Portrait of the week | 4 October 2018

Home

Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary, played a well-nourished Banquo’s Ghost at the Conservative party conference, where Theresa May, the Prime Minister, declared that Britain after Brexit would be ‘full of promise’. She had insisted that the Chequers proposals for Brexit were the only ones possible. Mr Johnson called them ‘deranged’. Mrs May felt obliged to tell Andrew Marr on television: ‘I do believe in Brexit.’ Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, mocked Mr Johnson’s way of speaking: ‘Boris sits there,’ he told the Mail on Sunday, ‘and at the end of it he says, “Yeah but, er, there must be a way, I mean, if you just, if you, erm, come on, we can do it, Phil, we can do it.” ’ Mr Johnson mocked Mrs May, who once confessed to having run through a field of wheat, in front-page pictures showing him running through a field of grass. To a large crowd on the conference fringe he advocated house-building and said ‘the authors of the Chequers proposal risk prosecution under the 14th-century statute of praemunire’. Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, said: ‘The EU was set up to protect freedom. It was the Soviet Union that stopped people leaving.’ The party conference app was found to reveal delegates’ personal details to anyone if their email was typed in.

To take people’s minds off Brexit, Mrs May announced that couples of different sexes would be able to form civil partnership and that, for the ninth year, fuel duty would be frozen. She promised an immigration policy favouring high-skilled workers, with no preferential treatment for EU citizens. Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, said he would safeguard the future of Britain’s two amphibious landing ships, HMS Bulwark and HMS Albion. Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary, announced easier ways of gaining compensation for late trains.