These may well be the defining few days of the Johnson government. Having failed to make a towering success of the initial response to the Covid-19 crisis – by his own admission on Times Radio this morning – the Prime Minister is now embarked on the kind of structural reform of the machinery of government that will determine whether he will be seen by future generations as a Homeric hero or Homer Simpson.
So far we can see the building blocks of the reconstruction, rather than the detail.
These blocks include, first, infrastructure investment as a response to the economic calamity that is the consequence of the coronavirus calamity – what the Prime Minister this morning called ‘doubling down’ on his manifesto commitments rather than responding to the explosion of government debt with cuts to public services.
And second, they are to give more political direction to Whitehall.
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