"WE lead the world in the transition to net zero,” said Grant Shapps yesterday on the World At One.

No “we” do not.

But his BBC Radio 4 interviewer let this outrageous porkie pass. After all, speak in a posh voice and you can say what you want.

Sound confident enough, Tory enough, prickly enough upon interruption, and choose your words carefully enough and you too can make outrageous claims without fear of interruption. It’s become a default.

But does it work with listeners?

Well, most folk can see the Net Zero Secretary’s hollow claim hardly squares with issuing 100 new oil and gas licences.

But doze off a bit, answer the door, feed the cat, speak to the kids or in any other way lose the thread of that interview and Shapps’s cocky climate confidence invades your being like an unwanted political ear-worm.

It’s why the Tories use bald assertions and half-truths during interviews. They are quick to spout and take time plus background knowledge to contradict. And an acceptance you’ll never get that minister on your programme again.

Take Shapps’s crazy assertion about Britain leading the world on net zero. Yep, the targets are ambitious. But not the reality.

Take heating: 80% of UK households are heated by gas – almost double the proportion of homes in Germany and three times the total in France. Further north, Sweden has 0% homes heated by gas and 85% heated by (mostly renewable) electricity and local heat networks.

But ironically that means their shift to net zero may look lower than Britain’s because they are already so far ahead. Nice one.

It’s the same with Shapps’s hollow claim about the shift to electric cars – the fastest in Europe, he says. Again, the BBC host let that pass without any correction.

In March, electric and hybrid cars on UK roads topped the million mark – up by more than 50% in one year. That’s impressive – but still just 3% of vehicles.

In Norway, 20% of vehicles are electric and the country will stop selling petrol/diesel engines in 2025 – a decade earlier than the UK’s scheduled exit date and maybe more as Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch tries to bend the rules and prolong petrol engines.

The Biden administration aims to have electric engines in 50% of new-vehicle sales by 2030. Norway passed this milestone in 2019.

In short, our Nordic neighbours are miles ahead on a variety of key climate indicators.

But Shapps has the audacity to claim Britain is doing better.

It’s like the Father Dougal joke.

Just as tiny cows look bigger close up than real ones far away, tiny gains here look larger than those of our small, independent, eco-minded neighbours.

It got a laugh for Ardal O’Hanlon.

But it’s not funny now.

Most BBC interviewers won’t fact-check ministers when these weak porkies are trotted out. Even though Shapps et al repeat the same old tripe every time. Happily there are exceptions.

Correctly anticipating the weary old “home-grown oil is better than imports” line, Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Ciaran Jenkins confronted a Tory MP in graphic detail with the evidence that Shell and BP own Britain’s deposits and sell “our” oil on world markets to the highest bidders with nothing “local” or “home-grown” about it.

Then Radio Scotland’s Martin Geissler not only outed the fact Rishi Sunak had allocated just five minutes for a rare interview, but asked the Tory leader how he’d travelled to Aberdeen for his carbon capture announcement.

This prompted an utterly incoherent meltdown by the PM who suggested Geissler wanted to stop people going on holiday or using their cars. Sunak stopped short of suggesting the presenter was a paid-up member of Just Stop Oil – but then his five minutes were up.

This feisty challenge propelled Good Morning Scotland into the UK headlines – partly because of Sunak’s testy response but mostly because of the broadcaster’s decision to challenge his spiel. Even though the PM’s private jet journey was all over social media that day, no-one else raised it during their sacred allocation of Prime Ministerial seconds.

As a result, Labour discovered Sunak had probably broken the ministerial code by wasting taxpayer cash on a private, climate-damaging RAF jet trip north when two scheduled flights had been available to get him to Aberdeen on time.

A pyrrhic victory perhaps.

The Radio Scotland interview wasn’t Sunak’s finest hour, didn’t persuade anyone to vote Tory and probably didn’t even guarantee carbon capture jobs for Aberdeen, since Acorn’s Teeside rival was promised that same £20 billion two years ago.

Still, the radio rammy did one thing. It uncovered the new attack line being developed by the Tories since their by-election win in Uxbridge. Challenge Sunak on any aspect of his continuing collusion with climate crisis and the international oil industry and he’ll accuse you of Waging a War on Motorists.

Yes, it’s a non-sequitur.

Yes, it’s slightly hysterical.

But yes, it might just work.

Because restrictions like Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) and Low Emission Zones (LEZs) are being introduced piecemeal in Scotland and across the UK apologetically and without fanfare, persuasion, debate or publicity.

The green transition – the biggest collective shift in our lives, streets, cities and thinking since the advent of the welfare state – is being phased in like a set of new parking regulations and not the first wave of a national mission to save our environment, economy and air quality.

It’s a national mission that needs us all to sign up. But it’s being “sold” like a series of individual, unrelated, pernickety restrictions.

Now you can understand why there’s no Green evangelism at Westminster, where UK ministers are planning to stop councils imposing 20mph speed limits and LTNs. The Tory right has realised it can sneak a pro-oil agenda past voters by making the argument about their freedom to drive instead and groups like #Together have adapted their anti-Covid vaccine stance to “Free our streets” by tackling “roadblocks, fines, ‘15 Min City’ schemes and LTNs” instead.

A recent event in Edinburgh gathered a fair crowd, and heard local residents list the practical problems of excluding traffic from busy streets, including loss of trade by small businesses. But far more time was devoted to hearing anti-politician, anti-science assertions from anti-lockdown campaigner James Melville, who claimed “net zero is the diametric opposite of civilisation”, and the organisation’s co-founder Alan Miller who cited Plato, the Scottish enlightenment, Adam Smith, David Hume, Chicago and Nudge theory in a lengthy diatribe against traffic-calming measures.

Sure, it’s a free world, it was one-off event, maybe a couple of hundred folk attended and a few “green” speakers were allowed to speak. But as one said later, panellists built on anxieties most of us have – can we afford to live, do policymakers ever really listen, are changes are “imposed” – and this worked “frighteningly well to motivate and draw in people who weren’t necessarily on the same page at all”.

This will keep happening and public support for heat pumps, marine protected areas, LEZs and other “disruptions” to the petrol-fuelled norm will crumble into surly resistance and conspiracy theories, unless the Scottish Government joins the dots, presents a coherent strategy rather than a scatter-gun of individual “restrictive” management measures and takes the Scottish public with them.

English councils can’t do that. The British Government won’t do that. Holyrood can lead the way by presenting a vision of Green Scotland in 2050 – using ads, TV slots, whatever it takes.

Otherwise, the Tories and climate-crisis sceptics will do what they do best.

Distract, divide, distort and seed doubts over the green path Scots know we must take.