A dose of muchneeded optimism
They come for the rhetoric, the jokes, the bombast; they come for the ideas, the grasping curiosity that reaches across disciplines; sometimes they even come in the hope of watching a little mischief being made. Yesterday, Boris Johnson’s customary full house at Tory conference came expecting all these things in greater doses than ever. What they received instead was a simple, undiluted, and much-needed draught of optimism.
Good ideas and astute observations often have the quality of being obvious once they have been formulated. But the degree to which Mr Johnson’s infectious doctrine of optimism made sense the moment he had preached the good word was nevertheless startling. This was not down to his fun lines – though they helped. It was not because he, like no other, is able to enliven his speeches with references to “murrain on our cattle” (summing up how some enduring doom-mongers view the Referendum result) or the “superannuated space cadet” who leads the Opposition. It was not even because he relentlessly, remorselessly and ruthlessly identified and skewered the Socialist pipe-dreams that pass for policy in the Labour Party, making it seem not impossible but inevitable for the Tories to take them on and demolish them. Rather, it was that his joyful and evidently sincere belief in conservatism’s essential power to make lives better is supported by the facts.
Don’t be downhearted, he bellowed, rightly. Look at what Britain is achieving: record-breaking employment and investment. Look at what people around the world are clamouring to engage in: free markets and innovation that makes them and their families richer, and their countries’ economies stronger. He even sought to dispel the miasma of melancholy that has settled on the Conservative Party since the General Election. Did Theresa May not lead the Tories to the highest share of the vote in any election in a quarter of a century, winning more votes than any party leader, he asked? The gloom began to lift. For a moment, the assembled faithful began to see the light.
Again and again, Mr Johnson offered such plaudits to Mrs May. In that, his speech represented a rapprochement with a Prime Minister he is widely accused of having attempted to destabilise, if not dethrone, in the past weeks. But as a consequence it also represented something of a challenge. “The outlook is not grim,” he seemed to be saying. “In fact, many factors are in our favour. So there is no excuse for not making the most of being in power, for not exploiting this historic opportunity to refashion and retool Britain for a new age of industry and industriousness.”
Certainly, when summing up those who view Brexit as “a plague of boils”, it was Jeremy Corbyn whom he identified as “the most pessimistic of them all”. And when criticising the political tendency “ineffectually to ban things”, rather than “doing something for a change”, it was his successor as Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who was in his sights. But there is also no doubt that, by outlining a future in which Britain achieves its full potential by “refusing to retreat from the global stage”, free “to stop being negative and to start being positive about what we believe in – including free trade” – he was throwing down a gauntlet to Mrs May, whose admirable work ethic can be mistaken for a purely managerial attitude towards our departure from the EU.
With a barnstorming speech today, she herself can dispel some assumptions. She can prove that hers is a party full of ideas, not bereft of them; that hers is a party with a clear and coherent vision that does not ape Labour’s, but exposes it for the nonsense it is.
Do so and she will dispel that other assumption: that her party is not united behind her.