Just when the Boris Johnson-as-Winston Churchill shtick was beginning to wear thin, the prime minister has come over all Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Robert Lea writes).
It does not matter that spending on construction programmes, called a “New Deal”, is GCSE-level economic policy. Nor that such state intervention is horrifying old-style Conservative free marketeers. Nor whether the “building, building, building” figure is £5 billion or £500 billion (£5 billion, by the by, is 5 per cent of an HS2 rail line).
It is the fact that Britain is set on a course of major infrastructure investment, with the country cleared to become a giant construction site.
Balfour Beatty has been a leading construction company for decades. And while it has had diversions over the past century
