The incoming editor of The Spectator, Michael Gove, emphasised his belief in environmentalism and climate action at Tory conference yesterday – setting up a rift with the magazine’s new ownership.
At the event in Birmingham, hosted by the Conservative Environment Network (CEN), former Conservative MP Gove, who stood down at the 2024 general election, suggested that members of his party “shouldn’t say that it is wrong to seek to decarbonise the economy.”
The former environment secretary, who served in the role from June 2017 to July 2019, added that it is “electorally in the Conservatives’ interests to take these issues [climate change and the environment] seriously.”
He said that it was important for the government to have “interlocking policies” on “the quality of our rivers”, “marine protected areas”, “air pollution”, and “nature restoration”.
Gove’s rhetoric signals a clear divergence from the views of The Spectator’s new owner, Paul Marshall. It was announced on 10 September that Marshall, who co-owns the right-wing broadcaster GB News, had bought The Spectator for £100 million. Gove was soon revealed as the magazine’s new editor, set to take over in the coming months, with Lord Charles Moore becoming its chair.
GB News has been the UK’s leading climate science denial media outlet since it launched in June 2021. A DeSmog investigation last year found that one in three GB News hosts had broadcast climate science denial in 2022, while nearly half had attacked the UK’s net zero emissions targets.
DeSmog also revealed that Marshall Wace – Paul Marshall’s hedge fund – had £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuels firms, including oil and gas majors Chevron, Shell, and Equinor, as of June 2023. One of Marshall Wace’s biggest investors, U.S. private equity firm KKR, also has a large fossil fuel portfolio, including 188 assets in oil, gas, and coal.
In addition, Marshall bankrolls the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship – a right-wing lobby group fronted by climate science deniers including the psychologist Jordan Peterson.
Lord Moore, a former Spectator editor and current columnist, also has a history of climate science denial. From 2015 to 2023, he was a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s leading climate science denial group. In May, DeSmog revealed that figures associated with the GWPF had appeared on GB News 36 times in the previous seven months.
Lord Moore has said that: “On climate change, I resist what I see as a political viewpoint masquerading as ‘the science’. The aim of the large numbers of alarmists is unprecedented government control and the relative impoverishment of Western societies.”
Authors working for the world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.
The IPCC has also stated that “climate change impacts will put a disproportionate burden on low-income households and thus increase poverty levels.”
Under its previous editor Fraser Nelson, The Spectator regularly published attacks on climate action and science. The 7 September issue of the magazine featured a cover story by Ross Clark, a journalist who has a long record of questioning climate science, attacking the new Labour government’s clean energy policies.
Meanwhile, over the past 10 months, the magazine’s YouTube channel, Spectator TV, has published videos on “Climate alarmism”, “Labour’s net zero madness”, and net zero “leading the world to ruin”.
The Spectator, often dubbed “the Tory Bible”, had an average print circulation of 98,000 in 2023, making it the fourth most read current affairs magazine in the UK.
When asked at the CEN event by Guardian journalist Helena Horton whether the magazine would continue to publish climate science denial, Gove said: “The Spectator will continue to publish articles from a huge variety of perspectives covering every conceivable issue and the thing that will characterise all of the articles will be wit, insight, and fidelity to the truth.”
He added that some Conservatives are sceptical about climate action due to the costs of the green transition being “experienced by hard pressed citizens”. He also said that Greta Thunberg and other climate activists “hector” in a way that “puts Conservative backs up”.
Gove’s Climate Views
In 2018, during a speech on climate change, Gove said that his work at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was “rooted in science”.
He added that “peer-reviewed scientific research states that the rapid [global] warming is substantially due to the methane, nitrous oxide, and fossil fuel emissions we produce.”
“Food and water security are affected, as is national security,” Gove said. “Across the planet, people, plants, animals and also diseases are on the move, searching for habitats in which to thrive, escaping erratic and extreme weather events which deliver too much rain, too little rain, searing summer temperatures, colder winters.”
He added that climate change “disproportionately affects nations with the least resources to cope.”
Speaking at the CEN event yesterday, Gove urged the next Conservative Party leader to “tell the truth about the boondoggle that is Drax”.
Drax’s plant in Selby, Yorkshire, which burns wood pellets to generate electricity, is the single biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the country according to the climate think tank Ember. Drax disputes this claim.
Drax has received state subsidies worth more than £7 billion since 2012, and the government is currently considering whether to extend this financial assistance to 2027 so the firm can build facilities to capture and store carbon emissions.
The company says that its electricity is “carbon neutral” given that trees can be planted to reabsorb emissions – a claim that has been disputed by climate experts.
However, Gove’s climate record is not unblemished. In 2022, while serving as levelling up secretary, he approved the development of a new coal mine in Cumbria – the UK’s first deep coal mine in more than 30 years.
In July 2024, the government admitted that the mine was unlawfully sanctioned, and in September the High Court blocked its development.
The new Labour government has been urged by former ministers and campaigners to release the evidence provided to Gove and his department before he approved the mine, which would have extracted 2.8 million tonnes of coking coal a year from under the Irish Sea to produce steel, emitting an estimated 220 millions tonnes of greenhouse gases over its lifetime.
Gove and Marshall
It’s unclear whether The Spectator’s editorial position on climate action will change following Marshall’s takeover.
However, the magazine’s former chair Andrew Neil – who briefly served as the founding chairman of GB News – has suggested that Marshall may try to impose his agenda on the magazine.
“I regarded it as my prime responsibility for 20 years to ensure [editorial independence], protecting the editor not just from outside pressures, commercial or political, but even from proprietors,” said Neil, on announcing his resignation as Spectator chair.
“I cannot tell if the new owners will have the same reverence for editorial independence since they have not shared their thinking.”
Marshall’s investment vehicle, OQS Media, has said that The Spectator will have an “independent editorial and governance structure”. The magazine is expected to appoint a new board of directors in the coming months. OQS Media is run by Freddie Sayers, the editor-in-chief of right-wing opinion website UnHerd, which is also bankrolled by Marshall.
Gove and Marshall have a long association. While serving as education secretary, a role he held from 2010 to 2014, Gove praised Marshall’s children’s charity Absolute Return for Kids (Ark), which now runs dozens of schools across the UK. In 2016, Marshall donated more than £13,000 to Gove’s short-lived campaign to become Conservative Party leader.
Marshall also donated £890,000 to Policy Exchange, a think tank co-founded by Gove, between 2020 and 2023 via his charity Sequoia Trust. Policy Exchange has in the past received money from the oil and gas major ExxonMobil, and was credited by former prime minister Rishi Sunak for helping to draft laws that have cracked down on climate protests.
In March, Gove – who was a journalist prior to his election to Parliament in 2005 – defended Marshall in the House of Commons during a debate on extremism.
Marshall had “liked” a tweet that said it is only “a matter of time before civil war starts in Europe”, and warned that “the native European population is losing patience with fake refugee invaders”.
Gove said: “I deprecate the personal attack on Sir Paul,” describing him as “a distinguished philanthropist”.
