Overconfident and rebellious – Johnson will rue the day he made a Tory party in his own image | Martin Kettle

Clashes over the climate crisis and Covid are revealing deep divisions in government. A time of reckoning is approaching

Compared with the fate of the globe, that of Boris Johnson is infinitesimally trivial. Yet the two things are interconnected. In November, Johnson hosts what is likely to be a knife-edge Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow. At the same time he faces an autumn of acute political dilemmas at home, in which his own future as Conservative leader will be on the line. Truly the coming months are a season of reckoning – for the planet and the prime minister alike.

This week’s report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) posed existential questions for the nations when they come to Glasgow. But it also highlighted issues that are becoming increasingly important to Johnson’s own survival. He is the leader of a Tory party that bridles both ideologically and financially at the hard and expensive choices – on everything from aircraft and cars to home insulation and power generation – that are umbilically linked to his net-zero-by-2050 pledges and to the implications of the IPCC report.

Related: There is no ‘getting back to normal’ with climate breakdown | Mark Blyth

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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