UK Environment Minister Zac Goldsmith quits, criticises Sunak

LONDON: UK Environment Minsiter Zac Goldsmith on Friday quit as a government minister and criticised Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, accusing him of showing "apathy" on climate change issues.

Taking to Twitter, Goldsmith, in a two-page resignation letter, posted: "It has been a privilege to have been able to make a difference to a cause I have been committed to for as long as I remember. But this govt's apathy in the face of the greatest challenge we face makes continuing in my role untenable. Reluctantly I am therefore stepping down."

"Was horrified at the government abandoning its environmental commitments and withdrawing its leadership on the world stage," Goldsmith wrote in the resignation letter, BBC reported.

He wrote: "The problem is not that the government is hostile to the environment, it is that you, our prime minister, are simply uninterested. That signal, or lack of it, has trickled down through Whitehall and caused a kind of paralysis."

The resignation comes a day after the Tory peer was accused of putting "improper pressure" on the Privileges Committee's probe into former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's partygate denials to MPs.