By Editor,Martin Beckford

Copyright dailymail

Kemi Badenoch has been hit by a backlash from Tory grandees after vowing to scrap a major green law if she wins power.

On the eve of her first party conference as leader, she faced criticism from her predecessor Baroness May and two former Conservative ministers for her proposal to put cheap energy above environmental targets.

Mrs Badenoch had insisted that she was not questioning climate change, but believes that the targets and regulations imposed by Labour’s Climate Change Act 2008 are making power more expensive and damaging industry.

The Act imposed legally binding caps on the total amount of greenhouse gases the UK can emit.

However, former premier Lady May, in a rare attack on the leader, said: ‘I am deeply disappointed by this retrograde step which upends 17 years of consensus between our main political parties and the scientific community.’

She said Britain has ‘led the way’ in tackling climate change, citing her own legislation to impose the target of reaching Net Zero by 2050 as well as the 2008 law passed by Ed Miliband which Mrs Badenoch now wants to abandon.

‘To row back now would be a catastrophic mistake for while that consensus is being tested, the science remains the same.

‘The harms are undeniable. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to ensure we protect the planet for their futures and that means giving business the reassurance it needs to find the solutions for the very grave challenges we face.’

Her former chief of staff in Downing Street Lord Barwell said: ‘This is a combination of bad policy and bad politics.

‘Those voters who don’t support Net Zero are going to vote for Farage.

‘There is no future for the Conservative Party in being a Reform tribute act – it will shed centrist voters without winning back voters from Reform and continue to decline in the polls.’

Margaret Thatcher’s environment minister Lord Deben said the former PM would have been ‘appalled’.

He told The Times: ‘She didn’t support industries which were no longer going to be the future. She actually moved the support to new industries.’

Lord Sharma, a Cabinet minister under Lady May and Boris Johnson who led the Glasgow COP summit in 2021, said: ‘Thanks to the strong and consistent commitment of the previous Conservative government to climate action and Net Zero, the UK attracted many tens of billions of pounds of private sector investment and accompanying jobs… The path to a prosperous, secure and electable future for the Conservative Party lies in building on our achievements, not abandoning them.’

But Mrs Badenoch said the real error would be to retain the Act. ‘The catastrophic mistake is stopping drilling oil and gas in the North Sea while importing oil and gas of the North Sea from Norway,’ she added.

‘A catastrophic mistake is losing chemical industry, manufacturing industry, ceramics. We are de-industrialising. That needs to stop.

‘We are bankrupting our country, but we’re not making any headway with improving our environment.’