End the rationing... Boris must take centre stage again
GIVEN that Boris Johnson has always been a consummate political showman it can seem like we don’t hear from him directly very much these days. Labour accusations about him allegedly “hiding away” during the petrol crisis are horribly unfair considering his mother’s funeral took place on Monday. Nonetheless prime ministerial public performances have been a strictly rationed commodity in recent months.
That is about to change as the Conservative Party conference gets underway in Manchester. All eyes will be on Mr Johnson’s keynote speech on Wednesday. This is when he can set out his stall in the knowledge that millions of us will either listen live or hear all about it on TV news bulletins.
Oddly for someone who has been in Downing Street for more than two years, it is his first proper opportunity to communicate to a mass audience his vision across the broad sweep of issues. So dominated has his premiership been to date by two enormous stories – Brexit and Covid – that there has been precious little room for anything else.
BOTH Brexit and Covid are capable of providing aftershocks and next week may see a new crisis in relations with Brussels if Mr Johnson suspends the Northern Ireland protocol. Yet even that will not crowd out the space for other things which is just as well, given the number of issues on which an increasingly restless public would like answers.
How long are current shortages of everyday items going to continue? What is his plan to tackle a looming cost-of-living crisis? How does he propose to sort out migration chaos in the English Channel? What about growing anxieties on law and order? What does he mean by “levelling-up” and what benefits should people expect to see from it in their local communities? How will he ensure the NHS is able to clear the enormous backlog of operations and diagnoses that has built up over the past 18 months?
These are just some of the concerns crowding the political agenda.To put it in terms of the three-word slogans so beloved of his former adviser Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson must Calm Us Down and Cheer Us Up. On the former, he has plenty in his locker. For a start, public borrowing is running substantially below forecast, there are no signs of jitters in financial markets about Britain’s ability to service its admittedly huge public debt and inward investment continues to pour in.
Many of the supply issues really are to do with the global economy rapidly rebooting after the pandemic, while others originate from the blocking of the Suez Canal and ensuing disruption to container trade earlier this year. Both are transient factors which should be sorted out in months rather than years. A long-feared “Covid collapse” in employment levels never occurred, and while there is still a vital economic task to complete in the coming weeks – moving people who come off furlough and find their old roles no longer exist, into new jobs, there is every reason for optimism here.
There are now record numbers of vacancies and some sectors are crying out for extra staff. Skill shortages and geographical factors must be factored in, but it is still very helpful to be facing this challenge when so many companies are looking to recruit.
THIS can lead Mr Johnson into painting an economic vision for the long-term too, involving better training of homegrown workers, higher productivity and higher pay as the antidote to the historical reliance of many companies on EU free movement.
On levelling-up, many of us would like to hear something about two obvious areas where there is room for improvement: reinvigorating high streets and better local public transport. Neither of these is as highfalutin as the dash to net zero or a green jobs revolution, but both can make an appreciable early difference to the quality of life in the towns that have placed their trust in the Tories.
If all this is the basis for calming us down, then cheering us up should come naturally to the PM. For a start there is always Labour to mock after its horror show in Brighton. Then there are doomsters to send packing such as those who predicted 100,000 Covid cases a day and the NHS being overwhelmed after restrictions were relaxed in July. It just didn’t happen. And neither will Christmas be getting cancelled this year.
There’s no denying it has been a rocky spell, but so long as the real Boris Johnson stands up next week Britain will surely continue to plump for him rather than any conceivable alternative.
‘Cheering us all up should come naturally to the Prime Minister’