In his book “The Passage to Europe”, Luuk van Middelaar called the equivalent EU strategy to demonstrate its relevance to voters the “Roman” strategy politico.eu/article/boris-…
See also “Life of Brian”: “What have the Romans done for us?” 
The strategy does not always work. The Jews rose against the Romans and almost threw them out. Wales and Cornwall voted to leave the EU despite the 🇪🇺-flagged projects.
A clue to why the strategy failed in those cases and why the strategy may well fail here can be found in this passage. Note “managed from London” and “specific purposes”.
The current government just can’t let go: it has to decide everything, at the centre. Everything else - locating central government officials in different parts of the UK; putting all its policies through a “Union” filter - is performance trying to hide that reality.
Combine that reality with the refusal to listen to the devolved governments over any aspect of Brexit and the power grab of the UK Internal Market Act (whence, among other things, comes the power to splash the cash here) and you have an essentially paternalistic approach.
“You can have money to spend on things I think you want, and I will take all the decisions that count.”
But the fate of paternalism is to fail: in the end, children grow up, and want to be respected as adults. If the family is to stay together, decisions have to be taken together.
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