If the Sunday Times story about last Friday’s mini-reshuffle is to be believed, Alok Sharma’s demotion from BEIS Secretary to full-time president of the COP26 summit is part of a No. 10 rebrand attempt of Brexit Britain in the eyes of Biden’s incoming liberal administration:

Boris Johnson put a cabinet minister in charge of the COP26 climate change summit last week following a warning from Joe Biden’s team that there was no “heavy hitter” running the show.

In the first sign of the US president-elect flexing his muscles with the UK, Biden’s climate change pointman John Kerry complained before Christmas that if Britain wanted to be taken seriously it would need to get a grip on preparations for the summit, which Britain is hosting in Glasgow in November.

The rebrand isn’t just about changing Britain’s reputation with the president-elect, however. The Cabinet Office is currently advertising for a “Relationship Manager – Influencers and Civil Society”, whose full-time job will be that of selling Britain’s “climate action” efforts via COP26 to “high profile influencers around the globe”, with an emphasis on social media; presumably to turn the tide of a generation who think because Boris is a Tory PM he doesn’t have environmental credentials. It can’t be long before Boris is lipsyncing to Dua Lipa with Greta on TikTok…