When the Prime Minister said he was going to 'level up' the playing field, we assumed he meant he'd be lifting us to equal height.
But instead his big idea seems to be designating vast swathes of the country as one giant floodplain then forgetting it exists, which is more of a levelling down.
Half the country has not only been washed out by two successive and near-unprecedented storms, he can't even look it in the eye. "Went to Fishlake once, they were bloody rude, never going north of Henley again," he probably muttered.
Boris Johnson has mentioned "levelling up" in every major speech since he entered Downing Street. It's become a catchphrase, like getting Brexit done, or 50,000 more nurses. Say it often enough and it becomes true, even through Brexit is a decade away from being done and those nurses haven't even been born yet.
But levelling up requires pumping money into places that need pumping out. It means underwriting insurance schemes, small business grants, repairs to schools, roads and streetlights, and billions of pounds worth of flood defences.
And all for people he does not even respect enough to tell the truth to.
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Because all flood defences are temporary. Grants, repairs, insurance can only be sustained for so long. Unless you can fix the fundamental problem, you will always be overwhelmed eventually.
And the cause of increasingly-violent storms, higher rainfall, worse heatwaves, is a changing climate. You may wish to argue whether it's man's fault or not, but it's a fact our long-term weather is not what it was, and that man's activities can affect it.
Burning the moors for grouse shooting above Hebden Bridge is as foolish as blowing a hole in a dam. It's a destruction of a natural flood defence, simply so visiting morons can shoot birds they won't eat.
Building on flood plains is as dense as trying to wash rain away with a hosepipe. Concreting those bits of the countryside best suited to deal with flooding merely moves the waters further out, flooding bigger areas and, because they've been built on, increasing the insurance bill. Crowing about the new houses you've built is no good if you have to swim to reach them.
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In the North, in South Wales, in East Anglia, in the Somerset Levels, in the South East, on the coasts and in the Westcountry there are communities not just pumping out but asking themselves how long they can stay there.
And one day, they won't. They'll find their homes are worthless, the bills impossible, floods inevitable. Their businesses will fail, the schools will empty and lose funding, and the streetlights will never work again. The people who call those places home will up sticks to move somewhere up a hill.
The towns and villages they once called home will become economic sinkholes. The places they move to will grow at a speed the existing residents don't like. We'll be levelled down. And we'll all bemoan our fortune to live in such a wet country, when we're pretty fortunate compared to Bangladesh where they don't have the ability to move out of the way of a cyclone.
And through it all, Boris Johnson will still have the carbon footprint of a small country.
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He'll still jet to international summits, rather than make a video call. He'll still expel hot air, calling for carbon neutral blah blah at some point, without ever laying out exactly how it will be achieved or how much taxes will have to rise, or living standards change, in order to pay for it. His Environment Secretary George Eustice will still claim to be "fully committed" to tackling climate change, while claiming expenses for 29 flights to Cornwall since 2012.
And they'll never ask themselves how, exactly, all the votes they won in 2019 got washed away as well.
Boris will blame the electorate for the erosion of his base. He'll put it down to ingratitude and ignorance that poorer people, in poorer places, found reason to vote for someone greener.
A man who has yet to demonstrate, in his entire life, a scintilla of self-doubt, will never spend a long, dark night of the soul wondering where he went wrong. But this is where he's going wrong – right here, and now.
Of course he'll be bollocked if he sets foot in York, Aberdaron, or Ludlow. The point of going is not to be feted, but to be seen taking responsibility. The fact he finds that so unwelcome is the main reason he's not the best pick for the most responsible job in the country.
His government has held COBRA emergency meetings on migrants and oil tankers, anything in fact in order to look tough and busy, but can't be bothered to organise one for millions of people who could be ruined by the weather.
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And while there are many simple, cheap, easy things he could do to avert some of these problems in future, the Atlantic barrage is formed elsewhere. It would take the whole world, acting together, to calm our climate. The UN climate talks this country is hosting in November are, however, mired in infighting, ballooning budgets, and petty politics.
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It's all very well promising to level up, and it's eminently doable with investment and determination. But, like Brexit and nursing recruitment, it's not as simple as all that. Grimsby or Margate or Yeovil all need help of different sorts, for different reasons, and if you start chucking Biblical weather on top it's even more of a challenge.
And therein lies our problem, as a nation. We have someone in charge, with a massive majority and very likely for two terms, who wants things to be simple. He wants to say simple things, achieve simple wins, and be World King.
He will be undone by the fact the world is more complicated than that. His job is to fix crises, and all he wants is to take a bow. The only level he can reach will be the one he is reduced to, when simplicity comes up against reality, and loses.
The wind'll change, and blow him away. It can't come soon enough.
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