Gove starts to define ‘levelling up’

What is levelling up? One of the problems with this nebulous term is that anyone in government who has understood what it means has decided to keep this a glorious secret, rather than sharing it with others. Now that there is an entire department for Levelling Up, it’s a bit harder to take this approach. Michael Gove is the new Secretary of State for the policy and spoke last night at a ConservativeHome fringe event at the Conservative party conference. He was keen not just to offer a picture of what levelling up will look like, but also to respond to critics within his own party who think this is somehow a left-wing agenda.

The fringe was launching a pamphlet by a group of recently-elected Tory MPs called ‘Trusting the People: The case for community-powered conservatism’, and Gove was particularly taken by some lines in it explaining the difference between conservatives, liberals and socialists.