‘There is no chance of stopping climate change next week,’ the Prime Minister told me in an interview for ITV News. ‘There is no chance of getting an agreement to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees’.

Standing in Rome’s magnificent ancient Colosseum, he warned that the cost of this failure, if not somehow rectified, would be far worse than the recent pandemic: ‘The Romans thought they were going to go on forever…Then wham, the middle of the fifth century, they hit a complete crisis, uncontrolled immigration, you have the Dark Ages.