JOHNSON WAS INCOHERENT AND GLIB... BUT MAY HAS TO HIT BACK

BOrIS Johnson arrived yesterday at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham as badly damaged goods. He’s made a career out of being loved by the party faithful. But he has made very significant enemies elsewhere in the higher ranks of the Conservative Party.

The day before, Chancellor Philip Hammond mocked Mr Johnson for his failure to master detail. The former foreign secretary won’t have liked that.

And in recent weeks, Boris has made some very serious mistakes. His comparison of women in burkas to letterboxes was not simply tasteless; many saw it as sectarian and divisive.

Indeed, Mr Johnson has been getting a reputation for making arresting statements that attract newspaper headlines, but damage his reputation as a serious politician.

And was it wise to publish, on the eve of this conference, a 4,500-word essay attacking the policies of the Prime Minister on Europe?

Defenders of Mr Johnson are fully entitled to argue that on Brexit, the greatest issue of our time, he has a duty to set out what he truly believes. However, the Tory Party has always valued loyalty above all else. Those who breach this rule are seldom forgiven. Think of Michael Heseltine and Maggie Thatcher. Enoch Powell and Edward Heath.

Nevertheless, Mr Johnson’s speech yesterday came as a reminder that when he is on top form, there is no orator like him. He has a fearless intelligence and the capacity to inject humour into debate.

Yesterday at the Tory conference all of this was in evidence. There was a buzz and excitement as Mr Johnson appeared on the scene. Cameras everywhere. Chaos.

The fact is there have been two conferences at Birmingham this week. There’s been the formal conference in the main hall. It’s been dull, dutiful, often poorly attended and a series of apathetic speeches, marred by the absence of the passion and oratory that Mr Johnson brought to the conference yesterday.

The audience loved him, and in the front row the Brexiteers were out in force: Iain Duncan Smith, Owen Patterson, Steve Baker, Priti Patel, David Davis. This was a show of strength, and one which needs to be taken very seriously by No10.

To start with, Mr Johnson pulverised Jeremy Corbyn with a series of devastating criticisms that came as a reminder why the Tory Party so badly needs him.

This was the aperitif of Mr Johnson’s deadly serious attack on the Prime Minister’s plans for Brexit. Showing formidable eloquence, the former foreign secretary demolished Mrs May’s Chequers deal as half in and half out. He said it was an unacceptable intrusion on British sovereignty and won tumultuous applause when he called for Britain to ‘chuck Chequers’.

Many Tory activists have been yearning for language like this all week. Mr Johnson’s central argument is that the Tory Party faces a choice between his own preferred socalled Super Canada solution, and a Corbyn government. Canada or Corbyn. I am an admirer of Mr Johnson. But I have to accept that his speech, whilst strong on rhetoric, was short on detail. It scarcely addressed the two fundamental issues that explain why Mrs May has chosen to embrace her Chequers solution.

The first of these is political, namely that Super Canada risks leaving a hard border between Northern and southern Ireland, something that is completely unacceptable to the United Kingdom.

THE second problem neglected by Mr Johnson is an economic one – namely, the insistence by many of Britain’s manufacturing concerns that they need frictionless trade in order to export to Europe.

The former foreign secretary glibly hinted that frictionless trade could be achieved through more investment at customs points. Big business insists, by contrast, that it is impossible without some form of membership of the European customs union.

Mr Johnson made a great deal of the trading opportunities available to Britain once we leave the EU. However, he was incoherent and unconvincing on this point, bizarrely citing the presence of British consultants at a sporting event in Peru.

I am not an economist, but I have a feeling that those consultants would have been in Peru even if Brexit was never going to take place and in any case, Britain’s trade with Peru is negligible compared with our exports to the European Union.

All that said, this was an important speech for Mr Johnson and one in which he regained considerable ground following the ‘Boris backlash’ he suffered because of his illadvised comments on the burka and his recent comparison of Mrs May’s Chequers plan to wrapping a suicide vest around Britain.

It is a speech that throws down a challenge to the Prime Minister when she stands up to address the Tory conference in Birmingham this morning.

Let’s face it. Mrs May, unlike Mr Johnson, is no orator. She prefers to work behind the scenes, guided by a group of advisors about whom little is known. She manoeuvres in private. Those secretive techniques won’t work today.

The Prime Minister needs to explain why the alluring future set out by her great rival Boris Johnson is not quite as easy and simple as he made it appear.

Mrs May needs to do something she’s never attempted before. She needs to explain convincingly why she believes that Britain’s economic interest is served by keeping close to Europe.

This means being brave – stranding up in front of Tory activists to explain that it is worth surrendering a significant slice of political sovereignty as a price for upholding our national and economic interests.

It would do no harm if she could show a fraction of the enthusiasm that Boris Johnson displayed yesterday afternoon. All the more so because she has to deliver a message that many Conservative Party members frankly won’t like. That means showing leadership – something that, so far, does not appear to have come easily to her.