So fell Boris, a crowd pleaser seen off by the forces of greyness
SHOWMAN to the last, Boris Johnson delayed his declaration to the last moments. A large crowd had gathered at the St Ermin’s Hotel in Westminster, expecting him to say that he was still going to seek the Tory crown, even after being deserted at dawn by Michael Gove.
Boris entered the large, white room – cake-decoration cornices and air conditioning – to enthusiastic cheers at 11.40am. He had opened his speech with some stuff about how this was ‘not a time to quail – nor should we see it as a moment for wobbling or self-doubt’.
After that Churchillian oratory he drifted off into less gripping passages which reprised his achievements as London mayor. He said Britain needed to unite after the EU referendum and become a one-nation Tory country in which the lowpaid had a better deal while FTSE-100 bosses contributed rather more.
‘That is the agenda for the next prime minister of the country,’ said Boris in his gruff, staccato way. Then, after a tiny pause and a wrinkle of V-sloping eyes: ‘Well, I must tell you, my friends, you who have waited faithfully for the punchline of this speech, that having consulted colleagues and in view of the circumstances in Parliament, I have concluded that person cannot be me.’
My wristwatch said 11.52am. Rollingnews reporters later claimed that at that moment there were ‘audible gasps in the room’. I didn’t hear any. I was struck by the way the assembled MPs, activists and reporters in fact barely reacted. There was a lacuna. An inaudible gulp. A silence in which second hands ticked.
Was everyone dumbfounded? Or had it been inevitable once ‘The Gover’ walked out on him with such pointed remarks about Boris’s lack of leadership potential.
BORIS gathered his script and bowled off. Exit stage left. He had arrived at the hotel via a tradesman’s entrance and departed the same way, pursued not by a Shakespearean bear but by TV news crews who rushed through the lobby of the St Ermin’s to the bafflement of international business types having coffee meetings. These British, they crazy.
And so fell Boris the Brave, Boris the Bold, Boris the Brexiteer. Shambolic, heroic, flawed, magnificent. As with Hailsham, Heseltine, Clarke, a crowd-pleaser, a campaigner who electrified the public, had been seen off by the forces of greyness.
Politics is supposedly a popularity contest but he had proved too successful at that. The way he seduced the voters and made them laugh had secured him the
envy of parliamentary colleagues. How they resent panache.
Word of the Gove-Boris spat broke just after 9am as we all gathered for Theresa May’s campaign declaration at the Royal United Services Institute on Whitehall. This was the building used by David Cameron for his campaign launch in 2005 but whereas he had gone for fishtank music and fruit smoothies in the Rotunda, Mrs May opted for a staider affair. Her venue was the marble-pillared library, all tasteful taupes and walnut polish.
Behind her, from floor to ceiling, were shelves of books about warfare and statecraft. Among them I noticed ‘Between Peace & War’ and ‘Sea Killers in Disguise’. Of the MPs who turned out to support the Home Secretary, many were spongy consensualists – pro-EU puddings such as Dominic Grieve, Damian Green, Sarah Wollaston.
The current Immigration Minister, James Brokenshire, was there. Brokenshire! Should he not have been down at Dover Docks, checking lorries for Turkish stowaways?
Two of Parliament’s most assiduous sycophants were present: Havant’s Alan Mak and ‘Sir’ Michael Ellis from Northampton North. Sir Alan Duncan (Rutland & Melton) was in the front row, jacket off, just to show he meant business.
When these people heard that Gove was going solo, how they laughed. The happiness! The hatred of Boris! Coffee cups clinked and you could almost sense the System clutching its damp hanky and sensing that the nightmarish populist uprising might be about to ebb.
We had been promised a mystery guest. Was it Falklands War hero Simon Weston? He was certainly there. But the big shot was Chris Grayling, one of the Leave campaign’s top men. He proceeded to do the warm-up speech. The country needed ‘a strong prime minister’, he said, and he was backing Mrs May, whom he had first met 25 years ago in that hotbed of revolutionary zeal, the Wimbledon Conservative Association.
Enter the candidate. The room leapt to a standing ovation – all credit to Mr Mak, he was first to jump to his feet.
She was dressed in a clan Campbell tartan trouser suit. Red nail varnish, hunched shoulders, a pale-pink Jermyn Street shirt and Thatcherish make-up. She stood on a high podium, thrust slightly into the auditorium.
The early buzz words were delivered with a deepening of the voice: ‘Clear … Patriotic … Strong … Reassure.’ She asserted that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and there must be ‘no attempts’ to stay in the EU, to rejoin it or to seek a second referendum.
TO one side of the room stood a grandfather clock. In due course she would disclose that her own grandfather had been a regimental sergeant-major and her father had been a parson – public service flowed in her veins.
At this point in the morning, Boris was still thought to be a rival. She took several swipes at him, mocking the way he once bought some second-hand German water cannon (such was the level of his negotiating ability, she scoffed). And she deplored attempts by Leave campaigners to ‘wriggle out’ of immigration-control pledges.
But could she, who had campaigned for the EU in the referendum, really lead the largely Eurosceptic Tories? Could she control immigration? She kept showing us how serious she was – if politics ever goes wrong for her, she has a fine future playing Lady Bracknell on the Maidenhead amateur stage – but she caved in on her earlier proposal to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights.
‘I am Theresa May and I think I’m the best person to be Prime Minister,’ she declared, with a flash of the eyes to defy any doubters.
Berkshire’s Merkel, the mistress of mirthlessness, so invisible in the great referendum, has emerged from her lair and is finally engaged in combat. Challenge her, ye who dare.