Just you wait – Boris Johnson will soon show his true centrist colours

Enthusiasm for Brexit does not always go hand in hand with support for the untrammelled free market

The general election, we are told, was followed by a sharp rise in business confidence and a small, but welcome, economic upturn. Some put this down to the size of Boris Johnson’s majority that promised to finally end three years of wrangling over Brexit. According to those who claim to be in the know, however, there was a bigger, simpler, reason: the new certainty that Labour’s leftist leader Jeremy Corbyn was not going to be prime minister.

So what on earth is business opinion likely to think now that the Johnson government appears to be taking more than one page out of the Corbyn-McDonnell playbook? Not only has the transport secretary announced that Northern Rail is to be brought into public ownership – under the aegis of a Department for Transport offshoot delightfully called the operator of last resort – but it is also loosening the Treasury purse-strings to the point that the chancellor says he will give the go-ahead to the controversial rail line, HS2, despite the probable cost already running far, far ahead of initial estimates. Whatever happened to the supposedly right-wing, free-market Brexiteer Boris Johnson?

The first point to make is that even among Conservatives, enthusiasm for Brexit did not always go hand in hand with support for the untrammelled free market. There is nothing that automatically connects the one cast of mind with the other. The desire to “take back control” – not to be part of a political, as opposed to economic, European project – may indicate a predisposition towards freedom in other areas. Then again, it might not.

The second point is that one of the politicians who has most conspicuously managed to combine enthusiasm for Brexit with less-than-unconditional enthusiasm for the free market is none other than – drum roll, please – Boris Johnson. Those who concluded from his last-minute decision to plump for Brexit before the 2016 referendum that he was the same sort of Conservative as such die-hard Brexiteers as Jacob Rees-Mogg, Steve Baker or Sir John Redwood – evangelists for the free market and Eurosceptics – were simply wrong.

Boris Johnson’s allying himself with Brexit ultras such as Rees-Mogg and his brothers-in-arms in the European Research Group was entirely tactical; as was his ruthless eviction, on his way to securing passage for his Brexit deal through parliament, of 21 Conservative Remainers, including Ken Clarke and Sir Nicholas Soames. In stripping them of the Conservative whip, Johnson had only one purpose: to discourage other potential rebels and so to guarantee, so far as possible, his much-needed majority. It said nothing about his hostility or lack thereof towards any of their other views. In fact, on the economy and social mores, Johnson probably shares more philosophical ground with these generally centrist Conservatives than he does with, say, Rees-Mogg.

If this has not always been apparent over the past three years, there is a simple explanation as to why: Johnson had his eye on the top job. How badly he wanted it can be judged from the tactical calculations he and his team made during the party leadership contest, and the discipline he managed to apply to himself. He knew he had to appeal not just to the parliamentary party, but to grassroots Conservatives in the country at large. Euroscepticism and the free market (or at least small businesses) had to be the orders of the day. The primacy of Brexit also dictated Johnson’s whole approach before the election.

Having “got Brexit done”, Johnson will be free to reclaim the sort of Conservatism he finds more congenial. For a clue to the sort of prime minister he will be – indeed, is already becoming – it is worth looking back to the last time he was (within certain limits) the boss. That is, when he was mayor of London.

There is no way that Boris Johnson could have been elected – and certainly not re-elected – as mayor of one of the UK’s most Labour-learning and cosmopolitan cities had he campaigned as a right-wing, fundamentalist free marketeer. Yes, there was an indefinable character advantage; somehow Boris and Londoners seemed to get on. But he was no right-winger, no xenophobe. He may, as has been reported, have been lazy and delegated some of his responsibilities. But he presided over a diverse administration; and delegation, too, is a skill.

There is something reminiscent of Johnson’s time as mayor in some of his early priorities. London did get more police on the beat. He was keen on cycling, rebadging Ken Livingstone’s cycle scheme rather unfairly as his own. And he ordered a fleet of new buses – which were supposed to have not only back entrances, but conductors. Indeed, he was so keen on buses that there were times when they clogged Oxford Street end to end. The wastefulness of his “garden bridge” has been rightly condemned, but he was open to original projects (and the hyper-persuasive Joanna Lumley must share the condemnation, too). He presided over a hugely successful Olympics. That his decision to buy water cannon was scuppered by the then home secretary Theresa May does not make it wrong.

Which takes us back to the renationalisation of Northern Rail. It is not, in fact, the first rail company to be taken back into public ownership. That was Virgin East Coast 18 months ago, when May was prime minister. But Johnson’s government has been seen as quite a lot further to the right than hers, and – thanks to its huge majority in parliament – has infinitely more freedom of manoeuvre. Nor is it, by any stretch of the imagination, a free-market move. In fact, it comes straight out of the Corbynite Labour manifesto.

The message from this is threefold. The first is that this prime minister is not a right-wing ideologue. He wants things to work, and Northern Rail was conspicuously not working. If that means public ownership, temporarily or permanently, so be it. At the very least, it probably means a shake-up for the current franchising system.

The second is that he is prepared to spend money on infrastructure and on what might be called quality-of-life issues, such as efficiency and safety. This was clear from his manifesto, but it is starting to be seen. And the third is that, as a populist who wants to please, he is not above – how shall we say – “borrowing” good ideas from his adversaries.

Yes, the Labour manifesto was too long and too good to be true, as even ingrained Labour supporters admitted. But amid the starry-eyed thinking, there were elements – such as renationalisation and a comprehensive rethink on social care – that enjoyed wide public support, and might warrant at very least a second look. It would not be surprising either if some of the Liberal Democrats’ greenery found its way through the Downing Street door.

More should be clear after the Budget on 11 March. But when all is said and done, the nationalisation of Northern Rail may turn out to be less an exception than a harbinger of things to come. With Brexit out of the headlines, the EU flags folded away, and what he describes as a “stonking majority” in parliament, Boris Johnson can take a long, hard look at what is ailing the UK. I for one would venture that his perspective will be a lot less ideological and partisan than his recent history as a Brexiteer would suggest.