Does Liz Truss really believe in levelling up? She doesn’t talk about it that much, and it wasn’t really a major feature of the ‘fiscal event’ recently (though given the way that’s gone, this might not be a bad thing). This evening Levelling Up Minister Dehenna Davison insisted that it really was still a thing. She told a Tory ‘fringe’* event that she didn’t understand why people were questioning its longevity, saying:

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen this emerging narrative that the government is dropping levelling up, isn’t having it anywhere near as much of a priority, and I honestly have no idea where that has come from, because levelling up is very much at the heart of what this government is about.

She added that it was also ‘core to me, core to who I am, core to my ethos and everything that I believe in’.

The problem is that the definition of levelling up that Davison then offered sits rather uncomfortably with the spending cuts that are coming down the line. Asked what it actually means, she initially said ‘it’s a bit broad and conceptual’, before adding:

It’s difficult to pin down to one thing because I think the point is, it has to be a real holistic package. It has to be about local investment. It has to be about public services. It has to be about education. It has to be about health. It has to be about transport, making sure that you can access jobs that are available to you, it’s a whole package and that’s why it has to be a cross departmental full government effort and it absolutely is.

Are all of those areas really going to escape unscathed from the spending squeeze that Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are going to have to announce in order to fund their tax cuts and reassure the market? Davison, who is in her first ministerial job after being a rebel backbencher in the Boris Johnson government, won’t be able to answer that yet. But she might find herself wishing she were still a rebel by the end of this year.

* This ‘fringe’ was organised by CCHQ and was in the ‘Thatcher Theatre’, which is one of a number of small areas around the conference hall where ministers and other Tory personalities such as Ben Houchen will be speaking. It’ll be the best place to get the party line perspective on the current turmoil. But it’s worth pointing out that the theatre was not particularly well-attended, despite Davison being an interesting politician. The mood at the conference is extremely anxious generally, and a lot of the energy is coming from a man who once ran Davison’s department, Michael Gove. He’s engaged in non-stop fringe appearances where he is, in the words of one of his colleagues who is still in government ‘doing an excellent job on behalf of 70 per cent of us’. A number of payroll MPs have told me today that they would vote against the abolition of the 45p rate if it came to it, which would mean they’d lose their jobs in government, and potentially also the whip. Their mood is in complete contrast to Davison’s upbeat appearance this evening. It feels as though the Tory party has managed to split even further since its fractious leadership contest.