The ‘northern powerhouse’ has to be more than a slogan if Boris Johnson wants votes next time

Towards the end of previous cabinet reshuffles, there has been a panic about some favourite who has been overlooked, or a minister for women who hasn’t been appointed, or a Post-It note with a forgotten middle-ranking minister’s name on that has been found on the floor after all the jobs have been allocated.

This week was no different. Towards the end of a two-day reshuffle, as the bulletins from No 10 were deep into Lords-in-Waiting and parliamentary under-secretaries of state remaining in post, there was a flurry about the “northern powerhouse”.

The minister who had been responsible for this slogan, Jake Berry, was no longer invited to attend cabinet meetings, as the number of supernumerary attendees was cut from 10 to four, and decided to leave the government rather than accept a post at the Foreign Office.

As we report today, his replacement, Simon Clarke, the MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, will also not attend cabinet, while cabinet-level responsibility for pretending to care about the north of England will lie with Grant Shapps, the transport secretary and an MP for a Home Counties seat.

This has gone down badly with Steve Rotheram, the Liverpool city region mayor, who no doubt spoke for many northerners when he observed: “For all Johnson’s talk about levelling up the north, his first act is to downgrade the minister responsible.”

Of course, ministerial ranks and titles are flimsy things, and Boris Johnson will ultimately be judged on the substance of his policies, but for the moment, titles and slogans are all the prime minister has to deploy as evidence of his intent, and this is not a good start.

Everyone knows that rebalancing the London-centric British economy is an immensely difficult and complex undertaking, bordering on the impossible. People have complained about it since the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, if not for centuries before. It will take more than cheap talk about setting up a branch office of Conservative HQ in the north, or holding a meeting of the cabinet in Sunderland (a gimmick copied from Gordon Brown), or planting some stories in the press about the House of Lords moving to York.

However, the prime minister did some of the right things in his transport announcement on Monday – not so much about HS2, which remains a controversial and ambiguous project, but when he spoke about buses. Improved bus services across the country outside London could be provided at a fraction of the cost of a big infrastructure project and would produce results in a fraction of the time.

For the longer term, now is the time to take bold decisions to use the huge economic power of government to build up centres of activity outside London. Some shifting of secondary government functions has happened over the decades, but some core functions should move too. And perhaps Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief adviser, could recruit some “weirdos and misfits” to think about how to move “science” – much of it paid for by the taxpayer – north from Oxford, Cambridge and London.

Mr Johnson surely knows that the northern powerhouse has to be more than a slogan if he is to deliver for the people who voted Conservative for the first time at the election. But he needs to show it.