Johnson at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell

Author:Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Levelling Up, Infrastructure and Skills

In as far as his team was capable of defining what he wanted to do as Prime Minister, and they tried hard on several locations to get him to elucidate why he had so badly wanted the job, it came down to what we have described as his ‘three impulses’. We now consider the first two, levelling up and infrastructure, emblematic of his desire to rebuild the country and be a Prime Minister in the mould of US Presidents Roosevelt or Reagan. The third impulse, ‘patriotism’, we examine in the next chapter.

‘Levelling up’ encapsulates Johnson in a nutshell – boosterish, inchoate and self-serving. No longer able to rally the forces to get Brexit done and destroy Corbyn, he was also no longer able to justify himself as the defiant challenger – his natural habitat. Rather, he needed to show himself to be a successful governor, a transition he achieved in the London mayoralty. Levelling up Britain ticked every box. It even promised to retain Red Wall seats in the North, a far cry from the party’s natural heartland. Levelling up was win, win, win.

Then reality began to dawn in the course of 2021: levelling up was politically difficult, cross-cutting and very expensive. Johnson had never sought to articulate or substantiate it in any great detail, happy to leave it as a fluffy aspiration – only periodically visited where a speech called for the recurrent motif. Johnson taking little responsibility for its progress would have worked if he’d charged other ministers to do so. But being so broad, the policy lacked a natural home and ministerial sponsor to own it. Very little flesh, therefore, was on the bones of levelling up by early 2021 despite Johnson’s repeated and undoubtedly sincere insistence that ‘talent and genius is distributed equally, but opportunity is not’.10

The Treasury, the Whitehall department that was most sceptical about the policy, had been left to drive change, its partial move to Darlington in the North-East following on the slow rollout of the 2019 Towns Fund and 2020 Levelling Up Fund. ‘These funds weren’t actually intended to achieve the levelling up agenda,’ says an official. ‘They were merely short-term financial support to pave the way for longer-term transformative programmes.’ With Covid mostly under control, Johnson appointed Neil O’Brien to a junior ministerial post for Levelling Up within the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). A rising star in the wonkish mould and a protégé of Osborne, O’Brien was on paper a natural fit, having written the first serious piece on how levelling-up progress might be measured for centre-right think tank Onward in September 2020.11 Heading a unit of fewer than a dozen officials, he rolled up his sleeves and began articulating the long-awaited details of levelling up.

Few of them made it into Johnson’s speech delivered in Coventry on 15 July 2021, billed as the seminal relaunch of the levelling-up policy. Couched in the ‘recovery from the pandemic’ vein, the speech was effective in its

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