Boris Johnson has just delivered his big speech on levelling-up. It was awful. He’s a bumbling, stumbling speaker at the best of times — which he can turn to his advantage — but not this time. It felt like he was reading out the pages in random order.
Adding to the impression of not knowing where he was, he claimed that the “golden triangle” of London, Oxford and Cambridge was the greatest concentration of academic excellence in “this hemisphere”. By this he meant that Britain’s top universities are second only to America’s Ivy League. However, most of the UK, including most of the golden triangle, is also in the Western Hemisphere. Look at a map, Boris!
With zero self-awareness, he began the speech by emphasising the importance of “consistency”. He claimed that previous attempts to level-up the land had failed, because government policies kept chopping and changing.
Not much chance of that with Boris, because he doesn’t have a policy at all. Judging him on his words, “levelling-up” is still no more than a rhetorical theme — a convenient wrapper for disconnected parcels of public funding.
As for any idea as to what the overarching strategy is, he left us none the wiser. Or, as Dominic Cummings put it, this was the “same crap speech” that “he’s given pointlessly umpteen times.”
There were formulaic mentions for particular issues both big and small — transport, “gigabit broadband”, vocational education, localism and some desperate references to football. But it’s hard to say what they added up to.
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