It was vintage Johnson, the would-be “world king” who loved to put his stamp on the latest global mega project.
Starmer, by contrast, is dogged by criticism that he is gloomy and robotic. He has spent his early weeks in Number 10 telling British voters how bad everything is. The PM’s own aides want him to cheer up.
But when he glimpsed the same vision as Johnson, of wind turbines spinning far out at sea, the Labour leader suddenly sounded as booster-ish as his old Tory nemesis.
This new technology — floating offshore wind — “is going to be a game-changer,” Starmer proclaimed in March, on a trip to see green industry on the north Wales coast. “Some country in the world is going to be the leader, and I want that to be the U.K.,” he enthused.
Starmer calls it “a frontier technology.” Aides to Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said the government wants to be its “world leader.” Both are betting on a post-2030 export boom, if the U.K. can develop the industry ahead of rivals in the next five years, at a time when ministers desperately need help to hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Labour’s new publicly-owned power company, GB Energy, backed with £8 billion to invest in green schemes in the next five years, has earmarked floating wind as one of the “emerging technologies which could revolutionize the entire sector.” Earlier this month, the Crown Estate, which owns the seabed off England, Wales and Northern Ireland, invited energy companies to buy up rights to build what it says could, by the mid-2030s, be one the world’s biggest floating offshore wind zones, off the south-west coast of Britain.
