Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison (Image: EPA/Neil Hall)

Remember the narrative Scott Morrison’s office and the Press Gallery journalists they briefed were running for a long time, that Morrison was slowly moving towards a net zero commitment by 2050?

We haven’t heard much of that since Barnaby Joyce returned to lead the Nats — appropriately, since it was always a fake story to provide cover while the government promoted the interests of its fossil fuel donors via a “gas-led recovery” and shovelling taxpayer money to fossil fuel companies for carbon capture and storage.

It turns out that not only is Morrison not adopting even the wholly inadequate 2050 target, but he can’t even abide mention of the Paris Agreement temperature target, to keep the global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees, and preferably to 1.5 degrees. His negotiators demanded that mention of the temperature targets not be included in the trade deal with the UK — though mention of the Paris Agreement will be included, at the insistence of the British, despite the objections of the Morrison government.

It’s a measure of how desperate Boris Johnson is to conclude a trade agreement that he was willing to cave in to the demands of a climate criminal government like Australia’s. Johnson needs an FTA with at least a recognisable, if not a major, economy in order to prop up his Brexit pitch that an exciting world of free trade opportunities awaits the UK outside the European Union.

But Morrison is also desperate, as his willingness to accept reference to the Paris Agreement in the deal shows. He has no economic agenda to speak of beyond his “gas-led recovery” and, like Tony Abbott, hopes to fake one by endlessly talking about “free trade” deals.

Abbott’s obsession with such managed trade deals didn’t save his prime ministership and left us with what is now an embarrassing reminder of the Coalition’s previous Sinophilia, in the shape of a trade deal with China that Beijing trampled over the moment it had a mind to.

Morrison was also willing to cave in to Johnson’s demand that British backpackers no longer be subjected to the vile predations of the agricultural sectors, depriving exploitative farmers and horticulturists at a stroke of a valuable source of cheap labour. The Prime Minister had to go hunting in the region for a new source of easily-exploited labour to bring in under a new visa category to placate the Nationals.

Both leaders were desperate for a deal, reflecting the other significant elements they have in common — their obsessive lying, their warmed-over populism, their lack of any clear ideology, their wholesale unfitness for leadership of a carpool, let alone a nation — and yet it yielded so very little. As Crikey reported in June, the actual benefits to either side of the deal are “trivial”, “underwhelming”, “negligible”, etc (and that was just the ratings agencies). It was as if two desperate and dateless singles got together merely so they could announce they’d had sex, rather than for the actual purpose of doing so.

Johnson’s government is furiously spinning in response to the leak, obtained by the UK’s Sky News (no longer any relation to the Australian Sky News; unlike the local one, it is a credible media outlet), saying “our ambitious trade deal with Australia will include a substantive article on climate change which reaffirms both parties’ commitments to the Paris Agreement and achieving its goals, including limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.”

Evidently they didn’t run that text by Barnaby Joyce first.