Zac Goldsmith: “As a minister, I was being required to effectively lie in Parliament”

31 October 2025

The former Conservative environment minister on resigning from government in 2023, why right-wing parties are getting it wrong on nature, and his fears for Britain as a global voice on climate

Zac Goldsmith has said he resigned from Rishi Sunak’s government in 2023 because he was asked to mislead MPs about cuts to environment funding. Speaking on the Planet Possible podcast, the former Conservative environment and international development minister said he had been “required to effectively lie in Parliament” about the scale of the cuts, and to “pretend that we weren’t cutting the budget when I knew from internal meetings and documents that the budget was going to be cut.”

Goldsmith first became an MP in 2010, representing the Greater London borough of Richmond Park until standing down in 2016 in protest over the expansion of Heathrow Airport. He was the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London in 2016, losing to Sadiq Khan. Goldsmith was MP for Richmond Park again between 2017 and 2019, before being awarded a life peerage in order to continue to serve as a minister in Boris Johnson’s government. He still sits in the House of Lords today, alongside working for a number of environmental foundations.

In addition to his revelations around his departure from Rishi Sunak’s government, Goldsmith talked to Planet Possible host Niki Roach about the anti-science stance of parties like the Conservatives and Reform, the current UK government’s apparent lack of ambition when it comes to global climate issues, and how policy makers can achieve easy wins for nature recovery.

If you enjoy this taster, you can listen to the full conversation here or search for Planet Possible in your favourite podcast app. Follow the podcast to stay updated on our monthly deep dives into pressing environmental challenges.

Now, over to Niki and Zac…

--

Niki Roach: How is the environment considered globally?

Zac Goldsmith: Things are changing. Plates are moving all over the place. On the one hand, you've got climate-vulnerable nations around the world, often poorer countries for whom this stuff is existential. I mean, it's not an academic debate. You're seeing increasing organisation, coordination, mobilisation of those countries. I was just at Climate Week in New York at the UN General Assembly and it's really extraordinary to see the coming together of all these organisations. You had a group of all the Pacific small island states, for example, they are actively working to create the largest marine protected area on Earth. If they pull it off, which they will, it'll be an area bigger than the surface area of the moon.

So you've got huge ambition on one level, and then in parts of the West, you've got a new politics taking over, which has, in my view, completely misunderstood the issue. Environmental groups have a small nugget of responsibility: we've allowed the environment to be reduced down to this single, one-dimensional issue of carbon, and the effect is that the real environment, which is crucial for climate stabilisation, has just been left to one side. When this new populist right decide that they don't like climate policy, they don't believe in climate change, they effectively chuck the whole environment issue in the bin, which makes no sense.

There's a long history of environmentalism on the centre right of politics, and that's true of America more than anywhere else. Teddy Roosevelt created [five] national parks [and] his speeches on the environment were unbelievably moving and poetic and heartfelt. Even Richard Nixon – we think only of Watergate, and not surprisingly, given the scandal at the time – but more environmental legislation was passed on his watch than any previous or subsequent president. But all that stuff's been thrown in the bin.

The Conservative party has announced that it's effectively scrapping the Climate Change Act – which was a cross-party piece of legislation – not replacing it with anything, as far as I can see, and no emphasis either on alternatives, a shift towards the natural environment, for example. The battle now is to try and imbue our politicians with the sense that they can disagree about the solutions but we have one planet and if we allow the planet to wither – which is happening unbelievably quickly – if things don't change, you're going to have a humanitarian crisis on a scale that we've never even had to consider. It's really not political in an ideological sense: the solutions are political, but the job of any serious political party has to be to come up with what it believes are the best solutions, not just to ignore the problem altogether. That is a disastrous policy, and unfortunately, it is a policy which is gaining traction in certain places.

NR: You resigned from the Conservative government in 2023 over the direction of travel that we're now seeing…

ZG: I know people have different views on Boris Johnson, but he was a supporter of these issues. He was a champion of nature. And as a minister at the time, I had a huge freedom to do very exciting, good things, particularly around the natural environment. We hosted [the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference] in Glasgow, COP26, it was the first COP where nature was at its heart. But then Boris Johnson was replaced by Liz Truss and then Rishi Sunak, and I was committed to continuing to try to protect what had been done and make progress.

