Starmer has spotted Boris’s big weakness

Boris Johnson’s relaunch speech this week contained something for everyone: a clear-sighted policy on Ukraine, the bizarre idea that stoking up housing demand is the way to overcome a shortage of housing supply and a take on the economy that one might charitably describe as a Keynesian-Thatcherite synthesis.

But the most telling line came in a section about energy policy, when the Prime Minister claimed to be ‘building a new nuclear reactor every year rather than one every ten years’. Not to be planning to do so, but actually to be doing so right now, in real time as it were. In Johnson’s mind, the preliminary expression of an intention to do something complicated, time-consuming and difficult clearly means it is being done.

This would appear to explain an awful lot about his administration. For instance, when you want to stop civil servants working from home you just get Jacob Rees-Mogg to leave a note telling them to do so and this constitutes effective action.