Sketch: A step-by-step guide to levelling up and making sourdough by Boris Johnson
We’re levelling up trains, we’re levelling up roads, we’re levelling up shires and towns, counties and cities. We’re levelling up our internet, our schools, and our clean energy infrastructure, Boris Johnson told a crowd yesterday in an attempt to flesh out and actually explain the phrase which has plagued British politics possibly even more than “Get Brexit done”.
What levelling up isn’t, Mr Johnson said, is a “jam-spreading operation”. He didn’t rule out marmite or peanut butter, but there will be no gooey strawberry stuff slathered over Doncaster, where the Prime Minister it seems very recently discovered that a woman has a shorter life expectancy than one in York.
But while there will be no breakfast spread, there will be yeast. Lots of yeast. We’re making sourdough and it will level up every other loaf of sourdough we made during all three lockdowns. “The yeast”, Mr Johnson said, “will lift the whole mattress of dough, it is the magic sauce – the ketchup of catch-up.”
So, we’re left with a levelled up bread roll with a smattering of ketchup and very little filling to explain what Mr Johnson means when he says he wants to level up the country.
The Prime Minister, after a year of being beaten and bullied from all sides about introducing masks, not introducing masks, having lockdowns and not having lockdown, wanted to make a speech that would make everyone love him.
“No one believes, I don’t believe, you don’t believe that there is any basic difference in the potential of babies born across this country,” he regaled today to a crowd of people who were unlikely to suggest we ditch the toddlers of Teesside into a bin labelled “unfit for opportunities”. Who would cry out and disagree with the need to “give all our children the guarantee of a great education with safe and well disciplined classes and fantastic teachers”?
It’s not as though Sir Keir Starmer is standing on the opposite benches hammering for classrooms fraught with rusty nails and teachers who leave in the middle of a lesson to have a smoke out the back. But the Prime Minister’s promise to ensure every starting salary for every teacher was £30,000 was one of the few details we heard on his levelling up agenda. A pledge first mooted in September 2019.
We are also levelling up football. The hope of almost winning the Euros was so sweet and the loss so crushing, we will eradicate poverty by making sure we are never 15 minutes away from a high quality football pitch, a promise which seems to have taken its inspiration from the oft-cited statistic that you are never more than three feet away from a spider.
What we don’t know is whether that is a 15 minute walk, a 15 minute drive or a 15 minute bus-ride? To prevent any confusion, we will level up transport. And thank god for Andy, Mr Johnson said, for he has been great at levelling up transport. Street, that is, the Tory mayor of the West Midlands, not Andy Burnham of Manchester, who presumably is in fact plotting the imminent destruction of his city’s eerily silent trams.
Just in case any of this levelling up could possibly cause offence to London, which, of course, was levelled up while Mr Johnson was Mayor of London, we are assured there will be no “decapitations” here. That guillotine in the Tower of London went out of use a long time ago and we will pour our happy, go-lucky levelling up yeast all over the tall poppies of the United Kingdom. Let’s just hope they’re not gluten free like all of those horrible metropolitan voters who voted for that guy Sadiq.
Now, are we all clear? Do we know what levelling up means? Some gloomster critics suggested we were still none the wiser, and policies might have been more helpful in understanding the vision underpinning Mr Johnson’s premiership. But other than that, are we all kapeesh?