Sir Keir Starmer said the other day that he wanted to put rocket boosters under AI. It’s not the only thing he wants to put rocket boosters under. In September he said that ‘new planning passports will put rocket boosters under housebuilding’. He wasn’t the only one. When it was his turn to be prime minister, Rishi Sunak promised to ‘put rocket boosters’ under construction in areas that were already built up.
Usually rocket boosters are put under things, but Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, was more anatomical in his thoughts, praising a youth mobility scheme that would ‘put rocket boosters up businesses in London’. Even so, in 2023 he thought his Ultra-Low Emissions Zone scheme would put rocket boosters under electric car demand.
My husband points out that if you put rocket boosters under things that aren’t rockets it will destroy them. Boris Johnson was similarly literal in carrying through the metaphor. In his valedictory speech outside No. 10, he likened himself to a ‘booster rocket that has fulfilled its function’. He certainly fell away, but perhaps he would want to think that, like the Space Shuttle rocket boosters, he can be recovered and used again. His successor Liz Truss believed it was ‘the moment to put rocket boosters on the economy and get growth going’. However, it was she who blew up.
I find rocket boosters marginally preferable to turbo charging. Someone writing in the Telegraph before the last election was looking for ‘the rocket boosters needed to jump-start the economy into growth’. Others rely on the old-fashioned kick-start.
Rocket boosters have been around since the 1940s. But rockets figured in political language long before they found their way into space. In 1782 Tom Paine said of Edmund Burke that, ‘as he rose like a rocket, he would fall like the stick’. Rockets are dangerous things. In West Side Story Riff’s advice is: ‘Get cool, boy./ Got a rocket/ In your pocket,/ Keep coolly cool, boy.’ But then, it’s Riff who gets killed.
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