PERHAPS it was the chilling effect of Theresa May, who had just delivered a crowd-pleasing and deadly serious oration on national security. Or maybe true-blue Conservatives are just getting tired of Boris Johnson’s constant wisecracking. At any rate, the mayor of London’s speech to the Tories’ annual conference, in Birmingham on September 30th, was anticipated a little less hotly than usual.
As the home secretary left the stage, to a standing ovation, seats began opening up in the packed auditorium. “We’re not staying for Boris, thank you,” muttered a grey-haired couple next to Bagehot as they vacated their seats. For whatever reason, the allure of the Tory funnyman and prospective candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip has become more resistible to Tories than it once was. Then Mr Johnson took the stage and, instead of delivering the more statesman-like speech many had asked of him, he doubled down on the schtick. Here are a few of his best gags.
Describing the Labour leader Ed Miliband’s slip-up last week, in forgetting to talk about the budget deficit in his own conference speech, Mr Johnson said: “It was a Freudian slip. The baggage-handlers of his mind went on strike and refused to load the word onto his tongue.”
To describe a crowd-pleasing proposal to sell low-cost houses in London to locals, not foreigners, he said: “We want Brits to buy these homes, not oligarchs from the planet Zog… Not that I’m Zoggist. Many of my ancestors are from Zog.”
Brandishing a brick, which he claimed to have been presented with at a recently-opened kiln in Newcastle, he described the vast construction boom that London’s growth is driving, with knock-on benefits across Britain. A billion more bricks will be required, he said, then offered this Churchillian reassurance to the one he had in hand: “Brick, you will not be alone!”
This must have been one of the funniest orations Mr Johnson has ever given. Whatever reservations the Tory audience had started out with, it seemed, did not last the course of it. The audience laughed. It hooted. It howled its acclaim as Mr Johnson delivered his final line—“See you at the barricades”—then stomped, bear-like, from the stage.
It was a reminder of what a useful campaigning tool Mr Johnson, now fully in harness for next year’s general election, is for his party. The Tory crowd loves him. So does the wider public, which is how he succeeded in winning two mayoral elections in a city that generally votes Labour. People are amused by him; they are also cheered up by the second strand of his schtick, his relentless positivity. “If we can get over that simultaneous message of hope and enterprise,” he said, “I have no doubt we can win in 2015 and win big.”
Mr Johnson’s speech was also a clear sign, ahead of an election that promises to ease him back to national politics and towards the leadership of his party, that he is not going to change. With Mr Johnson at the centre of public life, Britons are going to have more to laugh about, at least for a time.
Because amid the schtick, it is also clear why some Tories—presumably including Bagehot’s neighbours in Birmingham—dread Mr Johnson. He is undoubtedly a man with a serious political purpose; to restore hope and enterprise to a country short of both. Yet his relentless wise-cracking also suggests a man for whom not just politics but, in the end, life, with its compromises and disappointments, is simply ridiculous. That might not be the man to have presiding over a national crisis.
