Inside Boris Johnson’s bid to woo the world’s green investors

For a few short moments, Boris Johnson thought British taxpayers had fallen victim to daylight robbery at the hands of Bill Gates.

Fresh from an intimate banquet in Downing Street on Monday, Johnson and Gates took to the stage at the London Science Museum to unveil funding to invest in clean energy technologies.

Whitehall said each side would contribute £200m. “£400m each,” interjected Gates.

The Prime Minister shuffled his notes, looking slightly perplexed. “£400m each is it? I think we're going to have to go back to the Chancellor,” he joked, moments before a Government announcement confirming £200m from each party.

The museum was host to Johnson’s Global Investment Summit, flanked by a heavy police presence. With 200 of the world's most influential executives in attendance, the gathering’s importance could not be underestimated by government officials.

They viewed it on a par with June’s meeting of G7 leaders in Cornwall and the United Nation’s Cop26 climate change conference to be held in Glasgow in a fortnight.

With Britain emerging from the pandemic debt-laden and less amenable to business, here was a chance for Downing Street to set the record straight.

As the great and the good ambled through the doors of the South Kensington venue, where six months ago Matt Hancock got his vaccine from Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, the speakers were getting warmed up.

Anne-Marie Trevelyan, freshly promoted Trade Secretary, was wearing knee-high red velvet boots and could be seen practising her speech as attendees made their way into the main hall.

“There is nowhere better to invest than the UK,” she later said. “This is Global Britain in action – looking outward to embrace new opportunities."

Bernard Looney, chief executive of BP, seemed to have got the memo about the climate change agenda by donning a green tie. Glaxo boss Dame Emma Walmsley was in a gold jacket.

Gates was spotted in animated conversation with Larry Fink, boss of Blackrock, the world’s biggest fund manager, as the summit began with pre-recorded opening remarks from Sir Ian Blatchford, boss of the Science Museum.

Then Trevelyan took the stage to talk of the “exciting potential of green and clean innovation”. A handful of journalists, forced to turn up at 6:30am and locked in a room in the bowels of the museum, tried to unpick the rhetoric.

Johnson followed. His speech, little more than one long sales pitch, heavily featured Britain’s green agenda but with a few laughs – in typical fashion.

Summoning his inner Gordon Gekko, the cut-throat investment banker in 1987 film Wall Street, Johnson replaced “greed” for “green”, saying: “Green is good, green is right, green works.”

“I am given to understand that there is $24 trillion represented in this room,” he said. “We have to listen to the scientists. But we must mobilise the markets.

“I can deploy billions… but you can deploy trillions.

“I want to say to each and every one of those dollars: you are welcome to the UK and you have come to the right place at the right time.”

The Prime Minister’s “fireside chat” with Gates was billed as one of the highlights, with the first question from Allegra Statton – Johnson’s Cop26 spokesman.

“Why the UK?” she asked, as if completely unscripted.

Gates, his belly full of Monday night’s three Michelin-star food at the taxpayer’s expense, was on message.

“Well the UK has made immense progress on reducing carbon emissions,” he said. “On the first floor of this museum there is the steam engine which drove the industrial revolution and of course that was based on coal. Now the UK, which started it all, has moved away from coal and has policies to support great science [and] innovation.”

Johnson championed a long list of “new” investments in Britain that totalled nearly £10bn – more than three times that announced by France’s Emmanuel Macron at a similar event in June.

Some looked disconcertingly similar to those unveiled in previous years – not least £6bn pledged by Spanish firm Iberdrola into a wind farm off the coast of East Anglia.

Viridor, which last year was sold to “Barbarian at the Gates” investor KKR, insisted that its £1bn deal was fresh. A spokesman for the waste company said that it would remove annual emissions equivalent to those produced by 750,000 gas boilers.

Following the chat, 12 businesses were invited to show off their green tech. Among them was Arrival, a UK-headquartered electric vehicle maker. The delegates would later be whisked off on an electric bus to Windsor Castle to meet the Queen and other members of the Royal family - though not one made by Arrival as the company's first vehicle is yet to roll off the ramps.

Arrival floated in the US in March with a valuation of nearly $14bn (£10bn) - reportedly a record debut for a UK-based company. Founded by Russian official Denis Sverdlov, it is now run by Avinash Rugoobur, who was among those with ideas on how Global Britain can do better.

“We need to make it a bit easier [in the UK] to get that early access to capital – that's something the US does very well. I don't think anywhere can recreate Silicon Valley so I want to create the UK version of that,” he said.

“The Government has a lot of one-to-one funding mechanisms – they are really good – but early start-ups don't have the money to even do the one-to-one funding...The early phase [companies] need more support.”

Rolls-Royce, however, has spent years making the case for support for its plans to develop small-modular nuclear reactors – dubbed “mini-nukes”. The company was in a good mood as it showed off the technology.

Paul Stein, the engine maker’s chief technology officer, said: “They [the Government] have attracted top-class investors and businesses and it's turned into a marriage-broking service. It's very useful and has been well thought through.”

As the summit wound down and thoughts turned to what canapes Her Majesty might have on offer, senior executives made all the right noises.

“Today’s meeting is crucial. Attracting more investment into the UK is a national priority,” said Amanda Blanc, chief executive of Aviva. “Aviva is stepping up to the challenge, investing billions in UK renewables and infrastructure.”

Johnson will undoubtedly win plaudits for putting the green agenda at the heart of his “Global Britain” vision, but how much of this will become reality remains to be seen.

As Stein says: “The journey to net zero is complicated. There are lots of words and lots of PowerPoints – but ultimately you have to decide what you're going to do. What I have seen from the Government is a mature, systems-led approach and we fully support that.”