Boris Johnson painted Brexit as a source of ‘hope not fear’ in his speech yesterday. The Foreign Secretary said that Britain’s departure from the EU was not a ‘great V-sign from the cliffs of Dover’. ‘That’s how you do it!,’ says the Sun in its editorial in which it urges other members of the Cabinet to follow Boris’s lead. His barnstorming speech ‘laid out the exciting case for a truly global Britain’ and was the same ‘vision’ which persuaded 17.4million Brits to back Brexit in the first place. ‘Too often’ other Ministers ‘treat our exit like a problem to be managed rather than an opportunity to be seized’. Philip Hammond – who the paper calls ‘Treasury Tin-Ears – is a prime example and needs to take a leaf out of Boris’s book and ‘glitz up his spreadsheets’, the paper says. After all, ‘there is plenty of good news for him, and the rest of the Cabinet, to shout about’.
But the Guardian is not impressed with Boris’s speech. His vision was intended to carry a simple message: it’s all about me. His vision for Brexit was packed with ‘rhetorical flourish’, yet it was also ‘empty of detail’. The paper goes on to call his address a ‘shameless piece of oration’ and a ‘Valentine’s Day card to himself and his ambition to be the next Tory leader’. What is becoming increasingly clear, says the paper, is that Johnson’s Brexit vision ‘is a grotesque distortion of reality’. Despite what the Foreign Secretary claims, for example, ‘no one in Brussels harbours ambitions to build a European federal superstate’. For all his bluster, Boris also failed to ‘explain how the option of an almost complete break with the EU can be accomplished’ without undermining the government’s pledge that there will be no hard border with Northern Ireland and the Irish republic. ‘Without an answer to that conundrum, talks about future trade relations will not get very far,’ the paper says. What’s more, while his speech was painted as an outreach project to win over Remain voters, this was nothing of the sort, concludes the Guardian. Instead, ‘it was the kind of take it or leave it offer that Mr Johnson once imagined would frighten Brussels’. It is true that Boris ‘is sometimes funny and he is clever’, says the Guardian. But not even these attributes can make him a ‘even a half-way competent foreign secretary’. Boris has been ‘rumbled’, the paper says.
Not so, says the Daily Telegraph, which calls Boris a ‘welcome ambassador for Brexit’. Those who criticised the Foreign Secretary for the lack of detail in his speech are missing the point of his address, says the Telegraph. Boris was not intending to walk ’the audience through section three, paragraph two of a deal with the EU that hasn’t been written yet. It was about setting Brexit to new mood music: upbeat and reassuring.’ Of course, for those who have made up their minds that Brexit will be a disaster, no amount of ‘charm or humour’ can win them over. Instead, such ‘militant Remainers’ are only interested in ‘overturning the referendum result’. So, Boris’s ‘real audience was reasonable voters who are disturbed by the growing extremism in political debate’. These same voters wanted ’general reassurance that leaving the EU doesn’t mean turning inwards’, says the Telegraph. Yesterday, Boris gave them just what they wanted. The Foreign Secretary’s ‘talents as an ambassador for Brexit have been under-used. Theresa May should send him out to sing for his supper more often,’ concludes the Telegraph.
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