This is the week a Government that began with such promise finally lost its soul. Its great policy relaunch is a tragic mush, proof that it no longer really believes in anything, not even its own self-preservation. Conservative supporters, keen to move on from Partygate, were desperate for a comprehensive package of conservative ideas to enrich the North, relaunch Brexit and pave the way for an electoral resurgence. It was not to be.

Michael Gove’s levelling-up blueprint is a grotesque disappointment, a list of buzzwords and targets masquerading as strategy, its pseudo-intellectual veneer and cod history intended to camouflage the fact that it essentially advocates the very same nostrums that ultimately destroyed Labour.

The Left, needless to say, is delighted at the strategy’s ideological underpinnings. Jonathan Portes, a Left-wing economist, welcomed the paper as “remarkably like [Gordon Brown’s] mid-2000s Public Service Agreement targets. Some are more or less directly recycled.” Gove’s paper even bears a striking resemblance to ​​a plan proposed by the Labour-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research in 2004. For those of us who argued against the wasteful, “ state knows best” nonsense of the Labour years, which needless to say failed or else we wouldn’t be in today’s mess, this is almost unbearably depressing.

A proper conservative approach to levelling-up would focus on schooling, and the heart-breaking results of the white working class. It would investigate family policy and the values crisis. It would create dozens of libertarian pro-business areas, run by development corporations, with almost no taxes and regulation. It would target cheaper energy. It would liberate an extra one per cent of Britain’s landmass for house building. It would tackle the failed monolith that is the NHS. It would not see spending on public transport as a panacea. It would reject targets, subsidies and bureaucracies. It would break with socialism.

Instead, Torsten Bell of the Left-wing Resolution Foundation, Britain’s most influential economics think-tank despite our nominally Tory administration, describes Johnsonian levelling up as a fusion between George Osborne and New Labour. “The agenda combines the devolution of the former Conservative Chancellor with the last Labour government’s bigger/activist central state reprioritising spend towards deprived areas”, as he puts it.

A central problem is that too many Tories now have a vested interest in pretending that the form of devolution practiced in this country has been a success. This is the very reverse of the truth.

Competition between local jurisdictions works, but only if set up correctly. Britain’s flawed model encourages bailouts from Westminster, grants power without fiscal responsibility and encourages municipal socialism. It doesn’t incentivise local leaders to improve competitiveness, or to think carefully enough about spending projects.

Eurosceptics were always opposed to Labour’s flawed devolution: The North East Says No campaign, which defeated John Prescott’s devolution drive in 2004, was a dry run for the Brexit referendum, and included figures who went on to work for Vote Leave.

The Tories also have not answered a fundamental contradiction: why do they want to make everywhere like London, given that our capital voted Corbyn and Remain? Left to its own devices, London would self-destruct, imposing punitive taxes and chasing away its value-creators. Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, is at it again, threatening to shut roads and tube services if he isn’t bailed out. We need more Canary Wharfs, created before devolution, and fewer City Halls.

In the US, the Republicans don’t want to turn the whole of America into New York or San Francisco – they look instead at Texas or Florida. We need to replicate the brilliant bits of London, its ability to create jobs and wealth, without the socialism and cultural Left-wingery. If the Tories really believed in local accountability, they would break London up into several competing entities, not create yet more dysfunctional, statist, subsidy-hungry, rotten boroughs all over the country.

If the establishment technocrats are getting everything they want, the Right has been left with almost nothing, including on Brexit. The scale of the betrayal is staggering. The Brexit white paper is one of the most shameful economic policy documents ever produced by a Conservative government. Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges Speech, Christopher Booker’s Mad Officials, Brian Hindley’s Better Off Out, the Open Europe deregulatory reports, Business for Britain’s Change or Go: all targeted over-regulation. Yet that powerful intellectual movement, built over decades, has virtually zero presence in the Remainers’ Brexit being delivered by Johnson.

There have, of course, been major changes on immigration and foreign policy, and the vaccination success would not, in practice, have happened had we been part of the EU. That alone means that it was worth it, though the agricultural reforms are flawed. The decision to allow Hong Kongers to settle would also have been politically impossible had EU free movement still existed.

But when it comes to the economy, the Government’s policy barely differs from Theresa May’s Brexit in name only. The authors of the 2016 Treasury attacks on Brexit have triumphed: they argued that there was very little in Britain’s tax, spend and regulatory structure that needed to be changed, and, staggeringly, Johnson’s government now agrees.

All of which brings us to energy policy, another case study in extreme failure. A sensible government would urgently accelerate its nuclear plans by creating a powerful agency modelled on the vaccines taskforce. As a temporary solution, such an administration would also push to extract more oil and gas, including by fracking.

Instead, a government that no longer believes in markets will now simply pretend that prices are much lower than they are. The Treasury will lend billions to energy companies to allow them to moderate price rises; customers will then pay higher bills in the future to ensure the Treasury (hopefully) recoups its money.

The furlough and bailouts that accompanied Covid – necessary evils given state-mandated lockdowns – have perverted our politics, undermining self-reliance and normalising handouts.

That wail you hear is the cry of Toryland: among the true believers, the long-marchers, the Eurosceptics and the free-marketeers, there is sorrow, anger and despair. We have been vanquished, but we will be back.