Boris bites back! He says Chancellor’s apeing Corbyn – and taking Tories to the Left
BORIS Johnson will today hit back at Philip Hammond for planning to increase taxes and accuse him of abandoning ‘Conservative values’.
Descending upon this year’s Tory conference for the first time, the former foreign secretary will deliver a brutal swipe at the Chancellor and Theresa May for ‘apeing’ Jeremy Corbyn.
In yesterday’s Mail, Mr Hammond accused Mr Johnson of lacking a grasp of detail and suggested he was doomed to fail in his bid to be Tory leader. He also sent a clear signal that next month’s Budget will include tax rises to pay for a multi-billion pound planned rise in NHS spending.
Today, Mr Johnson will fire a return salvo, saying the party should ‘follow our Conservative instincts’ and focus on core Tory issues such as law and order and tax cuts to beat Labour at the next election.
In what allies openly described as an alternative leader’s speech, he will suggest the party has moved too far to the Left and should instead take ‘basic conservative ideas and fit them to the problems of today’. Couched as an attack on Mr Corbyn, Mr Johnson’s speech contains a series of barely disguised barbs at the PM and her Chancellor. He will say the Tories must not abandon their belief in free markets or follow the Labour leader and ‘treat capitalism as a kind of boo word’.
He will tell the Conservative Home event: ‘We can’t lose our faith in competition and choice and markets but we should restate the truth that there is simply no other system that is so miraculously successful in satisfying human wants and needs.
‘We should set our taxes to stimulate investment and growth. We should be constantly aiming not to increase but to cut taxes. It is the conservative approach that gets things done so let’s follow our conservative instincts.’
Mr Johnson was also accused yesterday of mocking the PM by running through a ‘field of wheat’ near his Oxfordshire home. It appeared to be a reference to an interview Mrs May gave last year in which she said the naughtiest thing she had ever done as a child was running ‘through the fields of wheat’ to the annoyance of local farmers.
The image of the former foreign secretary led to claims he was ‘trolling’ the PM ahead of his conference speech today. Mr Johnson’s aides denied this, however, saying he was just out for his morning run.
Online commentators pointed out the ‘field’ appeared to be a meadow and was not planted with wheat.
Stephen Glover – Page 16