Levelling up the polls

By David Scane

A little over two years has now passed since Boris Johnson was swept into Downing Street following one of the biggest landslides in living memory.
 
On that cold December evening, as he sat celebrating with his partner and chief advisor in Number 10, the newly emboldened Prime Minister could have no idea of the events to come.
 
Fast forward two years, and the Prime Minister’s reputation is now more damaged than Wilf Johnson’s garden swing after a Number 10 work meeting.
 
So, while Sue Grey conducts her investigations into Number 10’s lockdown breaches, and Conservative backbenchers slip their letters of no confidence under Sir Graham Brady’s office door, is there anything the PM can do to reset the agenda?
 
When he won that famous election victory in 2019, the Prime Minister did so on the back of two slogans “Get Brexit Done” and "levelling up”. The first of those slogans was relatively quantifiable; to take the UK out of the EU, whereas the second was far more nebulous and abstract. 
 
Next month we are set to finally discover what "levelling up” actually means with the publication of the hotly anticipated levelling up white paper. But could “levelling up” offer the embattled Prime Minister as way out of his current cheese and wine induced slump?
 

A report published this week by zero carbon house builder Etopia Homes sets out the 34 local authority areas with the greatest need of  ‘levelling up’. These areas include 13 Parliamentary seats which the Conservatives won in 2019, while a further 8 saw the party lose by less than 5,000 votes. If the current polls are to be believed, then Labour is would still be a handful of seats short of a majority, despite the Conservative Party’s current woes. Many of the seats Labour needs to convert from blue to red sit in these areas requiring the most investment.
 
Should the Government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda start to pump money and opportunities into these areas in the next two years then it could just make the difference between a Labour and a Conservative Government in 2024.
 
As the Prime Minister continues to hang on to power he’ll be hoping that events will intervene to halt his slide in the polls.
 
The levelling up agenda, could be just such a way out.