No crowd, no problem – but history might hold a lesson
For more than a decade, Boris Johnson has been the unrivalled star of the Tory party conference. Year after year his speeches have had members in raptures. They sigh. They mew. They wriggle with pleasure. Outside the auditorium, meanwhile, the headline act has routinely found himself engulfed by gabbling admirers, and pursued down corridors by adoring swarms of little old ladies. For a reporter, it was always extraordinary to witness: few politicians attract such delirious adulation. He was like the Tory equivalent of Donny Osmond.
This year’s conference, however, has been a fan-free zone. The whole event was held “virtually”, with members watching on their laptops at home.
Yesterday, therefore, the Prime Minister found himself having to give his keynote speech to an empty room, with only the camera for company.
I wondered how the lack of atmosphere would affect him. After all, a showman feeds off a crowd: he needs its adoration, its cheers, its affirming guffaws. It’s hard enough to tell jokes to a live audience but it’s surely even harder to tell jokes in front of no audience at all.
As it turned out, however, Mr Johnson managed pretty well. His speech was still funny, albeit in a slightly different way from usual: the tone cosy and comforting, rather than showy and swaggering. He began by thanking Tory election activists for “pounding the streets in the middle of winter, prodding leaflets through the letterbox and into the jaws of dogs”.
He looked forward to a time, post-covid, when “hairdressers will no longer look as though they’re handling radioactive isotopes” and when “we no longer have to greet each other by touching elbows as in some great national version of the Birdie Dance”.
He also made light of the idea that “my own bout of Covid has somehow robbed me of my mojo … I could refute critics of my athletic abilities in any way they want: arm-wrestle, legwrestle, Cumberland wrestle, sprintoff …”. (This was the part of the speech when he looked most animated. He seemed to deliver these lines with extra vigour, as if hoping to demonstrate how wrong these critics were.)
He said little of substance about the pandemic, and his Government’s response to it. Instead his speech was a valiant bid to look beyond Covid, to envision a Britain of 10 years hence: a Britain, according to him, of wind power and zero-carbon jet travel and youthful homeowners.
His inspiration, as so often, was Winston Churchill. “In the depths of the Second World War, in 1942, when just about everything had gone wrong,” he said, “the government sketched out a vision of the post-war new Jerusalem it wanted to build. And that’s what we’re doing now.”
A heartening aim. Then again, Mr Johnson will hope that history doesn’t entirely repeat itself. In 1945, the British public decided it didn’t want the post-war new Jerusalem to be built by the Tories – and gave a landslide election victory to Labour instead.