Doncaster Sheffield Airport closure shows how levelling up has amounted to nothing more than a slogan - Andrew Vine

The closure of the airport, which begins winding down flights at the end of this month with the probable loss of 800 jobs, is yet another symbol of how levelling up the economy has amounted to nothing more than a slogan.

There are other symbols of this dismal failure to be seen every day across Yorkshire – overcrowded trains crawling across the Pennines and traffic jams bringing the M62 to a halt amongst them.

But losing South Yorkshire’s airport is a particularly serious blow that exposes the hollowness of ministers’ claims to be doing all they can to boost the economy of the north, especially because the Prime Minister pledged to save it, initially during her campaign for the Conservative leadership and again when she moved into Downing Street.

These are just empty words. Doncaster’s mayor, Ros Jones, was entirely correct when she accused the Government of washing its hands of the issue last week.

Its suggestion that any deal to keep the airport open was a matter for local authorities is an abdication of what should be a clear Government responsibility to safeguard critical regional infrastructure.

And Ms Truss’s failure to make good on her promise to the airport makes it all the harder to believe another she made whilst on the campaign trail – to revive stalled plans for Northern Powerhouse Rail across the Pennines.

It is already clear that her Government is likely to freeze or cut public spending in order to balance the books and against that backdrop, strategic projects face the axe.

A conflict is emerging between Ms Truss’s rhetoric and the reality, and it is especially apparent here in the north.

On the one hand, she told her party conference that her priorities are “Growth, growth and growth”.

On the other, the lack of any intervention to save Doncaster Sheffield Airport hampers regional economic growth.

The Northern Powerhouse drive, and levelling up, were always about growth, supporting the regional economy to enable it to realise its full potential. Rowing back on investing in the north is the complete antithesis of what the Government is claiming as its primary purpose.

That not only raises questions of trust in the Prime Minister – not least in the red wall constituencies she needs to hang on to whenever the next election comes – but casts doubt over her entire approach to boosting the economy.

The trickle-down economics she appears to favour are already coming in for serious criticism from her own MPs, who doubt they will work.

Even if they do, wealth is going to have to trickle down an awfully long way – and with astonishing rapidity – to help 800 South Yorkshire airport workers who have lost their jobs going into Christmas and a winter of rising fuel bills.

That is vanishingly unlikely to happen. Nor will the Government’s approach do anything to help the many people across Yorkshire who are at the very bottom of the economic heap.

Deprived areas are going to have to wait a long time for trickle-down economics to reach them, and if there cuts to benefits or public services in the interim, their plight is going to become worse.

The failure of levelling up is not entirely the fault of Ms Truss. She has inherited a completely stalled project from Boris Johnson, who effectively did nothing to make it happen despite constantly promising to do so.

But the financial and political difficulties likely to engulf her as Parliament gets back to business today do not bode well for her delivering on levelling up, even if she embraces the concept, which is far from certain.

Rebellious MPs, jittery financial markets and a lack of detail on what the Government’s economic plan actually is could result in an autumn and winter of crisis management instead of the long-term planning and investment that the north has long desperately needed.

The pity of this is that so much could be achieved if Ms Truss determined to pump money into the north and persuaded her party of the benefits it would bring to the entire country.

If she wants rapid economic growth, the untapped potential of a region that is home to 15m people and industries straining at the leash to innovate and expand if they only had the right support could deliver it with more certainty than anywhere else in Britain.