But then there was a particular issue: we had made a pledge before COP26 to double our international climate finance and all the small island states and Commonwealth countries and climate-vulnerable countries, our friends and allies on the whole, were really happy about that, because it created a sort of chain reaction. Other countries stood up and doubled their own commitments as well. And I remember going to COP and there were leaders of these countries we’d been working with and they were furious: nothing had been announced. The budget hadn't been cut, but all the rumours were that the government was going to go back on this promise about something which for them is existential. I felt that it was such a betrayal. I possibly could have stayed and fought my corner on that issue, but as a minister, I was being required to effectively lie in Parliament, to pretend that we weren't cutting the budget when I knew from internal meetings and documents that the budget was going to be cut. It wasn't going to be straightforward cut: we were going to redefine projects as to pretend they were environmental, so that we could create this of illusion that we were keeping our promise, but we weren't. I wasn't willing to do that. It became intolerable.

NR: How is the current Labour government doing from an environmental perspective?

ZG: There are probably more environmentally minded MPs in Parliament today than ever before but there's no pressure on the Labour government. When we were in government, I would often work with the opposition. I could just hint that there were certain areas that if they pushed hard, they might win, and it would help me as a minister trying to get this stuff over the line. So we always felt pressure, a healthy pressure coming from the opposition. But the current government has no pressure on these issues from the opposition. So that dynamic is gone, and as a result, the sense that the government has to deliver on these issues doesn't really exist.

There are some really good people: Steve Reid was good in the environment department, David Lammy was excellent in the Foreign Office on these issues. He really cares about nature, and it's not academic for him. I've known him for years and he's passionate about forests. He's now been moved, effectively downgraded: deputy prime minister sounds great, but it is a demotion. The new Foreign Office doesn't seem to have anything like the same focus on global leadership, on environmental issues. It sounds like Keir Starmer is not going to go to the Brazil COP. I suggest that's probably because he doesn't feel that he has anything to offer. But that's a political choice. Brazil is doing some really ambitious things. It needs global support. When I talk to the Norwegian government, the German government, the Singaporeans, other countries as well, there's much more enthusiasm about supporting the President Lula [da Silva] agenda on the environment, on forests in particular, than we have here in this country.

There's a worry for me about international commitments. A lot of that stuff just seems to be withering. The money is shrinking away to almost nothing. Lots of commitments that we made before are being quietly put on the shelf.

There are some great champions in government, some really good people, new MPs. But the general direction of government is pretty depressing. We're definitely not taking advantage of the low hanging fruit.

NR: How do you make the case to the Treasury that nature, climate, water challenges, need funding?

ZG: This is the thing: it's not even about extra cost. It's about spending that money in a slightly different way. The solution isn't to go and find new money. If you were to shift that money away from funding bad things, towards supporting stewardship of the land, you've got twice as much money as you need. I know it's never going to be that simple, but that is the direction of travel we should be moving in. It's not always about writing cheques, taxing people more to do more things, it's about spending existing money more effectively.

Fishing is one of the most subsidised industries. The people that are on the screens of the Attenborough film, Ocean, who are destroying whole systems, they're paid by us to do it. Anyone watching who pays their taxes is paying for the destruction of those marine protected areas. Why should we be doing that? How difficult would it be for a government to say, ‘We're going to switch those subsidies? There are blocks in the system. There's a lot of lobbying by vested interests. I saw that in government. We got a lot of stuff done in the years that Boris Johnson was there, but we didn't get that done. I wasn't a fishing minister, but I often tried trespassing into this area because it drove me mad that we were effectively lying to people about protected areas in the ocean. But it isn't difficult. It's a political decision.

Environmental policy, if it's done properly, isn't unpopular. It can and should and would improve lives and livelihoods, as well as improving the environment. There's no choice between nature and progress, nature and development. That's a completely artificial choice, and one that's been spuriously peddled by quite often by the people who are destroying nature. They're doing well out of it, but on the whole people are not.

--

There’s much more where that came from – listen to the full conversation here. You can also search for Planet Possible in your favourite podcast app.

For more CIWEM news updates, sign up to 'The Environment' newsletter, our free monthly news round up.