Brexit legacy is just the start of incoming PM’s problems as cost of living crisis spirals

Boris Johnson chose whatever policies seemed attractive without a sense of how they would be implemented. Photograph: Frank Augstein/AP

Boris Johnson has left the Conservative party in policy la-la land. “Cakeism” has run riot – vast, incoherent ambitions detached from political, economic and business realities. Thus the aim is to be “Global Britain” but an ultra-hard Brexit ensures shrinking exports, falling inward investment, dwindling financial muscle and inevitably global retreat.

Britain is to be a high-wage, high-innovation economy but there is only one hi-tech company in the FTSE 100, and no strategy to add any more. We are to be a science superpower but there is little chance when we are excluded from the biggest transnational scientific organisation on earth – the EU Horizon programme. There are targets to level up Britain’s glaring geographical inequalities but with scant resources – with what little there is directed at Tory constituencies.