It is crucial for Johnson that he delivers tangible benefits for voters in ‘red wall’ seats – but can he do it?

A handful of working-class accents on the government benches, welcome though they are, do not a cultural revolution make

New Labour, New Boris. The prime minister sought to put the seal on his election victory by visiting Sedgefield, Tony Blair’s former constituency and one of the bricks in Labour’s “red wall” that used to stretch from northeast England through the midlands to Wales.

Boris Johnson now claims to speak for the working class, advocating an early Blairite combination of economic populism and calculated patriotism. In this, he is merely taking over a deep change in British politics that was already happening under Theresa May, by which the Brexit cleavage has made the Conservative vote more blue-collar and the Labour vote more middle class.

Despite his upper-class twit persona, Mr Johnson does it with more energy and conviction than Ms May, a Home Counties trestle-table Tory to her bones. And there were some nice touches in Mr Johnson’s victory speech on Friday morning, welcoming the “new dawn” and promising to change his party so that it delivers for those new voters who lent their support to it for the first time on Thursday.

There is the nub.

Thanks to Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s adviser who ran Vote Leave, the Conservatives knew how to run an effective election campaign that cut through to these voters.

Delivering the policies that work for them is a very different matter. Neither Mr Johnson nor his ministers think like these voters and feel what they feel. A big majority in parliament is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Conservative votes in parliament will have to be cast for things that neither Tory MPs nor Tory members understand. A handful of working-class accents on the government benches, welcome though they are, do not a cultural revolution make.

Equally, the civil service is ill-equipped to deliver change to areas of the country that are so alien to it they might as well be on Mars.

Mr Johnson urgently needs to learn some deeper lessons from the Master. One of Tony Blair’s most important innovations was the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, run by Sir Michael Barber during Labour’s second term, 2001-05. It focused with rigour and self-effacing diplomacy on a small number of targets, in the health service, schools, the criminal justice system and transport.

A lot of its work went unnoticed by the media, and not all of it was successful, but it was critical in ensuring that citizens saw some return for the large increases in public spending during that period.

Mr Johnson’s “new government” needs a blue-collar, One Nation delivery unit. We trust that the prime minister, Mr Cummings and Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, have considered this question.

It is critical to Mr Johnson’s success that he delivers tangible benefits to people in “red wall” seats over the next four years. He can borrow the New Labour slogans, but can he emulate New Labour’s success in improving public services?