Foreword

Lord Gove is the Editor of The Spectator. As the former Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath and UK Government Cabinet Minister, he served in Cabinet across five government departments for more than a decade, from the 2010 Coalition government onwards. In May 2025, Michael was made a peer in Rishi Sunak’s honours list and joined the House of Lords choosing the title Lord Gove of Torry.

The Conservative Promise is rooted in nature. To be a Conservative is to understand human nature, to shape politics in accordance with the impulses of the human heart, and to appreciate the beauty, wonder and importance of the natural world.

Conservatives recognise that our identity depends on an understanding of home – the environment in which we and those we love are safe and valued, the place where the relationships which give our life meaning are nurtured, the inheritance which we strive to enhance for those who succeed us.

There can, therefore, be no true conservatism which does not respect the natural world and recognise our duty to creation. For Conservatives, real environmentalism means honouring home, recognising the importance of prudence, restraint and respect for limits, and celebrating beauty.

And for environmentalists, Conservatives are not just natural allies but the strongest champions. An environmentalism which is abstract, statistically–driven, dictated from a distance and flatteningly universalist is unmoored from the enduring attachments which give our lives meaning and motivation. There is an approach towards nature found among some deep greens, and many on the left, which seeks either to erase the human or treat individuals as units of consumption and communities as entities to be regimented.

Of course, there are those on the right, many of whom might call themselves Conservatives, who do not recognise the importance of nature – who see human flourishing in narrow economic terms and chafe against any restraint, who do not see the value in beauty, wonder and awe. That perspective, which takes a valuable element within the Conservative tradition, economic liberalism, and allows it to trump all other instincts, is an impoverished vision of Toryism.

That is why the work of the Conservative Environment Network, and the contributions to this collection, are so valuable. They remind us that Conservatives have been, and will be, at the heart of protecting and improving our environment and the reach of Conservative arguments is all the greater when Conservatives comprehend the full range of arguments within our movement.

Conservatives in government have, since Victorian times, acted and legislated to enhance the environment and to ensure that economic growth does not come at the expense of wider human welfare. Acts to improve water and air quality, develop new homes sensitively, support farmers thoughtfully and steward land carefully have been introduced by successive Conservative administrations since Disraeli. And environmental concerns are not the property of any one wing within the party. Margaret Thatcher was the first world leader to emphasise the need to deal with climate change. Supporters of Brexit were concerned about animal welfare, the failures of the Common Agricultural Policy and the depletion of fish stocks under EU control. Since 2016, the UK has introduced world–leading legislation to protect wildlife habitats, improve marine conservation and direct support for farmers and land managers to environmental improvement.

Conservative writers and thinkers, from Burke and Coleridge to Jimmy Goldsmith and Roger Scruton, have written powerfully in the past about what a truly environmentalist Toryism should mean – the writers in this collection continue that tradition, now more important than ever.

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Views expressed in this chapter are those of the author, not necessarily those of the Conservative Environment Network.