‘I speak with humility’
...but, cheered on by 1,500 Tory activists, he still accuses PM of cheating voters – and makes a thinly-veiled pitch for her job
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.’
‘Locked in tractor beam of Brussels’