Conservatives accused of ‘levelling up’ stunt to save Boris Johnson’s job
The government has been accused of trying to manipulate announcements on extra funding for poorer parts of the UK in a desperate attempt to save Boris Johnson’s premiership.
An extraordinary row blew up after Michael Gove’s Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities released a press statement – before publication of a levelling up white paper this week – saying 20 towns and cities would benefit from a “new £1.5bn brownfield fund”. The release, which named only Sheffield and Wolverhampton as recipients, said the 20 areas “will benefit from developments combining housing, leisure and business in sustainable, walkable beautiful new neighbourhoods”.
Gove added that the “radical new regeneration programme” would prove transformational and deliver on the government’s flagship policy to create a more equal country. “This huge investment in infrastructure and regeneration will spread opportunity more evenly and help to reverse the geographical inequalities which still exist in the UK.”
But after the Observercontacted senior sources at the Treasury to ask if its ministers had signed off on the promised £1.5bn, Gove’s department backtracked and confessed that the “new” fund was not new money at all but would be made up of levelling-up funds that had been announced by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, in his spending review last autumn.
The confusion was seized upon by Labour and other opposition parties as evidence of the lengths Johnson and his ministers are prepared to go in order to persuade Conservative MPs in so-called “red wall” seats to stick by the prime minister before the imminent publication of a report into the “partygate” scandal this week by the senior civil servant Sue Gray. If at least 54 Tory MPs write to Sir
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