The Radiohead star's verdict on Downing St meeting:' It was poison... a nasty business'

The musician, an ambassador for the green charity Friends of the Earth, was asked to meet the Prime Minister to discuss climate change. He considered going to Downing Street, but snubbed Blair when he decided it would be a pro-Labour publicity stunt rather than a genuine debate.

Yorke dismissed Blair as a man with "no environmental credentials" and said dealing with Labour "spin doctors" had made him feel physically ill.

"Luckily, in the end the decision was kind of made for me," he told the music magazine NME. "This all started kicking off about two or three weeks before I was supposed to meet with Blair, which I was not happy about anyway for obvious reasons, i.e. Iraq.

"It was: 'If we could just have a meeting beforehand where we could go through how it would proceed ...' It was like talking to Blair's spin doctors. It was all getting weird. It was just obvious there was no point in meeting him anyway, and I didn't want to."

Yorke said he had had initially tried to think pragmatically about the meeting, "but Blair has no environmental credentials as far as I'm concerned. I came out of that whole period just thinking, I don't want to get involved directly, it's poison. I'll just shout my mouth off from the sidelines. It's a nasty business."

Yorke, 37, is backing Friends of the Earth's Big Ask Campaign, which is calling for a cut in greenhouse gas emissions. Radiohead will play a benefit gig at London's Koko Club on 1 May. The charity says that green taxes have fallen since Labour came to power, despite promises to increase them, and that carbon emissions are rising. Director Tony Juniper called for a new law to legally oblige the government of the day to cut carbon emissions by three per annually, to give the UK some chance of reducing carbon emissions on 1990 levels by 20 per cent by 2010. The Department for Trade and Industry last month predicted it would cut the figure by just 10.6 per cent. "The Government must stop dithering and take urgent action now," he said. "Thom is right to highlight [Labour's] shortcomings on climate change."

Greenpeace spokesman Ben Stewart said: "Yorke's judgement is as good as his music. Emissions have gone up under Blair, who has even sued Brussels to allow British industry to emit more CO2. He talks a good talk but his performance is worse than woeful. We're bracing ourselves for a poor budget."

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