With a year to go before Britain hosted the Cop26 climate conference, Boris Johnson was preparing to make an eye-catching announcement.

The then-prime minister was poised to set out his 10-point plan to spark a green industrial revolution – and the centrepiece was a vow to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030.

A highly ambitious target, this was five years sooner than the deadline he had set just nine months earlier, which car industry bosses dismissed as “a date without a plan”.

It was also a decade before the target outlined by his predecessor, Theresa May, only two years beforehand.

“Our green industrial revolution will be powered by the wind turbines of Scotland and the northeast, propelled by the electric vehicles made in the Midlands and advanced by the latest technologies developed in Wales, so we can look ahead to a more prosperous, greener future,” Mr Johnson said in November 2020.