ANALYSIS: Boris Johnson can warm a room with Brexit hot air - and Theresa May should take note
3 min read
Boris Johnson certainly knows a thing or two about warming a room.
The Tory bigwig threw countless jokes and verbal twirls into his 30-minute address to the party faithful today. But after the laughter and applause had died down, it was his hot air on Brexit that had upped the temperature.
The must-see event of the 2018 Conservative conference in Birmingham - met by a 2,500-strong queue that Cabinet ministers could only dream of - went down in true Boris style. Reams of rhetorical flourish and misty-eyed vision for the country masked a lack of bare bones detail on how to handle Brexit.
“What the Chequers proposals show is that the United Kingdom, for all its power and might and network of influences around the world, for all its venerable parliamentary history, [will be] ultimately unable to take back control,” he gushed. “And instead of reasserting our ability to make our own laws, the UK will be effectively paraded in manacles down the Rue de la Loi like Caractacus.”
That line had journalists and Tory members alike reaching for Google to find out what on Earth he was taling about.
But despite his ire for the Chequers plan put forward by the PM, any hopes that the former Foreign Secretary may have an alternative approach of his own were once again cruelly dashed.
Instead, he insisted that he did agree with Theresa May - albeit the version who delivered the Lancaster House speech in January last year, setting out her plans to take back control of the UK's money, laws and borders.
To be fair, Johnson was more specific on his domestic agenda: putting forward a string of ideas to boost house building and cut tax, while saying bankers should have been locked up after the 2008 financial crash. It was a clear leadership pitch to add to the long line of Boris Johnson leadership pitches.
Those in the room lapped it up: hanging on his every word, laughing in all the right places and bursting into spontaneous applause. It was all a far cry from the drab world of the main conference hall, where minister after minister has lined up to deliver stale speeches to sparse crowds.
One Johnson ally told PoliticsHome: "He's the first one to get a proper ovation this week. People say he wouldn't make it onto the leadership ballot. But can you imagine the members if the MPs kept him off? There'd be a riot."
Tomorrow it will be the turn of Theresa May, who will likely deliver the antithesis of the Johnson speech: full of detail but lacking that inspiring vision she needs to reach out to the country and sell her Brexit plan. Explaining her immigration proposals on the radio this morning, she was in full Maybot mode struggling to speak human.
If only she and Johnson could team up, with the PM filling doing the boring detail while the blond bombshell makes the pitch to the nation. Instead, the two Tories fighting it out for the ear of the membership - and the country - will keep their strengths separate, and both will be left all the weaker. Boris might only offer hot air - but Theresa May would do well to breathe it in.
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