What’s the point of Boris?

The anger against the Prime Minister for failing to observe the rules which he imposed upon the rest of us is justified. Even so, there will come a point at which the public starts to ask: aren’t we spending too much time obsessing about the parties?

Johnson’s electoral mandate gives him the chance to redeem himself; to show that he has the ideas to get Britain out of this mess and that although he may make mistakes over more trivial matters, he gets the big decisions right.

In defying Sage’s advice in December, Johnson saved Britain from a needless lockdown. He could and should have done this at a far earlier stage last year, but he nonetheless deserves credit. He should now move on to the next phase of his leadership, and show us what he means by those much-repeated soundbites: ‘global Britain’ and ‘levelling up’.

The lockdowns he imposed — which were longer and harsher than in most European countries — took the country in the opposite direction. They deepened inequality and weakened Britain’s links with the outside world. His party needs to ask how this damage can be repaired.

The levelling up white paper published this week is a heroic attempt to make verbiage look like policy, and to give the appearance of a serious agenda where in fact there’s only baseless assertion.

It sets ambitious goals with specific figures: healthy life expectancy to be increased by five years by 2035; the number of highly skilled workers to be increased by 200,000 each year. The language of centrally planned economies now comes easily to Tories. But the paper is strikingly weak on how the government can achieve its lofty goals.