Let British lion roar!

He thrills the grassroots with Brexit battle cry

‘Making Eeyore look positively exuberant’

BORIS Johnson last night declared it was time to let the British ‘lion roar’ as he delivered a tub-thumping vision of the country after Brexit – whilst pledging loyalty to Theresa May.

The Foreign Secretary brought the Tory Party conference to life and lifted the spirits of activists with his speech heralding how Britain ‘can win the future’.

‘It is time to stop treating the referendum result as though it were a plague of boils or a murrain on our cattle or an inexplicable aberration by 17.4million people,’ he proclaimed.

‘It is time to be bold, and to seize the opportunities and there is no country better placed than Britain.’

After days of infighting overshadowed the start of the gathering, Mr Johnson gave his full backing to ‘every syllable’ of the Prime Minister’s Brexit vision, which she set out in Florence, and claimed the ‘whole country owes her a debt for her steadfastness’.

But his rousing speech, which was snubbed by nearly all his Cabinet colleagues including Mrs May, will nevertheless be seen by some as a pitch for the leadership.

Mr Johnson roamed far beyond his foreign policy brief as he defended capitalism and warned that Jeremy Corbyn would do ‘incalculable damage to the future of our children’.

The Foreign Secretary told a packed conference hall in Manchester that critics ‘sunk in gloom and dubitation’ about Britain’s prospects after it leaves the EU were wrong, and the country was ready ‘to do amazing things’. Singling out the Financial Times and The Economist, he added: ‘Every week I pick up British-edited international magazines, of the kind that you will find in the briefcases of jetsetting consultants. Glossy-covered, elegantly written, suspiciously unread.

‘Every day a distinguished pink newspaper manages to make Eeyore look positively exuberant and across the world the impression is being given that this country is not up to it, that we are going to bottle out of Brexit and end up in some dingy ante-room of the EU, pathetically waiting for the scraps but no longer in control of the menu.’

But he countered: ‘Once again this country has had the guts to try to do something new and different, to challenge received wisdom with a democratic revolution that we can turn into a cultural and technological and commercial renaissance.

‘There are people say we can’t do it. We say we can. We can win the future because we are the party that believes in this country and we believe in the potential of the British people.

‘We have been privileged collectively to be placed in charge of this amazing country at a critical moment in our history.

‘We are not the lion. We do not claim to be the lion. That role is played by the people of this country. But it is up to us now – in the traditional non-threatening, genial and self- deprecating way of the British – to let that lion roar.’

Mrs May has faced calls from MPs to fire Mr Johnson for disloyalty after he set out four ‘red lines’ on Brexit at the weekend on the eve of the conference, infuriating many MPs and ministers.

It came a fortnight after he stunned No10 by publishing an unauthorised essay setting out his vision for Britain’s Brexit strategy.

But yesterday, Mr Johnson lavished praise on Mrs May for beating Mr Corbyn in June’s election.

‘She won more votes than any party leader and took this party to its highest share of the vote in any election in the last 25 years, and the whole country owes her a debt for her steadfastness in taking Britain forward as she will to a great Brexit deal,’ he said.

There were also calls during a meeting of the European Parliament in Strasbourg for Mrs May to fire Mr Johnson.

German MEP Manfred Weber, who leads its biggest group and is an ally of Angela Merkel, said: ‘Please sack Johnson because we need a clear answer – who is responsible for the British position?’

Mr Johnson laid into Labour yesterday, warning that its ‘ludicrous and vacillating’ Brexit stance - ‘in the customs union one week, out the next, in the single market, out the next’ – would be ‘disastrous’.

He described Mr Corbyn as a ‘Nato-bashing, Trident-scrapping, would-be abolisher of the British Army whose first instinct in the event of almost any international outrage or disaster is to upend the analysis until he can find a way of blaming British foreign policy’.

He added: ‘ We want a country with a government that works for everyone. Corbyn wants a Britain where everyone works for the government.’ Comment – Page 18