Boris should keep copying Blair

Having written here at least once before that Boris Johnson is the heir to Blair, my first thought on the Prime Minister’s tax-to-spend announcement on the NHS and social care is a petty one: I told you so.

The striking thing about making the Boris-Blair comparison is how resistant some people are to it. Among Bozza fans on the Leave-voting right, there is often fury at the suggestion that their man, the hero of Brexit, is anything like the Europhile they used to call ‘Bliar’. On the left, there is an almost pathological determination to believe that a Tory PM must, by definition, be a small-state free-marketeer intent on starving and privatising public services.

That latter point is why Labour people sometimes struggle to respond to Johnson. After Blair had left office, David Cameron admitted he used to dread waking up to find out what Tory-ish thing ‘that bloody man’ had done to appeal to Conservative-leaning voters.