May turns on Boris over Brexit
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 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 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.’
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 address was attended by 22 Tory MPs – more than enough to scupper the Chequers deal in Parliament. They included ex-cabinet ministers David Davis, Iain Duncan Smith and Priti Patel.
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’.
WHATEVER anyone may think of Boris Johnson, he’s a tremendous crowd-pleaser. Indeed, his speech on the Conservative Conference fringe yesterday was a masterpiece of the orator’s art.
It pressed all the right buttons to delight his packed audience – and many others besides – while striking a note of ebullient confidence in Britain, heard all too rarely from his former colleagues in the Cabinet.
But there’s no getting away from it. The content of his speech was both deeply disloyal to the Prime Minister – and profoundly unrealistic.
His purpose was not so much to outline a workable alternative vision for Brexit as to launch a campaign to topple Theresa May and take her place.
The very timing of his speech, on the eve of the Prime Minister’s keynote address, was calculated to upstage her and cause her maximum embarrassment.
As for his claim to be speaking ‘with all humility’ – before going on to blow his own trumpet over his achievements as London mayor – nobody will be fooled.
Nor will anyone be deceived by his claim that ministers will be backing Mrs May ‘in the best way possible’ if they ‘chuck Chequers’ and support her original plans for Brexit, as set out in her Lancaster House speech in January 2017.
The fact is that the Prime Minister has been fighting doggedly ever since to thrash out a deal that will be acceptable to MPs, the Brussels bureaucracy and all 27 of our soon-to-be-ex partners.
Imperfect though it is, the Chequers compromise is the only proposal that offers any hope of satisfying all three, while delivering the public’s pull-out decision.
As for Mr Johnson, his claim that Chequers is an affront to democracy and a surrender to a foreign power might carry more weight if he hadn’t endorsed it himself, before deciding days later that his leadership ambitions would be better served by resigning as foreign secretary.
Mr Johnson has widened the party’s divisions – Scottish Secretary David Mundell said, with masterful understatement, that he is ‘not an asset’ in Scotland. He ensures Brexit will dominate the conference headlines and drown out policy decisions that will affect us all.
This paper’s great fear is that the only beneficiary can be Jeremy Corbyn.
Boris may be riding on a wave of adulation from his fans today. But if his personal ambitions help Labour’s half-baked Marxists to power, neither his party nor the country should forgive him.