This had the potential to be a good week for the prime minister. While Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was off wooing the global financial elite at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, promising closer ties to the EU and playing pretend as prime minister, Sunak would be touring Britain, trumpeting a \u00a32.1bn \u201clevelling up\u201d investment and focusing on his favourite new buzzword: \u201cdelivery\u201d.<\/p>\n
But as with so much else with the prime minister at the moment, things just did not go to plan.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Fiasco followed fiasco, with news breaking that Britain\u2019s lead lawmaker is set to face another<\/i> police fine after filming a video in a moving car without a seatbelt. Seatbeltgate stole much of the media attention, but there was time too for intricate breakdowns of Sunak\u2019s new funding announcements on levelling up. After all was said and done, it was the details of the latest tranche of levelling up funding that sparked the most significant furore.<\/p>\n Analysis found that large sums of the headline \u00a32.1bn funding package is going to areas with relatively low levels of deprivation. In total, \u00a3151m is going to London, while the North East gets \u00a3108m and the Humber is getting \u00a3120m. It was also highlighted that, of the \u00a31.9bn of spending that could be linked to individual constituencies, \u00a31.2bn \u2014 around 63 per cent \u2014 had gone to seats held by Conservative MPs.<\/p>\n Then there was the matter of Richmond, the prime minister\u2019s own constituency, which received another heap of cash (as it did in the fund\u2019s first round). The news that the PM\u2019s own constituency was receiving \u00a319m in funding, while the cities of Birmingham, Nottingham and Stoke missed out, raised eyebrows significantly.<\/p>\n MPs and local leaders alike criticised the government\u2019s preferred method of allocating funding to local authorities via bidding competitions judged by ministers. Shadow levelling up secretary Lisa Nandy rubbished a \u201cHunger Games<\/i>-style\u201d system, while Conservative mayor of the West Midlands Andy Street blasted \u201cWhitehall\u2019s bidding and begging bowl culture\u201d.<\/p>\n Amid the outrage, many referred to the video which surfaced over the summer which caught Sunak boasting that he had deliberately diverted public money from “deprived urban areas\u201d during his time as chancellor. Given that new levelling up funding seemed to be heading disproportionately Southward, the video underlined anew for many the calculated farce of the \u201crebalancing\u201d project.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sunak tries his best Boris Johnson impression\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n The \u201clevelling up\u201d slogan first appeared as a new soundbite in the early stages of the 2019 election. The slogan was deliberately slippery, intended to subvert anti-Westminster feelings for Boris Johnson\u2019s own political purposes. In the end, it encapsulated Johnson’s stated concern with spreading opportunity across the country and was central to his successful pitch at \u201cred wall\u201d constituencies.<\/p>\n Levelling up was Johnsonianism distilled: a catchy slogan, a few billion quid and a monument to point to at the end of it all. It meant high-spending, headline-grabbing infrastructure projects.\u00a0This side of Johnsonianism was summed up neatly by Dominic Cummings in a recent New York Magazine<\/i> interview: \u201cThe only thing he was really interested in \u2014 genuinely excited about \u2014 was looking at maps. Where could he order the building of things?\u201d, Johnson\u2019s former top adviser said.<\/p>\n In short: as long as shovels were in the ground, Johnson thought he was winning.<\/p>\n The bidding war incited by the levelling up project would see communities pitted against each other, pining for Johnson\u2019s attention and Whitehall\u2019s cash. The PM would then tour the country, pointing to the physical markers of his success. His legacy would be then writ in stone across Britain\u2019s high streets. “Thank you Boris”, Britain would collectively bay.<\/p>\n But where Johnson was able to make levelling up central to his political brand, for Sunak, it\u2019s fast becoming a vulnerability. This is a serious problem for the Conservative party. Levelling up has never been large enough nor targeted enough to make a dent in regional inequalities \u2014 but balanced by Johnson\u2019s boosterism, it could be electorally gripping. And unfortunately for Conservative MPs, Sunak does not possess Johnson\u2019s powers of performance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This highlights another important point. For the levelling up debate begs further questions about Rishi Sunak\u2019s political identity. Our prime minister is a treasury technocrat, better suited to fiddling with funding formulas than revelling in levelling up \u201csuccess\u201d. Whereas Boris Johnson never saw a spending commitment he didn\u2019t like, Sunak is a fiscal Conservative in the truest sense. The very idea of big-spending infrastructure projects seems to jar with his political instincts.<\/p>\n