Janet Daley:

Boris Johnson’s recent intervention shows it is high time the electorate began to see results

My impression of Boris Johnson hasn’t changed much over the 20 or so years that I have known him. He has always seemed to me to be a serious person pretending to be unserious – which is the precise opposite of his one-time nemesis George Osborne. Well, by God, he’s done something serious now.

The question is: what has he done? He has certainly blown up the official bond of acquiescent support that the Cabinet was offering, often with gritted teeth and in visibly bad faith, to Theresa May’s present uninspiring stance. He has come forward, perhaps through sheer exasperation, with a positive account of what Brexit offers to the country, thereby implicitly discrediting the feeble attempts to do this by his present nemesis, David Davis. But most important he has led his troops – and they are numerous – over the top against the tireless assault from Philip Hammond’s infantry, which is attempting to demolish the understanding that this government has with the electorate.

He has kept faith with his commitment to the Leave campaign – even to the extent of reviving (with some equivocation) the £350million pledge to NHS spending, arguably a discredited claim. Is this a leadership bid? Of course it is – ultimately. It was timed to undercut (or undermine?) the coming extravaganza of a speech we are promised from Mrs May next week in Florence – which Boris had, it has been claimed, already seen (this is disputed: I am told senior Downing Street sources say that is impossible since no drafted speech yet exists).

So has he just been annoyed beyond endurance by the defeatist tone and readiness to make unwarranted concessions that emanate from the Treasury? Was that what provoked this pre-emptive intervention? Did he see the integrity and resolve of the whole project slipping away, and so decide that he must act unilaterally? Maybe. If so, the leadership bid comes later rather than sooner.

But what is meant to happen now? Perhaps this attack is designed to break open the relentless Remain campaign, which has run riot and whose antics have so infuriated everybody – largely thanks to the ever-helpful broadcast media. Boris’s intervention may be tantamount to saying: we can’t just sit here hoping that when this all comes right in the end, the electorate will forget all about the months of bloody-minded negativity. We especially can’t stay mute while Labour, in quite the most stunningly cynical ploy imaginable, mops up the Remain (now called “soft Brexit”) vote. He may simply have decided, as Mrs May said in another context, that enough was enough: time to flush this thing out into the open and make an aggressive pitch for what was, and still is, the agreed position of the country.

Then again, maybe he decided that Mrs May was a lost cause. Such momentous times call for a big personality with a potentially heroic capacity for national leadership. Her closest friends would not attribute Mrs May with much credibility in that role. Indeed, it is time to say what most commentators have only hinted: the Prime Minister is catastrophically incapable of projecting herself on any sort of scale that is commensurate with her position.

It is not just in campaigning mode that she fails so disastrously. Every journalist I know has an almost identically disheartening story about trying to sustain a conversation with her. We exchange anecdotes about her startling inability to relate to people even in off-the-record encounters. Sometimes her refusal to engage seems positively rude. But even if we charitably assume that this is just acute shyness, it must raise doubts about whether she is personally fit for the post she holds. No, this isn’t just about “getting the job done”. It’s about inspiration and reassurance and forming a bond of confidence with people in anxious times.

If we are talking about leadership style, it is scarcely necessary to point out that Boris could not be more different, being possessed of the invaluable gift for a successful politician – that he genuinely likes people and enjoys talking to them. Of course, he has a good many enemies, some of whom are breathtakingly vicious, but that doesn’t matter so long as they are irredeemable Remainers: this fight is to the death now.

Yet there are important distinctions between his political programme as outlined in this newspaper yesterday and that of the present prime minister which go beyond Brexit. He makes an unambiguous commitment to a low-tax, entrepreneurial economy and – perhaps with his London mayoral experience of the City as an influence – distances himself from the antibusiness rhetoric that Mrs May has adopted. The future he sees for Britain outside of the UK is one of truly inventive economic liberation in which free markets are encouraged to create wealth which can then be spent where British voters want to see it spent. He is presenting himself as frankly impatient with the ennui that seems to have overtaken the government’s stand in negotiations, but he is also offering something more: an alternative set of convictions with which to confront the Corbyn myth of authenticity.

So what happens next? This intervention means the Conservative party conference will reverberate with rumour and disinformation. Boris will descend on Manchester to glorious approbation, like Lenin arriving at the Finland Station. Mrs May will be hidden away by her minders except for ceremonial appearances. There will be briefing and counter-briefing. The Remainers will find, for the first time in months, that they have a real public fight on their hands. Even the BBC may notice that there is another side to the argument.

If all this is not to give rise to an endless stream of “Tory split” stories, then everybody – especially Boris – is going to have to stay very, very serious. This is the real thing: a once in a lifetime moment of truth. Either the Tories deliver what the country thought it had been promised or faith in democratic politics is destroyed for a generation. No more games. Time to grow up.

‘The Remainers will find that they have a real public fight on their hands’