Boris Johnson can’t transport the UK back to a bygone era – however much he wants to

Near Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire is Bekonscot model village.

It’s the oldest such attraction in the world and portrays rural English life in the 1920s and 1930s. There’s a cricket match on the village green, a pub selling pint jugs of foaming beer, a post office, a bank, a red telephone box, a well-attended church, a bobby in uniform, a children’s playground. Everyone looks happy and content, everything appears glorious.

What there isn’t is any sign of social disadvantage, no indication of poverty, hardship or crime. No evidence of the heavy hand of government and, lord forbid, any interference from Brussels.

Bekonscot has been visited by 14 million-plus people. There’s no record of Boris Johnson having been among them, but if he said he had, I would not be in the least bit surprised – we’re back to that “Merry England”Johnson clearly harks back to. This idyll is an objective, one he would surely like to take us to, should he be allowed.

How to otherwise explain his obsession with reintroducing imperial measures? I’m old enough to remember them, but struggle with what it all means. Anyone much younger than me – and that accounts for the great majority of the population these days, forget it – won’t have a clue.

For Johnson, they represent much more than a system of numbers for sizing and quantifying; they’re a reminder of a bygone era, when Britain was proud and free; when, to use his hackneyed phrase, we had “control”.

The fact that some of them have co-existed, alongside metric, for several decades now, so we still drink pints and drive miles is not good enough. Neither is the way in which we often use both quite happily, quoting in feet and inches one minute and metres and centimetres the next. We’re not bothered about having vestiges of the imperial system – and over time, with new generations entirely used to metric, they will disappear.

For the prime minister, though, this is tantamount to a great betrayal of all that was and will be good about our great nation.

No matter that his own ministers have been embarrassed when challenged to use imperial on TV and radio. It’s no concern either that retailers have warned Johnson that his plan to bring back pounds and ounces will push up the price of goods because they will require relabelling – just when the country is fighting inflation and a cost of living crisis.

The British Retail Consortium, which represents major supermarket groups and shopping chains, said this would be a “distraction” from the huge problems facing the UK. That surely, is the point. It would divert attention from difficulties elsewhere, ones that Johnson’s government displays no ability to tackle.

The move to turn back the clock – because that is what it is – is what is known in the political strategy trade as the ‘dead cat on the table’. Everyone is sitting, talking about one subject, and someone comes in and flings a dead cat on the table. Immediately, the previous topic is forgotten as they all focus on the cat – whose it is, how it died, whether there are any more.

Timing is the clue. Johnson could have done this at any time when we left the EU, but didn’t. He’s doing it now as he proves unable to shake off the Partygate allegations and the economy worsens.

BEIS, the business department, is looking to consult on imperial measures. It’s hard to judge who exactly they will be discussing it with, whose views they will listen to. Commerce is entirely opposed.

Even market stall holders, who you might expect to be more prone to favouring the old ways, call out their fruit and vegetables in pounds and ounces and are firmly against the idea. Joe Harrison, chief executive of the National Market Traders Federation, said it made little sense for stalls to shift back to imperial when most young people had grown up with metric. Harrison said that the shift would be a “hassle”, adding: “For what purpose? Seems like it would just be hanging on to the past, nostalgia.”

We formally brought in metric in 1965, but continued using imperial for products such as milk and beer. Retailers were allowed to use them side by side for most things if they wished. The EU ordered us to stop using them alongside each other, but abandoned that demand in 2007. Twenty years ago, a group called the “Metric Martyrs”, fruit and vegetable market traders who campaigned to be allowed to sell their wares only in imperial units, quickly gave up the cause.

It’s barely been an issue until the moment the going got tough and Johnson needed something to grasp on to. Hard to fathom is the reaction from the Chartered Trading Standards Institute – that reversing to imperial will create a “feelgood factor”. To be fair, John Herriman, chief executive of the CTSI, went on to say that while “we understand the desire to create a feelgood factor, especially during a time of many profound economic challenges, at a time when consumers and businesses are already feeling the pinch from higher prices and inflation, it is really important that any proposed measures don’t bamboozle the public on value for money and the prices of everyday items, or add unnecessary costs and confusion to business.”

He’s right on the last bit – that the unprincipled will take full advantage and see this as a means of making sleights of hand, squeezing reductions and generating profits – but “feel-good”?

There’s that Bekonscot aspiration again. Unfortunately, the reverie ends as soon as you leave and join the M40, and the M25 and London, shortly after, its towers and people looming.