It’s not just Brexit – there’s another Tory unmentionable in this election

Is it possible to have two elephants in the room? In this election there is one, the “B-word”, that is scarcely mentioned. But there is another.

Five years ago, the Tories swept to power on the back of something called “levelling up”. That description is deliberate. For no one, least of all its main proponent, Boris Johnson, had much idea what it actually entailed.

Regardless, it’s not playing anywhere in 2024. Rishi Sunak uttered the phrase only when challenged on how the Tories were going to pay for the return of national service (he replied that they would raid the levelling up fund). Oh, and at the start of the campaign there were some handouts from the government to towns to assist them in smartening up their centres, mostly in Tory seats. That’s about all.

We always knew levelling up was fanciful. If you took the concept at its most extreme, it meant rebalancing areas of deprivation against those of abundance. When Germany had its own equivalent, after the Berlin Wall came down, it cost €2 trillion to unify East with West; that’s what they spent between 1990 and 2014 – around £70bn a year. By contrast, Britain’s levelling up fund reached £10.47bn, and will come down should Sunak pinch some of it to pay for instilling responsibility into the nation’s youth.

Of course, national service is not even about levelling up. It’s not about boosting pockets of disadvantage, putting the post-industrial North and West Midlands on a par with the South and the South East, which is what we were led to believe it meant. The very fact that Sunak should use the levelling up fund for his election headline-grabber shows he had no clue what it was really for, either.

Johnson deserved credit, at the time. Plenty of politicians had veered away from tackling hardship in regions that once enjoyed full employment and prosperity but fell on hard times with the decline in the manufacturing industries. Easier to promise a project here, a bit of expenditure there, and ignore the big picture.

The only politician who had dared to voice similar thoughts was Michael Heseltine, who engineered the redevelopment of the likes of Merseyside and is still highly regarded in the North, even by Labour diehards.

Decades later, along came Johnson, another Tory who appeared to “get it”. On the doorsteps, in the broadcasting studios, the Conservative leader held out hope. He was articulating a simmering frustration that those areas wanted what the rest were having.

In focus groups, that anger had been expressed – not only against Westminster but also at town halls, many of which were Labour-run.

Voters were fed up with empty rhetoric and broken promises. They felt ignored and abandoned. There were hard facts that bore out their sense of desolation. Rail and road links were not as good as in other places; educational attainment was lower; health poverty was a major issue.

Johnson told the Tory conference of the difference in life expectancy between down-at-heel Blackpool and the nearby prosperous Ribble Valley. That gap remains. Indeed, precious little has been achieved in the interim. The flagship project, the second stage of HS2 north of Birmingham, was scrapped by Sunak in a speech given in Manchester, the city that was to benefit from it.

Some of the money saved will be committed to other developments, we were told; but these are at an early stage. There have been relocations of civil servants and public bodies northwards, out of central London. There’s the Freeport in Teesside, on which Sunak lavishes praise while others question what it will really achieve in terms of genuinely new jobs and new investment. Otherwise, we’re more or less left with the town-centre refurbishment schemes. The latest news is of £7,000 spent on a project called “The Trees Are Alive”, which involves 180 wooden shapes being fixed to 53 trees in Leeds, painted to resemble eyes, teeth and mouths to give them personalities.

In a report published three months ago, the Commons public accounts committee said the government had failed to provide any compelling examples of what levelling up had delivered. Only 10 per cent of the £10.47bn funding had been spent so far. Dame Meg Hillier, the committee chair, said: “Our committee is here to scrutinise value for money in the delivery of government policy. But in the case of levelling up, our report finds that the government is struggling to even get the money out of the door to begin with.”

In an indication of supposed serious intent, Michael Gove was made levelling up secretary. The Tory heavy-hitter failed to convince in the role, not coming up with any memorable initiative. Even he seemed stumped.

It does feature in the Tories’ 76-page manifesto – towards the end, on page 72. It’s nuanced. Instead of boosting the North and West Midlands, it is now referred to as levelling up “across the UK”. There’s no distinction any more; everyone is to benefit. “Delivering for people right across the country requires joint working between the UK and devolved governments as well as local partners,” it says. The manifesto then lists more than £3bn of investment in levelling up in Scotland, over £2.5bn to level up in Wales, and over £1bn on projects in Northern Ireland.

Levelling up, of course, implies levelling down somewhere else. The manifesto wants to make clear that this is not the case, hence the details provided for the devolved nations.

Johnson’s catchy phrase, his vote-winning destroyer of the red wall, is all but finished. Sunak never liked it – rarely do leaders love a predecessor’s work – but he can’t scrap it completely, so it clings on, adapted and broadened. Really, it joins Brexit as an idea from the past that’s no longer up for discussion.