Boris Johnson reshaped the electoral map – but doing the same for the economy will be a much bigger challenge

Rebalancing the system is not a top-down, instructions from Whitehall operation. It is about paying attention to local opportunities and then clearing any roadblocks that might get in the way

The political map has been utterly transformed. The economic map will be much harder to shift. But it has to be done, not just to show the new Conservative voters in the north of England that this government can deliver for them, but more profoundly because our uneven economic performance is holding back the country as a whole.

The political left failed, for the north/south imbalance increased under the Labour governments from 1997 to 2010. The Tory-led coalition from 2010 to 2015 and the two subsequent Tory governments also failed, because though there may have been some slight narrowing of income differentials, it was minimal. So what happens now?

Well, the first thing to acknowledge is that political imperatives may sometimes be different from economic ones. We will see that in the coming year in that there will be a difficult choice in the EU trade negotiations. Politics means we have to get right back to concerns like fishing rights, but economics means we have to protect the City’s foreign exchange exports.