Boris is the first minister to capture the Tories’ problem so vividly

Boris Johnson came to Tory conference to do two things. First, he had to win back the Tory grassroots from the floccinaucinihilipilificating ways of Jacob Rees-Mogg. Moggmentum rises and falls with the willingness of the faithful to indulge blithe theatrical Toryism at the expense of sense and good judgement. Second, he had to address his own reputation for flippancy and remind the party that he can do serious when he wants to. 

Whether he succeeded in achieving the former, we will see but he made a good effort on the latter point. It fell to Boris to remind Conservatives of their own fatal conceit — that of assuming the arguments against socialism had been won. He told the auditorium: 

‘We come up against a difficulty we must accept that when we talk about the 1970s we imagine people instantly understand about power cuts, the three day week, union bosses back in Downing Street, state-made-British rail sandwiches. We