A conversation with Claire O’Neill on her career barely two years ago might have focused on how this former cabinet minister waged a highly public campaign over the need for tougher online safety measures, particularly to protect children.

It might have lingered on the fact that David Cameron’s one-time rail minister admitted to being “ashamed” to be in the job while tens of thousands of commuters endured chronic disruptions because of strikes on Govia-owned Southern trains.

It would certainly have explored how a president-in-waiting of the forthcoming UN climate change conference in Glasgow, for which she put together and led the cross-government bid, was summarily sacked for deciding not to stand for re-election as an MP at the last general election. 

And, particularly stingingly, it would have covered how it felt to be on the receiving end of a hostile media briefing from Dominic Cummings, the UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s now-departed chief of staff that came as a fact-free surprise to those who had worked with her.

Almost two years later, each of these subject areas is still highly relevant. Debates about the availability of potentially offensive or abusive material on the internet rage on; there are still strikes on the trains and infuriating delays to journeys remain commonplace. The Glasgow summit, or COP26, for the Conference of the Parties, is just four months away and now has the former business secretary Alok Sharma at the helm. The climate emergency is intensifying.

Moving on
It’s not that O’Neill is unprepared to talk about her past. This often outspoken, sometimes pugnacious, politician has a wily tactician’s grasp of the narrative and is as happy chatting about how she “loved my trains” as she is reflecting on the significance of Joe Biden's arrival in the White House. (Enormous, as you might expect.)

But what quickly emerges, in this far-from-everyday conversation with a woman whose movement from public life to the private sector has been almost seamless, is a picture of someone who has clearly moved on. Time is ticking for the world and O’Neill just wants to get on with it.

Perhaps the perfect example lies in her thoughts on Cummings, who might well expect to be close to the top of her hit list. Not a bit of it.

“Let’s get Dominic Cummings back to ‘get net zero done’ – a bit like Brexit,” she says, knowing full well that her comment might make mischief. “Let’s work out how to really sell this. , the Arctic on fire and carbon dioxide (CO2) at levels not seen in 4.5 million-years.

“I see urgency in the protestors, in NGOs how do we get rid of methane; how do we make coal history; how do we have a massive ramp up in carbon removals in a way that is very nature positive; how much money is the private sector going to commit to innovation? These big questions have got to be asked, and they’re not on the agenda at COP. The challenge is that no-one is quite sure what good looks like when it comes to the core negotiations.”
UK: Leading or lagging?

It may be that the private sector is clearer about “what good looks like”, or at least how to establish it, but we’re not quite finished with the climate-related shortfalls at government level.
O’Neill is complimentary about the overall ambition and historical action of the UK on climate, and recounts how in her former role she got used to pointing out to disbelievers that the UK had decarbonised more deeply than any other industrial economy. The challenge now is that the targets keep moving and the “easier stuff” has already been done.

The Johnson administration has come up with some new extremely ambitious targets, including to slash carbon emissions by 78 per cent by 2035 (against 1990 levels) as part of a drive to become net zero by 2050. Again, the scale of this leaves many concerned, especially as the plans tend to be long on big targets but short on details and committed cash.

The UK has a strategy to foster the world’s first low-carbon industrial sector, a clean energy plan, including backing renewable projects in the North Sea, and it has recently floated the idea of widening its emission reduction scheme. However, in its latest progress report, the independent Climate Change Committee made clear its view that there was a woeful shortage of concrete policies.

“The UK government is in a uniquely visible position, partly because we put in place a governance structure few countries have. We have the Committee on Climate Change, which is an amazing institution, and we have carbon budgets, so ministers have to defend a carbon budget which is 20 years in the future. There is a level of scrutiny and governance structure that is world class.

“As much as we can look at the ten-point plan , how about if we have a private sector initiative on this that says we are going to do things that are equity and gender positive in terms of our climate action; that’s going to be part of the scoring mechanism.”

The reason we don’t segue off into many of these prescient and fascinating avenues is that the bald force of her overall argument just takes over.

There is her grasp of the facts and the debates. In many ways, that’s to be expected of a politician who will be all too aware that an appearance on Newsnight will not go well unless she’s completely up to speed on her brief.

There is her impressive breadth of knowledge – we talk about numerous projects, from the Taskforce on Climate Related Financial Disclosures and Sustainability Development Goals to Science-Based Target initiatives, and she never misses a step.

But in truth, it’s her unremitting willingness to aim high, to be prepared to tear things up and start from scratch if it gets the job done that draws you in, as well as a real-world resignation that sometimes you just have to work with what you’ve got. As she says, “let’s not make perfect the enemy of good”.

When the talking stops
So, can someone who is this in touch with how much harm to the environment has already been caused realistically be optimistic?

“I’m always asked, how confident are you that we’re going to hit net zero by 2050, and nobody is,” O’Neill says with the air of someone who is about to say something hopeful. “I think most of us think we’re going to overshoot, and we’re complacent about that. We’re not going to go extinct as a species, but the world’s going to look very different, very quickly.

“We’ve got to find a way of getting urgency into this. You’ve got to accept that people are slow to change, this is very complicated and we’re out of time. We need big solutions. Business as usual is not going to cut it.

“My hope is that some of the big foundations will say: right, we’ve got to halve methane by 2025, we’re just going to do it. We’re not going to ask permission; we’re just going to do it. That’s what we’ve got to do, because we’re just not going to get there in a 198-way conversation.”

And, then, this conversation, which could have become lost – in government failings, in planes, buses or trains, in quotas, targets or taskforces – comes to an end.
It’s not every day that you get the chance to talk to someone like Claire O’Neill. She makes a compelling case, however, that the issues she sees as being of such importance should be discussed the world over at least as often as that.

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