Sam Leith Sam Leith

Boris Johnson’s speech was a triumph

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If you were listening to the Prime Minister’s keynote address to party conference, you would not for a second have suspected that the country’s petrol stations were empty, its service industries hopelessly short of staff, its pigs being slaughtered on farms for want of abattoir workers and its Christmas turkeys on the line. You would have left the hall with the sense that here was a nation in boisterous good health and irrepressible high spirits.

That, among other things, was why Boris Johnson’s speech was a triumph. No doubt the factcheckers will rip it to tatters. No doubt there will be grumbles among hostile political scientists about its vagueness on policy. No doubt various sobersides will deplore its frivolity, its refusal to address the gravity of our present difficulties.

But it did what a political speech of this sort needs to, and it succeeded for just the reasons that the naysayers will have been enraged. It positively radiated confidence, relaxed good humour and cheerfulness. Which is to say that it decided on its own terms of engagement both in subject matter and in tone; here was a Tory speech that refused to paint the hall blue.

Sir Keir Starmer would love to have seen a Prime Minister at bay: defensive, resentful or cross. Instead we got one who felt able to tease the previous Labour leader as a ‘corduroyed communist cosmonaut’ and the present one as ‘like a seriously rattled bus conductor pushed this way and that by a Corbynista mob of Sellotape-spectacled sans-culottes, or the skipper of a cruise liner that has been captured by Somali pirates desperately trying to negotiate a change of course and then changing his mind’. 

That amused indulgence is much deadlier than open hostility. It’s a version of what Sir Keir aimed for when he called Mr Johnson a ‘trivial man’; but Johnson’s laughter is more rhetorically effective than Starmer’s contempt.

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