Boris’s speech was comedy, not policy

Last week, Keir Starmer derided Boris Johnson as a ‘trivial man’ in his Labour conference speech. Today in his own address to his party in Manchester, the Prime Minister decided to lean into that description.

He didn’t bother to give a serious speech groaning under the weight of meaty policies. There was just one announcement in the whole 45-minute offering: a £3,000 ‘levelling up premium’ to send maths and science teachers to schools in deprived areas. This will have come as a surprise to many of Johnson’s own Cabinet colleagues, who had expected that a policy-light conference would end with a speech full of announcements defining levelling up and showing the Tories what Boris Johnson stands for after a bewildering two years of pandemic politics. We didn’t get anything close to those things.

That’s not to say that those ministers will be even privately disappointed, because Johnson decided to use the slot instead as a victory rally.