‘Turbocharging’: sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Two weeks ago, I noted that our incoming PM had deployed this power-word — with its subliminal reminder of his pedal-to-the-metal reputation as the former motoring correspondent of GQ — to describe what ‘free ports’ would do to regional economies. Since then, it has clearly been scrawled on Dominic Cummings’s Downing Street whiteboard: Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Rishi Sunak were also bandying it around this week. In one sense it just seems to mean ‘energising’; in another, I suspect it’s a synonym for something no free-market cheerleader for the new cabinet would ever admit is a good thing: a desperate burst of debt-fuelled Keynesian public spending designed to push the economy through a no-deal crisis.
Hence that £300 million ‘pledge’ for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — and sudden enthusiasm for the Manchester-to-Leeds rail route. This is a bite-sized £3 billion proposition that’s easy to promise even if the full £39 billion Northern Powerhouse rail scheme linking Liverpool to Hull and points north, first mentioned five years ago, never leaves the drawing board. A 45-mile Manchester-Leeds upgrade doesn’t need a decades-long timetable: between Chinese cities, it would be done in six months. And it really would energise a regional economy long held back by dreadful Transpennine transport links. So however many other promises are abandoned or denied in the coming autumn of chaos, let’s hope this one happens. Who knows, it might be a short-lived Johnson government’s greatest legacy.
Man to watch
Rishi Sunak, incidentally, is my tip for fast promotion on the new front bench. In my observation, the MP for Richmond is more engaging and more articulate than his Treasury boss, Chancellor Sajid Javid. Whereas Javid’s vaunted experience with Deutsche Bank was in areas of securities trading that the troubled German bank surely regrets having ever touched, Sunak’s background at Goldman Sachs and later as an investor involved working with entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and Bangalore as well as the UK.
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