Boris Johnson is fond of announcing grand plans but has little interest in actually actioning them

The Coventry speech broke the cardinal political rule that you should never give a speech if you have nothing to say, writes Andrew Woodcock

Boris Johnson gave a speech on ‘levelling up’ in Coventry on 15 July (Getty)

Anyone who’s spent any time studying the career of Boris Johnson will be aware that he is a prime minister fond of announcing grand plans but less interested in the detailed work of pushing them through.

You can see it in his biggest project of Brexit, which was ushered into reality with high-flown rhetoric about a buccaneering “Global Britain” breaking free of its chains, but whose actual results – the blue passports, the promise of freeports, the trade deals worth a fraction of 1 per cent of GDP – amount to no more than tinkering.

You can see it in his promises of social care reform, supposedly ready for implementation when he came into power in 2019 but still to see the light of day, with the first proposals not likely to be published until the autumn.