Johnson’s speech about “levelling up” yesterday was an extraordinary affair. We were told, apparently by his spokesman, that the visit of the England football team to Downing Street was cancelled to allow him to finish working on it. Others say the squad refused to attend a planned photo opportunity with him, but who knows. What I would say is that if the answer was the former, it wasn’t time well spent.
A lot of commentators immediately condemned it for being vapid or lacking detail and coherence. Even Tim Montgomerie, founder of Conservative Home, said he was non the wiser about what levelling up actually means:
I still have absolutely no idea what levelling up* is.* Supposedly the Government’s biggest idea.— Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧 (@montie) July 15, 2021
Others pointed to the structure of the speech. It was quite unlike any great policy announcement made by previous prime ministers giving speeches drafted by experienced speech writers perhaps with civil service help.
I think we can say it was all his own work, not just because it was rambling, disjointed and incoherent but also because I think he didn’t give a copy of it to anybody before delivering it. I say this because the copy published yesterday is billed as a “transcript of the speech, exactly as it was delivered". Why do that if a text was available?
Some of the paragraphs are 350 words long without a full stop! You simply never see prime ministerial speeches that look like that. Usually, they are drafted immaculately. This was thrown together like a last minute newspaper column but with less thought.
Lewis Goodall at the BBC took it as a serious attempt at setting out what levelling up means and he tried to analyse the speech:
Judging by this speech the danger for the government's levelling up agenda is that it simply becomes a catch all term for govt policy on almost anything. PM just cited spending on crime, on mental health, on community sport all part of levelling up.
— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) July 15, 2021
He notes Johnson touched on increased spending, cutting crime, devolution and trying to increase the output of poorer regions - something governments have been doing since Pitt the Younger.
In other words Johnson is doing what every other prime minister has done and levelling up is just meaningless waffle. Even Dominic Cummings says the slogan is stupid and he claims he knows it is because they tested it in focus groups. He told Johnson to stop using it but he wouldn’t and now his entire government is based on it.
Having dreamt up his own simplified two-word slogan Johnson is now having difficulty defining what it is - beyond a new name for government policy.
Finally, I also see someone has linked to Jeremy Vine’s article from 2019 about the man who was about to become prime minister. It is a fascinating insight into Johnson's character. Before he became Mayor and when he was an MP, he and Vine were booked to give a speech and present awards respectively at The International Securitisation Awards 2006.
Johnson turned up late without a prepared speech, sat next to Vine breathlessly and appeared not even to know what securities were. With a borrowed pen and a table napkin he hurriedly jotted some ideas down beginning with the word SHEEP, and went up on stage (forgetting the notes) to give a bumbling story about a sheep farmer and involving an old joke about George Brown, the Labour minister from the 1960s, which had the crowd in stitches.
He even mentioned that his political hero was the mayor in the film Jaws who kept the beaches opened, something he has claimed again recently during the pandemic. Vine said:
"He spoke as if every sentence had only just occurred to him, and each new thought came as a surprise.
"Brilliant. The whole room is hooting and cheering. It no longer matters that Boris has no script, no plan, no idea of what event he is attending, and that he seems to be taking the whole thing off the top of his head."
Afterwards, Vine congratulated Johnson on a brilliant 'improvised' speech and thought he was a genius. He sent a postcard which read, “Boris. Brilliant. Inspired. Funniest speech I have ever seen. In the presence of the master. Jaws!”
Eighteen months later, Vine found himself once again at another formal occasion and discovered Boris booked to deliver a speech. Johnson seemed to have forgotten about Jeremy Vine and the earlier Securitisation awards and delivered EXACTLY the same speech in EXACTLY the same way. Even jotting 'ideas' down at the last minute with borrowed pen and paper, starting with the word ‘sheep.’ He then went up on stage and repeated the whole charade - even forgetting the punchline to the Brown ‘joke’ at precisely the same point as before!
Vine listened, 'momentarily apart' from the proceedings as Johnson continued to tell the same story and realised that he suddenly understood it all.
What I think it shows is that Johnson is not real or authentic. His whole life has been an elaborate act. He is a natural comedian but the joke is on us.
I have said before that I don’t believe Johnson is in the least bit clever. He is a man who wants to be seen as clever without trying and he is clever enough to convince people that he’s brilliant- as he did with Jeremy Vine before the ‘act’ was revealed.
Soon, the whole nation will see through him but not, unfortunately, before colossal damage has been done to this country.
