Goldsmith blasts Sunak for being 'apathetic' over environment as he walks out

LORD Zac Goldsmith dramatically quit as a government minister today, launching a scathing attack on Rishi Sunak over the environment.

- Nicholas Cecil

Resigning as a Foreign Office minister for the international environment, he tore into the Prime Minister for allegedly not being sufficiently focused on climate issues.

In his resignation letter, he said: “The problem is not that the Government is hostile to the environment, it is that you, our Prime Minister, are simply uninterested. That signal, or lack of it, has trickled down through Whitehall and caused a kind of paralysis.”

Lord Goldsmith is a former editor of the Ecologist magazine and one of the most high-profile Tories with an expertise on the environment. Publishing his resignation letter at around 9am, he tweeted: “It has been a privilege to have been able to make a difference to a cause I have been committed to for as long as I remember. But this Government’s apathy in the face of the greatest challenge we face makes continuing in my role untenable. Reluctantly I am therefore stepping down.”