Rishi Sunak challenged anybody who thinks that people in Doncaster should go skint, says Patrick Christys

I don't think people like Zach Goldsmith understand that simply getting a new electric car or getting a new boiler or whatever is beyond the reach of most people or is causing them significant distress at the prospect of bankrupting themselves, so that Britain can be world leading in the climate fight back.

I found the hysteria from vast swathes of the media absolutely hilarious yesterday, as Rishi Sunak said that he'd slow down those net Zero plans.

It was as if he'd kicked a family of polar bears to death, taken a flamethrower to a patch of Amazonian woodland and force-fed coal to kids.

One loving media type thought that she'd managed to corner Kemi Badenoch on this morning's media rounds by saying, well, most poor people don't drive anyway, do they? So you know they won't really be affected by this ban on new petrol and diesel cars

I mean, that in itself reveals the shockingly sheltered world that many people in the media live in. They talk about issues and people that they clearly know very little about, as Badenoch said, get out of London. Get out of the little bubble a lot of these media luvvies live in.

People living in rural communities drive, people in northern suburbs drive, time and time again, people who virtue signal about climate objectives have no idea about how these schemes are going to negatively impact the lives of normal people.

Rich people can afford to think about how we look on the world stage, about whether we meet our international obligations, about whether or not we're offsetting as fast as our comparable G7 nations. Normal people can only afford to think about how much money they've got in their pay check this month and whether they can afford to get their existing petrol or diesel car service.

The pearl clutching well to do types they scream what about our international obligations? Most of the people focus on the obligation that they have towards feeding their kids and paying their mortgage.

What I liked about Rishi Sunak's statement yesterday was that it was the first time I can remember a political leader actually coming out and saying, look, we need to do more to help out with the climate, but we're not all going to burn to death if we don't do things right now this second.

Sunak doesn't want to bankrupt ordinary people in order to hit a punitive target. He has challenged anybody who thinks that people in Doncaster should go skint to explain to those people why they now think that.

So mark my words, what will happen in the coming weeks and months is that the climate lobby will start to get even more extreme with their threats, ramping up the urgency as a form of justification. They still obviously though won't protest in Beijing or New Delhi.

At the last election, many working-class northern areas lent the Tories that vote. What I think is interesting about yesterday's Sunak announcement is that it was clearly an attempt to position the Tories as being on the side of the working class. Labour, it appears, may still be obsessed with North London middle class academic lefties.