DAGGERS DRAWN
Boris accuses May of ‘cheating’ voters on Brexit. She slaps HIM down in public rebuke. Just as the Tories need unity to crush Corbyn, the PM and her party’s star turn are at . . .
THERESA May turned on Boris Johnson last night after he staged a public audition for her job.
The former foreign secretary used a speech to cheering activists at the Tory conference to savage Mrs May’s record on Brexit, tax and housing. He even accused her of cheating the electorate. But the Prime Minister and her allies hit back, branding the performance an act of ‘grotesque self-indulgence’.
Mrs May used a round of media interviews to accuse Mr Johnson of putting his own career ambitions ahead of the national interest.
Asked if she agreed with Chancellor Philip Hammond that Mr Johnson would never be prime minister, she replied: ‘This is not about the jobs of
politicians. This is about the jobs of people out there in our country.’
She said Mr Johnson had initially backed her Chequers proposals on Brexit, only for him yesterday to describe them as ‘an outrage’.
And she acknowledged she was angry about his rejection of her Northern Ireland border plans, saying this could lead to the break-up of the UK.
She said: ‘There are one or two things that Boris said that I am cross about. He wanted to tear up our guarantee to the people of Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom.
‘We are all, he and I, members of the Conservative and Unionist Party. That’s because we believe in the union.’
Other senior ministers vented their anger at Mr Johnson, whose ‘Chuck Chequers’ campaign has overshadowed the conference.
Justice Secretary David Gauke said: ‘ The country faces many problems but Boris Johnson is not the answer to any of them.’
One cabinet minister said: ‘His so-called plan is not serious – it’s just grotesque self-indulgence.’
Another added: ‘ He was a terrible foreign secretary. He’s shown he doesn’t have the ability to be prime minister. He might do a decent job as a junior arts minister in a bad year.’
However it was reported last night that Mrs May’s Cabinet is demanding that she name a date for her departure.
The ecstatic welcome given to Mr Johnson will fuel fears in Tory high command that he is preparing to mount a direct challenge against her leadership unless she backs down over her Brexit strategy.
Around 1,500 Tory activists queued for hours to hear his speech at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham yesterday.
His 40-minute address was also attended by 22 Tory MPs – more than enough to scupper the Chequers deal in Parliament. They included former cabinet ministers David Davis, Iain Duncan Smith, Priti Patel and Owen Paterson and senior Tories Sir Bernard Jenkin and Zac Goldsmith.
Mr Johnson devoted much of his speech to an attack on Mrs May’s Chequers plan, which prompted his resignation and that of Mr Davis in July. He warned that the deal was ‘politically humiliating’ and suggested the ‘ultimate beneficiary’ would be the far Right and Ukip.
‘This is not pragmatic, it is not a compromise, it is dangerous and unstable politically and economically,’ he said. ‘This is not democracy, it is not what we voted for.
‘This is an outrage. This is not taking back control. This is forfeiting control.’
Mr Duncan Smith said the response to the speech was a clear message to Mrs May from the party that she was ‘in the wrong place’ on Brexit.
He said: ‘This hall could have been filled half again by people wanting to hear an upbeat message about who we are and where we are going.’
Mr Johnson set out his personal manifesto, calling for tax cuts and picking apart Mrs May’s record in government.
He described her curbs on stop and search as ‘politically correct nonsense’ and described the decline in home ownership over recent years as a ‘disgrace’.
‘Locked in tractor beam of Brussels’
BORIS Johnson threw down the gauntlet to Theresa May yesterday as he warned her Brexit plan risked fuelling the rise of the far-Right and handing power to Jeremy Corbyn.
Addressing a packed 1,500-seat auditorium on the fringe of the Conservative Party conference, Mr Johnson repeatedly plunged the knife into Chequers, saying it cheated voters and was dangerous and politically humiliating.
Repeating his demand that the Prime Minister ‘chuck Chequers’, he said failing to do so would see the party punished at the polls by an electorate which felt ‘betrayed’.
But the former Foreign Secretary – who told his audience he addressed them ‘with all humility’ as he tried to give back the party its self-belief – also launched a thinly-veiled pitch for the party leadership, accusing Mrs May of abandoning Tory values.
In a point-by-point rebuttal of core policies, he called for Mrs May to abandon planned tax rises and reverse her opposition to stop and search, which he suggested had cost lives.
His 40-minute speech, which was greeted with a standing ovation and applause throughout, electrified activists who queued for more than an hour beforehand, and threatened to dominate events in Birmingham.
In attendance were around 20 hardline Eurosceptic MPs, including former leader Iain Duncan Smith and ex-Brexit Secretary David Davis.
Afterwards they hailed his intervention, but supporters of the Prime Minister said there was ‘nothing new’ in what Mr Johnson said.
Mr Johnson told the Conservative Home event Chequers was not ‘pragmatic’ but ‘dangerous and unstable politically and economically’ and would leave the UK ‘ locked in the tractor beam of Brussels’.
Urging Mrs May not to ‘ bottle Brexit’, he said her proposals amounted to submitting to ‘foreign rule’. He added: ‘This is not democracy, it is not what we voted for. This is an outrage.’
Banging the lectern, he challenged the suggestion made by several Cabinet ministers that the deal could be changed once we leave, calling it ‘total fantasy’. He added: ‘ Do not believe that we can somehow get it wrong now and fix it later – get out properly next year, or the year after.
‘If we get it wrong, if we bottle Brexit now, believe me the people of this country will find it hard to forgive. If we remain half in, half out we will pro- tract this toxic tedious business that is frankly so off-putting to sensible middle-of-the-road people who want us to get on with their priorities.
‘If we cheat the electorate – and Chequers is a cheat – we will escalate the sense of mistrust.
‘We will give credence to those who cry betrayal and I am afraid we will make it more likely that the ultimate beneficiary of the Chequers deal will be the far-Right in the form of Ukip and therefore the far-Left in the form of Jeremy Corbyn.’
Calling for an alternative prospectus for the party, Mr Johnson said: ‘If I have a function here today it is to try, with all humility, to put some lead in the collective pencil, to stop what seems to me to be a ridiculous seeping away of our self-belief, and to invite you to feel realistic and justified confidence in what we can do.’
He urged Tories not to lose faith in ‘competition and choice and markets’, and to stick to Conservative ideas instead of ‘capering insincerely on Labour turf’.
Mr Johnson said the reduction in stop and search, a flagship Mrs May policy, was ‘politically correct nonsense’ which had ‘ endangered the lives of young people in our capital’.
Just days after the Prime Minister said tenants should be proud to live in a council house, he launched a defence of home ownership – also calling for tax cuts to ‘ give people back control of their money’.
Pro-Remain MP Stephen Hammond said there was nothing new in Mr Johnson’s speech and the public had ‘heard it all before’. He added: ‘We were all told this was going to be a seminal or seismic moment but the reality was we heard the same thing.’