With 52 days left in this ‘fantastic year for Britain’, Boris Johnson reaches for the big guns

One of the many downsides of having a newspaper columnist for a prime minister is that they really will leave it until 19 November before sorting out the whole “fantastic year for Britain” thing. And so, with just zero non-essential shopping days til’ Christmas, out Johnson blazes with two big, attention-grabbing paragraphs. Sorry, policies.

Yesterday, it was the “green industrial revolution”, for which £4bn has been found, compared to Germany’s £37bn and France’s £20bn for the same thing.

Look, who are we to doubt the guy? Yes, you might say, not that long ago, when the science was just as clear as it is now, he was writing climate change denying columns for The Telegraph. But the wind is blowing in a different direction now. The planet, after all, is a living organism and it has finally worked out that if it wants to survive, its best hope is to align its interests with the political career of Boris Johnson, which it has now done, but the rest is out of its hands.

You might also point out that in July, Rishi Sunak launched the Green Homes Grant, for which £2bn of public money had been found, for almost anyone to get their loft insulated, or their cavity walls, or to get a low energy heat pump or a wood pellet boiler. And, well, the scheme opened two months ago, it shuts altogether in another four, and at time of writing, the number of people who have successfully managed to claim a Green Homes Grant, from the 42,000 who have applied (which doesn’t count the quite possibly millions who have given up trying) is a whopping… 267.  

But anyway, that was yesterday’s news. It’s defence today, and specifically, it’s defence’s turn to receive a £16.5bn funding boost, some of which is to be spent on lasers. This, one imagines, was all part of the plan before Covid-19 came along, and with it, its roughly £300bn bill. But why stop now?

Of course, both these brand new policies come directly after Monday’s big news, which was Johnson accidentally calling devolution a “disaster” and so setting the break up of the union in ever more certain motion.

In that context, perhaps all this is part of a coherent plan. Should we call it Make England Great Again? The Mega drive?

Do the armed forces need an extra £16.5bn? Is it essential, or even important, that Britain should become Europe’s “pre-eminent naval power”? These are questions for the experts, of which I am certainly not one, but one does not need to be an expert to note that this urgent, “once-in-a-generation” opportunity to sort out the armed forces has come at the precise moment Johnson also needs to sort out his own public reputation.

Naturally, those that clamour for such things point out that the world is becoming more dangerous. That Iran and North Korea are on the hunt for nuclear weapons. That China is building more and more aircraft carriers, and will apparently soon start asserting itself in the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, these are the same people that become feverishly upset at the prospect of a “European army” that the UK couldn’t possibly ever want to be a part of.

The world is becoming more dangerous, larger and less friendly powers are on the rise, so it’s absolutely right that the UK must go it alone, and spend even more money it doesn’t have, pretending to be a great global power that it absolutely isn’t and never will be again.

There are, after all, only 52 days left in this “fantastic year for Britain”, and precious few in which we can carry on myth making to ourselves, before reality kicks in.