Britain will host Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021, after the COVID pandemic postponed the event which was originally planned for this year. But speaking to a parliamentary committee, Claire O’Neill, who was controversially sacked as Cop president in January, said that cabinet ministers were treating the summit like ‘amateur hour’. “There just did not seem to be any sense of what we were actually doing,”O’Neill said of the government’s plans for Cop26. “This is a deadly serious diplomatic moment on which the future trajectory of CO2 depends. And I don’t think that sense of gravitas had percolated through,” she added. “I like to think it’s starting to now.” The former energy minister revealed that although Theresa May and her successor Boris Johnson had publicly shown support for the United Kingdom hosting the global summit, behind the scenes things were markedly different. Senior civil servants openly questioned the idea of the country hosting the event and even suggested that the role of O’Neill being president was not needed. “Beis [Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy] civil servants did not want to host the Cop and neither did the treasury and that took a lot of persuading,” she said. “It really is a whole of government effort if we want to deliver something ambitious. “To his credit, the current prime minister does get involved, what I think has been lacking is a sense of this being job number one for the government because, of course, both with Brexit and Covid, there are other extremely important jobs that need to be taken care of.” Cop26 will be hosted in Glasgow from 1st to the 12th November 2021 and will see more than 200 world leaders attend.