With Sajid Javid gone, will Boris now start a Gordon Brown-style spending splurge?

The nature of the Johnson government is still not clear, but has become more so with the announcement this week that HS2 is to go ahead in its entirety. Until recently, it had seemed that the project would be, if not dropped altogether, cut back in order to rein in its ever-accelerating budget. This is what most Tory MPs,cabinet members and even the Chancellor had wanted. But instead, the Prime Minister has decided that it will be built in its full £106 billion form. Not only that, he threw in £5 billion for buses and cycleways, as well as the promise of a £39 billion high-speed line from Manchester to Leeds. And, perhaps, a £20 billion road bridge connecting Dumfriesshire with Northern Ireland.

The ability to think big is generally a positive trait. It is easy to admire brave infrastructure projects in other countries and contrast them with the penny-pinching roads and railways which have long been a feature of UK public spending. Choked, inadequate roads which need to be expanded or rebuilt a few years later can be a false economy. As for HS2, many have been seduced by the argument that if you are going to spend money improving and building railways you should make them ‘future-proof’ by going for a high specification.

But the challenge for Johnson is how to think big on public investment without morphing into Gordon Brown. The last Prime Minister but two precipitated an unprecedented boom in construction of new schools: not that it did much for education standards. He signed off on Crossrail. But the result of his looseness with the purse strings is that he left behind a public debt crisis, running a £158 billion deficit in his last year in office. Not only that: many of those new schools and hospitals had been built with off-balance sheet Public Finance Initiative deals which have continued to be a burden on taxpayers long after he left office.

Of course, there is a difference between borrowing to invest in a project expected to pay for itself (bridges, tunnels and roads) and borrowing simply to pay day-to-day government bills.