Has Boris made you better off?

Despite the political misery for Boris Johnson as he ends the year, he has a big hope: that salaries will boom in 2022. At Conservative party conference in October, he told fellow Tories what to expect. Yes, the country has gone through a phase of economic chaos — and as a result some supermarket shelves have been empty and truck drivers have been hard to find — but this was actually good news, he claimed, because it marked the start of a new, high-pay economic model.

‘We are not going back to the same old broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity,’ he boasted. Change would ‘sometimes be difficult’ but it was ‘the change that people voted for in 2016’: bad for bosses who are dependent on cheap labour, but better, overall, for workers.

Johnson’s plan is to ride out the turbulence, the Downing Street scandals, and then draw voters’ attention to the economy. It’s the old Ronald Reagan question: ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ Johnson is banking on the answer being a resounding yes.

Others aren’t convinced. ‘I don’t know how we’re going to answer that question when it inevitably comes up,’ one Tory minister tells me. Even before the start of the new year, the numbers are worrying. ‘Unless we’re entirely trusting now that the state can solve all our problems — which it’s comprehensively, blatantly failed to do in the past — we’ve got very little to offer.’ Some wages are rising but inflation may increase just as fast. The Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts that, after inflation, average disposable income will only grow by 0.8 per cent per year for the next five years.

Economic growth in October was a measly 0.1