Britain’s big news story of the past two weeks will have caused embarrassment at ‘The Thunderer’. Four days before the BBC reported that Prime Minister Sunak planned to water down net-zero targets, the Times dismissed any suggestion that the government would abandon the highest-profile one, the ban from 2030 on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.

The media could be forgiven for not anticipating Sunak’s sudden heretical assault on Britain’s largely undebated climate pieties. With a reputation as a cautious, bloodless technocrat, he previously seemed content to go along with the metropolitan establishment’s warmist consensus. By contrast with Liz Truss, who edged away from Boris Johnson’s eco-zealotry towards an emphasis on energy security, Sunak reinstated the power of the Westminster Green Blob – even if he’s never seemed personally obsessed with climate change like Johnson. He again banned fracking; net-zero sceptic Jacob Rees-Mogg was dumped as energy secretary; and North Sea energy development was all but strangled with punitive taxes. This was all consistent with Sunak’s previous climate policy record: as chancellor he slapped eco-taxes on long-haul flying and commented that voters needed ‘to adjust’ to higher energy prices increased by eco-levies.

Yet he’s changed course. And the catalyst for Sunak’s delay or scrapping of draconian climate-policy-driven rules on cars and boilers was the July by-election for Boris Johnson’s seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, which the Tories retained because of voter hostility to London Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan’s scheme to charge many motorists, ostensibly to reduce pollution. Opinion polls show that while voters want a cleaner world, they oppose being made poorer and colder to achieve that. Despite a strong element of hypocrisy, the Tories have finally twigged that an obvious electoral strategy is to paint Labour as the party of environmental extremists.

Sunak’s various announcements were smart politics. His delay of the ban on the sale of conventional cars from 2030 to 2035 was – gratifyingly from the Tory point of view – immediately condemned by Labour’s former leader and eco-fanatic environmental spokesman Ed Milliband, who said Labour would reverse the decision. This was irrational as well as extreme. The 2030 commitment was an arbitrary back of an envelope commitment by Boris Johnson, aimed purely at making the UK look more Green than the EU, which decided on 2035 as its target for its (recently softened) ban on new petrol and diesel cars. Not only that, but Labour leader Keir Starmer has committed to a broad UK alignment with EU standards. Labour will be setting up another own goal if it doesn’t back down.

Sunak also announced a range of newly delayed and relaxed rules on replacement of gas and oil boilers, which Labour hasn’t commented on. Cleverly, Sunak also ruled out taxes on meat, new taxes on flying, requirements for households to have seven recycling bins, and compulsory car-sharing – all measures Britain’s climate change apparatchiks have urged. The announcements paint the climate change lobby as swivel-eyed extremists out of touch with ordinary people and challenge Labour to reveal whether or not they agree with such unpopular measures.

Significantly, Sunak ignored the views of the country’s hitherto all-powerful Climate Change Committee, set up under Labour’s original 2008 Climate Change Act to drive decarbonisation. The attacks on Sunak of its chief executive, Chris Stark, which featured prominently on BBC news after the announcements, made for startling listening. Much of the media shared the hysteria: one of UK Sky News’ presenters, for example, asked a minister if Sunak was ‘prepared to let the planet burn just to get votes from elderly car owners’. Much of the criticism, including the sanctimonious bleating of Al Gore, boils down to charges that Britain has abandoned its global ‘leadership’ on climate policy. Such metropolitan elite hot air will have been welcomed by Tory strategists hoping that previous Conservative voters who see the party as no longer conservative will revise their view. Sunak’s allies will hope Extinction Rebellion and their like launch characteristically unhinged protests at Sunak’s new policies.

The extremism of the eco-lobby’s attacks on Sunak will have left the impression on some that he’s walking away from the UK’s net-zero 2050 commitments. In fact Sunak went to great effort to claim that he remains committed to the target. He no doubt doesn’t want to alienate the majority of Britons who, according to opinion polls, say that, in principle, they’re worried about climate change. Indeed, despite Sunak’s announcements, Britain remains more extreme than the EU in its net-zero car policy. In 2035 Brussels will allow internal combustion engines to continue, as long as they use ‘sustainable’ fuels. Sunak hasn’t proposed a similar adjustment. Moreover, despite his statement that people shouldn’t be ‘forced’ towards electric cars, his bureaucracy is still trying to do precisely that. It insists that car makers sell 80 per cent electric cars by 2030 or risk fines of £15,000 per car. That will translate into making petrol cars much more expensive.

Still, the eco-lobby may in fact be right that Sunak’s watering down of climate change pledges makes it less likely that the UK will meet net zero by 2050. With the deadline on the ban of conventional cars delayed, the slow uptake of EVs will probably become even more half-hearted. Similarly, the mass replacement over the next decade of cheap and effective gas and oil boilers, as the eco-bureaucracy originally planned, simply isn’t going to happen. But 2050 is a long way off and matters will be fudged. Sunak’s focus is not suffering a humiliating defeat at the next elections in about a year.

Sunak’s announcements, despite the Tories’ terrible poll numbers, suggest a pathway to remaining in government if he can persuade voters that Labour is environmentally extreme. He also looks set to emphasise other big vote-winning policy differences with Labour – the slashing and eventual abolition of inheritance tax is now widely expected to be one such.

The icing on the cake would then be if the Supreme Court gives the green light for the removal of asylum-seekers to Rwanda, which would give Sunak a fighting chance of stopping the boats. Next year’s battle for Number 10 looks like turning into a real contest.