Timid Tories need a warrior like Boris to fight the Great Brexit Battle

This is a swathe of dummy text that can be used to indicate how many words fit a particular space. The text contains [25 words] a couple of WHAT a splash! Boris Johnson’s dramatic intervention in the Brexit debate has left Theresa May looking dripping wet.

For what he says in his 4,000word speech – a brilliant piece of rhetoric, presented to the world in the form of a newspaper article – is this: ‘I am the great, dynamic, creative, fearless leader who can make Brexit a stonking success and all of us proud to be British.’

It is a rallying cry to the troops. Johnson steps forward like Henry V before Agincourt. He addresses us as his friends, exhorts us not to be fearful and promises that the United Kingdom will not be turned into ‘a vassal state’, as it would be by Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘invertebrate’ proposal to remain in the single market and the customs union.

If there were a soundtrack to this speech, it would be by Elgar.

As it is, Johnson gives us a snatch of Rupert Brooke, as well as echoes of Shakespeare.

He wants to put a smile on our faces as we stride towards a glorious future.

And when did the Prime Minister last put a smile on anyone’s face? She had her chance in the General Election campaign, and she blew it.

‘Theresa May’s Conservatives’, as they were known during those tedious seven weeks, did not win the glorious and decisive majority she had promised them.

She remains Prime Minister on sufferance. Conservative Eurosceptics tolerate her because she has promised to implement Brexit.

But does she have the personal qualities which will be needed to bring such an ambitious project to a successful conclusion? That is the question implied by the Foreign Secretary’s intervention.

Are we content with a timid, anxious approach, in which we make frantic efforts to maximise British influence and minimise disruption, while handing over large sums of money and fudging the hard question of where power actually lies?

Mr Johnson contends, in his survey of our relations with Brussels over the past 30 years, that we have often been timid, and have never got what we really wanted, which was to stop the development of a

Do we really want to show such an anxiouss attitude to EU?

European superstate. He reminds us that, as a young reporter, he observed the ‘ambush’ carried out on Margaret Thatcher at the Rome summit in October 1990. Speaking now as a veteran, he recalls what it was like in those battles of the early 1990s: ‘I remember the mantra of EU officials – Britain objects, Britain protests, but in the end she always signs up.’

And here he indicates another problem for Mrs May.

If at the end of the Brexit negotiations she is still Prime Minister, she will have to sign up to some sort of a deal, in which, one can guess, she will not have obtained absolutely everything this country was hoping for.

But will she be able to sell that deal either to her party or to the wider public?

For as we saw during the General Election, her abilities as a saleswoman are somewhat limited.

She will undoubtedly need the help of Mr Johnson to sell the deal. The sober, solemn, Establishment figures who dismiss him as a mountebank, and yearn for him to be thrown overboard, never seem to take this point into account.

They regard salesmanship as a rather grubby and flashy affair, which has no place in the great questions of diplomacy, which they alone understand, and which in the end should be settled behind closed doors, by people like themselves.

But Brexit is not going to be settled like that. It will play out in the full glare of publicity, and to cope with that, Britain may soon feel in need of a Prime Minister who is unafraid of publicity.