Now the Tories must make it their mission to repair the country

The centrepiece of Boris Johnson’s speech to Tory party conference this year was his Damascene conversion to the merits of wind farms. Some people used to sneer and say wind power wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding, he said — referring, of course, to himself, writing in 2013. Now, his post-Covid plan for Britain is wind farms powering every home by the end of the decade. But the Prime Minister was right first time.

When he was dismissing wind power, it was eye-wateringly expensive and was forecast to stay that way for the foreseeable future. No one envisaged, then, how global competition and technology would force prices down. The turbines being prepared for Dogger Bank wind farm, with their 100-metre blades, will be generating wind power at £40 per megawatt hour — less than half the price taxpayers will be charged for the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant under the deal disastrously negotiated by George Osborne.

If Johnson had run for party leader talking about wind farms, he would not have been elected. It’s not that the Tories are against them, it’s just that the energy revolution will happen anyway, globally, with or without government, and wind power is a pretty poor substitute for a vision when local high street shops are boarded up, jobs hang in the balance and children’s education is in tatters. What we need government to do is to preserve public services, minimise damage caused by Covid and start the job of social repair.

The feeling inside No. 10 is that the battle is on to design the post-Covid world. The competing visions will be Labour’s state-driven agenda and a Conservative response looking to free enterprise. The Prime Minister drew out these battle lines explicitly, and committed himself to the latter.