Boris ditches madcap charm as Ross sang Baby Shark
THE Boris who popped onto the screen was not the familiar conference showman. Back in the days before pandemics and prime ministerial responsibilities, Boris Johnson was the great vaudevillian player of Tory conference.
Delegates would pack auditoriums (‘auditoria’, he would say) to delight in this deliberately dishevelled, knowingly absurd, Swiftian caricature in all his Labour-zinging, BBC-baiting, Latin-punning charm.
Nearing two years in Number 10 and after 12 gruelling months of managing a pandemic, the magic has drained and the conjurer has given way to a more sober personality. The madcap barnet was still on display — imagine Oor Wullie had gone to Eton — but his remarks were delivered in a businesslike fashion.
Whether this was a reflection of time constraints or a decision to have his face appear as little as possible during the election, he was in and out in about ten minutes. I counted not a single joke.
Instead, the basic staples of the Scottish Tory election campaign were dished up: all the focus should be on Covid, no second referendum, don’t trust Labour not to work with the Nats. These were the points the Holyrood party wanted him to hit and he ticked them off at pace but with little flourish.
Where his remarks landed with a reassuring thwunk was in describing the awesome scale of the pandemic operation. It is easy to forget that it was the UK that secured Scotland’s vaccines, sent the Army in to held deliver them, propped up the public sector and kept the private sector above water.
Boris seemed to regard this as modern-day Blitz spirit but for viewers in Scotland, a more immediate thought might have been: there but for the grace of God and six percentage points in 2014.
‘This effort has shown what the UK can do,’ the Prime Minister averred, ‘pulling together such a massive programme, the biggest in our peace time history, over such a short period of time.’ He claimed to be baffled that the SNP would want to crank up the grievance machine at a time like this.
‘Surely even they have a sense of priority, of what is important right now?’ He must be new.
Douglas Ross, the Scottish Tory leader, will give his speech this afternoon, but yesterday he sat down for a natter with Ruth Davidson, who is also, confusingly, the Scottish Tory leader. Davidson, giving off the energy of a teacher on the last day of term, had a go at her own chat show, ‘grilling’ her successor on whether he’d keep the SNP out of power and whether Labour could be trusted on the Union. His answers will have shocked exactly no one.
IN fairness to his interrogator, she did convince him to sing a couple of lines of Baby Shark. You don’t get that on Andrew Neil. Ross is at his most affable and engaging when he isn’t talking about politics.
Even so, it was hard not to notice that, seven months into his leadership, he is still having to be introduced by his predecessor-but-one.
At some point, he will have to finish his apprenticeship and take on the job full time.
Sunday was rounded off by Rishi Sunak, who was there because he is somewhat popular in Scotland. It’s hard not to be when you are the political equivalent of that mate everyone owes a tenner.