They gave him the election – now Boris Johnson is trying to keep ‘red wall’ voters on his side

The prime minister’s bid for a ‘Rooseveltian approach’ is part of bringing back his agenda to ‘level up’ Britain after the coronavirus, writes Kate Devlin

The PM visits the site of a school yesterday ahead of its opening (EPA)

In the heart of Dudley, one of the English towns where Labour’s “red wall” crumbled last year, is a precinct called the Churchill Shopping Centre. Inside there was for many years a stained glass mosaic of the former prime minister, Boris Johnson’s great hero.

But when Mr Johnson visits Dudley to give a major speech on Tuesday, the signs are that it will be to praise not Churchill but another wartime leader, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

At the weekend, Michael Gove, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, invoked FDR during a speech to set out the government’s future plans.

In it, he indicated that Mr Johnson would take his inspiration from Roosevelt’s New Deal, which helped pull America out of the Great Depression with a series of measures including large-scale public projects.

Mr Johnson later also cited FDR as an inspiration for Britain’s route out of economic despair after the coronavirus, saying: “I think this is the moment for a Rooseveltian approach to the UK.” He added: “This is the time to invest in infrastructure, this is the time to make those long-term decisions for the good of the country.”

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In a bid to draw a delicate, if not complete, line under the Conservative government led by David Cameron and George Osborne, he added that this was not the moment to go back, in his words, to “what people called ‘austerity’”.

The choice of Dudley as the venue highlights the importance to the government of the former “red wall” seats, now branded as “blue wall” by many of the eager new Tory MPs who represent them at Westminster.

And so the prime minister will commit to doubling down, as it were, on his pledge to “level up” parts of the country that lag behind the southeast. The importance of these seats cannot be underestimated.

During calls for Mr Johnson to sack Dominic Cummings for an apparent breach of lockdown rules earlier this year, one former Tory cabinet minister privately expressed his belief that “blue wall” Tories could even hold the fate of Mr Johnson’s most senior advisers in their hands.

But the government has struggled to hit home its message in these seats, in part because the coronavirus crisis emerged just months after the election.

Now Dudley, the most marginal Tory-Labour seat in December’s general election, will be used as the place to try to kickstart that conversation again.

But whatever Mr Johnson’s ambitions to be seen as a transformational leader, it might take more than this announcement to see a shopping centre – or anything else, for that matter – bearing his own name a couple of decades from now.