You know things are bad when Boris Johnson and company are rehashing policies from ‘The Thick of It’

Brexit and the Covid-19 emergency consumed all the government’s attention and it is unable to put much content into slogans like ‘levelling up’, writes Sean O’Grady

Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker in ‘The Thick of It’ (BBC/Alamy)

Life mirroring art can sometimes be an amusing as well as illuminating spectacle, and so it is with the government’s latest initiative on the railways.

The rather grandiosely-titled Williams-Shapps plan is the first government policy is to be self-named after a minister as well as the person who conceived it, Keith Williams. It has many ideas, but few as trivial as the announcement about announcements, namely that the secretary of state for transport has made it his personal mission to reduce the use of the Tannoy on trains.

Shapps has even released a video, starring himself naturally, to launch the initiative. While not intrinsically daft, it does slightly suggest that at a time when there are queues of lorries miles long jamming the roads into Dover the government’s priorities are not completely aligned with the people’s.

As has been noticed, a rather similar policy about quiet train carriages was suggested, satirically, in an early episode of The Thick of It, to assist a hapless minister looking for a policy – any policy – that he could keep in his back pocket and please his prime minister. The part wasn't played by Shapps, but easily could have been.

It is also reminiscent of the policy drought of the Major years – a symptom then as now of a party that had been in power a long time and was running out of ideas and energy. The epitome of the fatuous search for ideas to excite the voter was probably the “cones hotline”, another gem from the minds of the Department of Transport, and derided as soon as the phone line to complain about unmanned roadworks went live. Like the citizens charter, it was an attempt to leave grand policy making to one side and “connect” with the quotidian concerns of the electorate. Apart from the National Lottery, almost all are forgotten.

The truth was that the Conservatives were exhausted and had done most of what they were elected to do. Almost all the state-owned industries has been privatised, taxes cut (or at least looked that way), the economy was growing steadily, the Maastricht Treaty had at last been ratified, and even inflation had been beaten.

Something similar does seem to be happening now. Brexit and the Covid-19 emergency consumed all the government’s attention and swamped every other concern the public might have. Now that those crises have subsided, though, we see a government unable to put much content into the slogans about “building back better” and “levelling up”. Covid has also ensured that the Johnson government hasn’t even got the funds to bait the voters with their own money, let alone indulge Johnsonian fantasies such as a new royal yacht or a bridge from Scotland to Ireland.

“Operation Red Meat”, which turned out to be mere crumbs, is also an indication that presentation is becoming more important than substance. As in the 1990s, the Conservatives are contenting themselves with arguments about Europe and plotting agent their leader.

You know things are bad when the best they can do is to borrow a policy from a comedy series first broadcast in 2005. At least they’ll be left in peace to think creative thoughts when they get the train to and from their constituencies.