Boris Johnson is fond of announcing grand plans but has little interest in actually actioning them

Anyone who’s spent any time studying the career of Boris Johnson will be aware that he is a prime minister fond of announcing grand plans but less interested in the detailed work of pushing them through.

You can see it in his biggest project of Brexit, which was ushered into reality with high-flown rhetoric about a buccaneering “Global Britain” breaking free of its chains, but whose actual results – the blue passports, the promise of freeports, the trade deals worth a fraction of 1 per cent of GDP – amount to no more than tinkering.

You can see it in his promises of social care reform, supposedly ready for implementation when he came into power in 2019 but still to see the light of day, with the first proposals not likely to be published until the autumn.

Add to that the Boris Island airport that never got built, the garden bridge over the Thames abandoned at a cost of £43m to the taxpayer, and the mooted bridges to Ireland or France that produce headlines every now and again but which one doubts that even Johnson himself believes to be viable.

His own former top adviser, Dominic Cummings, despairingly noted: “He cannot plan or discuss plans. He has anti-interest in ‘how will X actually become real’. For him… the announcement is reality.”

Which brings us to the present issue of “levelling up”. It’s a phrase that sums up the perennial efforts of governments, dating back to the 1930s, to spread the national wealth around a little, and it even cropped up in Treasury documents in the Blair and Brown years. But it’s a slogan Johnson has very much made his own, assigning to it all sorts of magical powers to restore life to communities ground down by 40 years of deindustrialisation, globalisation and austerity.

Downing Street describes levelling up as the “central purpose” of the Johnson premiership. And his much-hyped keynote speech on the issue was packed with dynamic phrases about “rewriting the rulebook”, “spreading opportunity” and “restoring pride in people’s communities”.

But hunt among the thickets of anecdote and rhetoric for any sign of an actual plan and there was little to be found – an invitation to shire counties to run their own bus services, £50m for grassroots football pitches, money for town councils to create bike lanes or, and I quote, “remove chewing gum and graffiti” from their high streets. The big picture schemes he mentioned on education, hospital-building and crime reduction were national policies with only a tenuous link to levelling up.

Economists surveying his statements for hints at what might follow pointed out that they tended more towards the “lick of paint” end of the spectrum – quickly achievable and highly visible improvements to local areas, which will be noticed by voters but won’t resolve fundamental problems of inequality – rather than the hugely expensive and decades-long interventions needed to transform national economic structures.

The Coventry speech broke the cardinal political rule that you should never give a speech if you have nothing to say. Journalists were left scratching their heads about what Mr Johnson even wanted them to write. A white paper setting out proposals is not due to be published until the autumn, so why not wait until then to pontificate on the subject?

In the end, it may simply be back to the Johnson delight in announcing stuff, in striding around a factory with goggles on looking at bits of hi-tech kit before telling everyone how spiffing the future is going to be. Whether that’s all there is to it, we may have to wait years to find out.

Yours,

Andrew Woodcock

Political editor