforts to protect and restore the natural world,’ he told BBC Hardtalk . ‘And at the moment, I’m not hearing any of that from the Labour Party,’ said Goldsmith. He added: ‘If I do, if there’s a real commitment – the kind of commitment that we saw when Boris Johnson was the leader – then I’d be very tempted to throw my weight behind that party and support them in any way I could.’ Lord Goldsmith was the Sunak government’s international environment minister until a row blew in June, when he was accused of being one of the Johnson allies who undermined in MPs’ Partygate inquiry. Mr Sunak made clear that Lord Goldsmith had been asked to apologise over his comments about the privileges committee inquiry that found Mr Johnson lied to MPs with his Partygate denials. But the ally of the former PM insisted he had quit because of ‘apathy’ over climate change and the environment, accusing Mr Sunak of being ‘simply uninterested’ in the issues. Zac Goldsmith with his former boss Boris Johnson Mr Goldsmith said he had been ‘horrified’ that the government appeared to be abandoning its climate commitments and was pulling back from any global leadership. The senior peer, a former Tory MP and London mayoral candidate, told the BBC that the Tory government cannot now meet its vow to spend £11.6bn over five years on global climate change programmes. ‘It’s great that the government is saying that they’re committed to £11.6bn, but mathematically, it is impossible for us to meet that target. Unless the Treasury intervenes, unless the prime minister intervenes, it’s simply impossible. He added: ‘If you look at the trajectory of expenditure, in order to fulfil that promise the first year of the next government – which may or may not be this government, it might be the Labour Party – will have to spend over 80 per cent of all of its bilateral aid on climate finance. And that it obviously is not going to happen.’ Mr Goldsmith said Labour still had a ‘blind spot’ on the natural environment. ‘When the Labour party thinks environment, when it talks environment, it’s think carbon, taxation and regulation and all the things that go with that.’ He said he wanted to hear Sir Keir’s party commit to ‘massive efforts to restore the natural world’ before he could take the dramatic step of switching sides and backing the opposition. The privileges committee’s damning June dossier named Lord Goldsmith along with Boris backers new dossier said  Jacob Rees-Mogg and  Nadine Dorries in making ‘unacceptable’ attempts to damage its work. Lord Goldsmith had retweeted a tweet calling the inquiry a witch hunt and kangaroo court deemed to have undermined the cross-party group by claiming that ‘evidence was totally irrelevant to it’.