Boris Johnson’s ‘new deal’ speech was his latest pitch for the New Labour centre ground

With all these confusions and distractions, it was hard to make out the central purpose of the speech – but it was aimed at certain voters, writes John Rentoul

The PM spoke about the amount of work needed for the economy to recover from the coronavirus crisis (Reuters TV)

When I say Boris Johnson‘s latest address was a New Labour speech, I don’t mean it was like one of Tony Blair’s in style. Blair would always try to make an argument in his big speeches. The best of them were exercises in persuasion, as he outlined the choices facing the nation and explained why he thought it needed to follow the course he was pursuing.

In construction, Johnson’s speech was more like one of Gordon Brown’s speeches. Brown’s drafting technique has been described by several scarred participants as a bolted-together assembly of paragraphs, simultaneously on several laptops and in a scissors-and-Sellotape paper version.

Johnson’s speech seemed as if something like one of Brown’s drafting sessions had been abandoned halfway through, and the prime minister had decided to deliver the bits he had in the best order that he could manage while he was at the lectern at Dudley College of Technology.