Not so much a speech, more a pointless ramble. An extended trailer for speeches he might give at some – as yet unspecified – future dates, along with some minor announcements of things that were almost certainly never going to happen. Politics at its most meta.
Boris Johnson is running on fumes. Monty Python’s Black Knight trying to convince himself and those around him that he’s only suffered mild flesh wounds when everyone can see he’s fatally damaged goods. So Thursday saw the Convict up at Blackpool and the Fylde College – the closest he gets to levelling up these days is the odd day out to the north-west – where he attempted to convince himself he had some kind of future. On today’s evidence, those 211 MPs who stood by him in Monday’s no-confidence vote will be wondering why they bothered.
It was dismal stuff. Grotesque even. The desperation to try to talk about anything but Partygate only laid bare the poverty of the prime minister’s ambition and achievements. It’s indicative that the only concrete proposals he’s got up and running – on refugees to Rwanda and changes to the Northern Ireland protocol – involve breaking the law.
Johnson began by saying that things weren’t quite as bad as the 1950s when rationing was in place and life expectancy lower. He tapped the lectern persistently at this, as if annoyed that his audience wasn’t more grateful.
Next he turned to Ukraine and rising energy costs. These were out of his control, so no one should blame him for not doing very much. But he would be doing something more at some point. Just not now. Because now was not the right time. He knew that people were already struggling with the cost of living but they would just have to continue as best they could until such a time he had worked out what to do. But if it was any consolation it was a global problem, so people could take comfort that they were dying in company.
The Convict looked up to check if anyone else was still listening. Or following. Because he didn’t appear to be, as there were several moments where he either lost his place or began to ad-lib. One minute he was talking about investing in the NHS and the next about how there was no money for anything. His was a tax-cutting government, he lied, even though it had imposed the highest tax burden since the 1940s. But all would be well because he would be cutting the civil service still further. With everyone flat broke, there would be no need to staff the Passport Office as no one would be going abroad.
It was almost as if Johnson was on auto-pilot. Just babbling his way through a selection of problems that had been clogging up his in-tray for the past few months. People shouldn’t expect higher wages because that just fuelled inflation, so people should just eat a bit less until things were back to normal.
Which they soon would be because of Brexit. There were countless benefits to leaving the EU. So many, he couldn’t remember what they were. Now he started openly trolling the farmers, wondering why they weren’t doing more to produce British food. Er … because all the EU workers who were prepared to do low-paid labour have gone home.
At this point, at least 20 minutes into a speech that had revealed nothing except that the government had totally run out of ideas, the Convict unleashed his three big plans to get the country back on its feet. First, he would reduce the tariffs on bananas and olives. Then he announced that he was going to cut the number of staff working in train ticket offices. And lastly he was going to conduct a review of how the mortgage industry worked, with the intention of introducing a 98% mortgage for people on housing benefits. Because nothing quite captured the aspiration of ordinary working people than the possibility of going into negative equity. All that was missing was the reintroduction of the cones hotline.
It was a measure of how dissociated Johnson has become – he’s looking increasingly physically derelict, as if his body has given up on him – that he genuinely appeared to believe he was offering the country a way out from its economic crisis. So he ploughed on with reinventing a housing policy that David Cameron had introduced in 2015 and had been dead on arrival back then.
Back-of-a-fag-packet stuff. Someone in the No 10 policy unit must have spent all of 15 seconds thinking up that one. “Chaps, the boss is making an Operation Save Big Dog speech tomorrow and we urgently need some ideas to fill out the rest of the drivel. Anything will do. They don’t have to be any good. Or even workable. Because they’re not going to happen anyway.”
The Convict’s grasp of his own reality is tenuous at the best of time, but his grasp on other people’s is nonexistent. He seriously believes that people on benefits will be able to save £16,000 – any more than that and they lose state support – and that they will be able to buy a house for about £105,000. More than that, Johnson was under the impression that the sales would result in a huge rush to build more affordable social housing. Despite decades of evidence to the contrary.
We are going to build a high-wage, high-growth economy, he concluded. Johnson frequently contradicts himself, but rarely in the same speech. Still, this was a collector’s item in futility. Something not lost on the media who had accompanied him to Blackpool.
“Did you really make everyone come here just for this?” was the underlying theme of every question. And Boris had no real answers. His response to why people should trust him was to lie about building more homes than Labour as London mayor. And he just went into denial when the Guardian’s Jessica Elgot asked why he thought the OECD ranked the UK’s economic growth the second-lowest – Russia at the bottom – in the G20. Can’t wait for that exciting announcement when we creep up to 18th.
Stick with Boris. The UK. Going somewhere nowhere fast.
