Towards the end of last month, Britain’s Prime Minister indicated that he was willing to go to increasingly extreme lengths to generate a mass of clear blue water to swell the thin blue line that currently distinguishes his party from His Majesty’s Opposition.

With this strategy in mind, he pressed send on a controversial tweet which conflated the Labour Party with “a subset of lawyers” and “criminal gangs” in “propping up a system of exploitation that profits from getting people to the UK illegally” and announced that he had “a plan to stop it”.

As several Twitter users commented, this sounded worryingly like a scheme not only to prevent illegal migration but also to ban his political opponents.

Rishi Sunak’s post came in response to a story published – inevitably – in the Daily Mail which reported that it had found two law firms which had encouraged clients to submit “false asylum and human rights claims”.

Mr. Sunak’s campaign to “stop the boats” (as he likes to put it) with a raft of draconian policies – including offshore detention facilities and threats of permanent deportation to central Africa – has set his government in conflict with the courts and has lurched the Conservatives towards the nastiness of the extreme right.

In doing so, he appears to have capitulated to the baser instincts of his Home Secretary in the ostensible belief that this strategy will endear him to racist voters, xenophobes who might otherwise be typically wary of committing their support to a person of color.

It would seem excessive to suggest the Tories are turning into a bunch of Nazis, but last week one minister’s comments about travelling communities prompted the launch of a police investigation into a possible hate crime.

Meanwhile, the short-term attractions of other impulses drawn from the cookbook of political populism are gaining the attention of Number Ten Downing Street.

Since the surprise of last month’s narrow Conservative by-election win in Boris Johnson’s vacated constituency, Mr. Sunak also seems to be listening to the barking and bleating of the climate change deniers on the lunatic fringes of his party.

It's generally understood that the Tories held the blond buffoon’s west London seat – albeit by less than 500 votes – as a result of the unpopularity of a controversial plan being progressed by the capital’s Labour mayor, a scheme to extend a levy on vehicles with the highest emissions of atmospheric pollutants to the outer reaches of the city.

At £12.50 per day, the cost of this levy is virtually prohibitive for those least able to replace their cars. Although it's projected to affect only a tenth of drivers, it’s therefore widely believed to target and penalize precisely those people who cannot afford to pay it.

The fact that these pollutants are killing people and killing the planet is evidently outweighed by the optics of the poorest families unable to get to work or ferry their children to school at the height of the nation’s cost-of-living crisis.

(The existence of London’s enviable public transport network cuts no ice with the Labour mayor’s critics in the right-wing press.)

This controversy has now been seized upon by none other than Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg and his unsavory cronies at the environmentally unfriendly end of the Conservative Party, in a bid to pressure Rishi Sunak to reverse his green agenda.

Tragically, the Prime Minister – desperate to grasp at any straws which might promise him a chance to maintain his feeble grip on power – seems to be listening to them.

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It's of course unfair to expect a politician known neither for his courage nor for his convictions to have the courage of his convictions in such matters. But his failure to do so – and his susceptibility to the most unpalatable and foolish influences – may impact negatively upon the UK and the wider world's chances of long-term economic prosperity and actual survival.

Mr. Rees-Mogg may look like a languid Victorian stick insect in an unfashionably double-breasted suit, the product of centuries of privilege, patronage, private schooling and aristocratic inbreeding – he might be a figure worthy of relentless ridicule – but his pernicious influence poses a very real and direct threat to the future of human society, civilization and life on this planet.

One can only assume that the rabid Brexiteer, whose own investment fund has profited handsomely from Britain’s economic woes, is banking on the possibility that cockroaches won’t be the only invertebrates to survive the impending apocalypse.

The current Prime Minister himself however will doubtless be long gone, forgotten except as a cloying aroma upon the scorching air.

At the end of last month, his office announced that they’d be reviewing the government’s entire slate of net zero policies, including bans on new gas boilers and petrol and diesel vehicles. In the face of environmentalist protests, Mr. Sunak has since denied reports that he’s already decided to delay the latter measures.

He is however still considering deferring the introduction of plans to require manufacturers to cover the costs of recycling in an attempt to reduce packaging to an absolute minimum.

Last week, Rishi Sunak announced he’d approved more than a hundred new licenses permitting North Sea drilling for oil and gas.

At the same time, his Energy Secretary took to social media to denounce the Labour Party as the “political wing” of the militant green group Just Stop Oil – despite Labour’s repeated condemnations of those activists.

The message seems to be both clear and blunt. Blue isn’t green anymore.

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak also ordered a review of traffic reduction schemes, claiming to be on the side of motorists.

He then became particularly petulant – and evasive – when asked about his own use of private planes.

“Banning things and stopping people from doing things is not the right approach,” the diminutive and diminished premier said.

His laissez-faire alternative may not be the right approach, but it’s certainly the right-wing approach.

This strategy appears to be based upon an assumption that working-class voters, whose support for Boris Johnson’s Brexit promises led to a Tory landslide in the 2019 election, are a bunch of bigots who care nothing for the future of the planet. There is however remarkably little evidence to suggest this might be true.

It may well turn out then that these posh boys don’t in fact, despite their profoundly patronizing beliefs, exactly have their fingers on the pulses of ordinary working people.

Duh. The future might not end up being quite as bleak as they hope… not so bleak at least for the planet, but – we might ourselves hope – pretty bleak for them.