Boris Johnson

Full text: Boris Johnson’s Tory fringe speech

Good afternoon my friends and fellow ConHomers. It is great to be here in Birmingham where so many thoroughfares in the city are already named after our superb Conservative mayor. I know this conference is going to be a staggering success because just in the last couple of days about a dozen far left Momentum activists have kindly pledged their loyalty by ringing my private mobile phone. I put them straight on to Brandon.

As Paul Goodman might confirm, I am not naturally of a timid disposition. It is not my way to confide my innermost fears. But since this is only a fringe meeting, unlikely to be widely reported, I will reveal that I have one overriding anxiety about the current political scene, both domestic and international. It isn’t global warming or terrorism or Rouhani’s Iran or Putin’s Russia – real though all those challenges are. It’s not the negotiating tactics of Jean-Claude Juncker – before or after lunch. It’s not even the economic and political catastrophe that would befall us in the event of a Corbyn government – horrifying though I find that idea.

My friends, there is only one thing I really worry about in this critical autumn of 2018, and that is that after 200 years this oldest and most successful of all political parties should somehow lose confidence in its basic belief in freedom. And that after 1000 years of independence this country might really lose confidence in its democratic institutions.

And that we should be so demoralised and so exhausted as to submit those institutions – forever – to foreign rule. If I have a function here today – it is to try, with all humility, to put some lead in the collective pencil, to stop what seems to me to be a ridiculous seeping away of our self-belief, and to invite you to feel realistic and justified confidence in what we can do.

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