Boris Johnson is to ‘take personal charge’ of a new crackdown on crime and gangs. So reports Steve Swinford of the Times, one of the Lobby’s best reporters.
While this is a good and new story, for a jaded and ageing ex-hack like me it crystallises a vague feeling that’s been nagging at me for a few weeks and prompts this realisation: Boris Johnson is turning into Tony Blair.
These days Blair is often remembered as the quintessential metropolitan liberal politician, a champion of globalisation, economic openness and, above all, the EU.
I became a Lobby reporter in 2001 and my memory of the Blair government that I covered is was rather different. On the economy, he oversaw an expansion of state spending and state provision. Corbynite Labour might now regard him as an austere ‘neoliberal’ (whatever that means) but that’s hard to square with his spending on the NHS, programmes like Sure Start and the national minimum wage.
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