Fishing for votes
Boris Johnson brandished a kipper on stage at the final hustings of the Conservative leadership contest, at the Excel Centre in London last night, as he relayed a story about an Isle of Man kipper smoker whose costs had risen because of EU rules. Mr Johnson has also appointed Daniel Moylan, a Eurosceptic, as a senior adviser to his EU divorce team
THEY had clocked up 3,000 miles on a 26-day odyssey around the UK and last night Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt reached the home straight for the last, and biggest, of their 17 hustings events.
Mr Johnson, by any measure, has worn the yellow jersey throughout this energy-sapping Tour de Britain, but Mr Hunt still believed he could sneak past him in one last sprint for the line.
“Vote with your heads as well as your hearts,” said Mr Hunt, after being introduced to a 2,000-strong London audience by “switcher” Elena Bunbury.
“This race is much closer than people think.”
We will know if he is right at 11.45am next Tuesday, when the identity of the winner is revealed to an expectant nation.
‘I know people are down in the dumps about our party, but the darkest hour comes before the dawn’
Today is the last posting date for Conservative Party members to send off their ballot papers if they want to guarantee they will be counted, and at The Excel Centre – previously used for the boxing at the London 2012 Olympics – the candidates were slugging it out for every last vote.
Not for the first time, Mr Johnson invoked his hero Winston Churchill, telling the audience: “I know people are down in the dumps about our party, but the darkest hour comes before the dawn. We can do this! We are going to come back and we are going to win!”
Mr Johnson then produced a kipper, saying he had been contacted by a kipper smoker in the Isle of Man who had told him his costs had rocketed because the EU insisted every fish had to be posted along with “a plastic ice pillow”, which he also waved aloft.
It was, he said, a perfect example of what Britain would soon be free from.
Mr Johnson also issued a reality check for those hoping for a swift post-brexit trade deal with America, saying: “A free trade deal with the US is not go ing to be done in a trice and is not overnight going to add several percentage points to GDP. The US are tough negotiators and they will make some very robust demands. We have to be prepared to be robust in return.”
While Mr Hunt had decided to ask a member of the public to introduce him, Mr Johnson, who went first, chose Liz Truss, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Mr Johnson was, she said, “a blond in a world of bland”.
And it was not the only time Mr Johnson’s hair was to feature at the event. He introduced a note of levity when asked by moderator Iain Dale if he dyed his hair and said: “That’s an outrageous suggestion. It shows this has been a long election campaign if they are asking questions like that!”
Mr Johnson ruled out doing a deal with the Brexit Party at any future general election, saying: “I don’t think we should do deals with any party. We are the Conservative Party. We are going to restore trust and confidence in our party. I will rule it out, I will rule it out.”
Mr Johnson also revealed that Nigel Farage had once tried to “recruit” him during a meeting in a pub.
He said: “We met for a Cold Warstyle meeting. He tried to recruit me and I tried to recruit him and we both failed. I was a journalist at the time and I think he was a metals dealer.”
In Mr Hunt’s camp, his team remain convinced that the contest is no foregone conclusion, saying their own analysis suggests 90 per cent of those who were undecided at the start of the campaign are now backing the Foreign Secretary. Quite how many members were undecided is hard to quantify, but the fact that only a third voted in the first week of the campaign suggests there were plenty of votes out there still to play for.
Mr Hunt last night pledged he would not take the country into a general election until more young people supported the Conservative Party.
He said he would tackle the unfairness of student loan interest rates, put 1.5 million young people on the housing ladder and would put the environment at the forefront of his agenda.
“Get this wrong and there will be no Conservative government, no Brexit and maybe no Conservative Party,” he said.
For anyone following the twists and of this leadership contest, it may seem hard to believe that it is just four weeks since Michael Gove was knocked out of the race, leaving Mr Johnson and Mr Hunt as the last men standing. Any suggestion that the contest was going to be straightforward for Mr Johnson was quickly dispelled on the eve of the first hustings event, when newspaper front pages were dominated by news of police being called to the flat Mr Johnson shares with his girlfriend Carrie Symonds following a noisy row between the two.
It was a reminder that history is often shaped by events, rather than by the best-laid plans, but after a carefully posed picture of hand-holding Mr Johnson and Ms Symonds appeared on a website two days later, the furore gradually died down.
Mr Hunt, of course, was far too shrewd to comment on his rival’s domestic arrangements, preferring instead to attack him over his “submarine” strategy of refusing to take part in TV debates or, indeed, make major policy announcements. Mr Johnson was “a bottler”, Mr Hunt said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.
“How is he going to make the case for our country to 27 EU leaders? How is he going to argue against Jeremy Corbyn or Nigel Farage if he doesn’t want to debate with a friendly Foreign Secretary?” Mr Johnson’s advisers, however, including Tory election guru Sir Lynton Crosby, insisted he stay calm, ignore the goading, and avoid making mistakes. At the very first membership hustings event, at Birmingham’s International Convention Centre on June 22, Mr Johnson insisted he would use the £39billion Brexit “divorce bill” as leverage to get a deal with the EU, but Mr Hunt, who relentlessly played on his background as an entrepreneur, said a tried and tested negotiator should be sent to Brussels.
The circus rolled on, to Bournemouth, Exeter, Carlisle, Manchester, Belfast, Newcastle, Perth, Cardiff and elsewhere, before Mr Hunt finally got the fight he had been spoiling for: the head to head TV debate, screened live on July 9. As the underdog, he decided to bare his teeth, accusing Mr Johnson of “peddling optimism” to get into Downing Street, and suggesting “Boris in No 10” was the only thing that mattered to his rival.
Mr Johnson hit back by accusing Mr Hunt of “embarrassing” blue-on-blue attacks, but had plenty of jibes of his own as he mocked Mr Hunt’s failure to set a firm date for Brexit. “How about Christmas? Christmas any good?”
It was to be the most bruising of all the encounters between the two rivals. By the time they held their second head-to-head battle, on Talk Radio earlier this week, the reality of a new Cabinet was less than a fortnight away, and suddenly, with one eye on the future, they were finding common ground.
Having previously said Mr Hunt would leave Britain on a “hamster wheel of doom”, Mr Johnson was praising his “new-found optimism”, while Mr Hunt joked that they would soon be next-door neighbours, with himself in No 10 and Mr Johnson in No 11.
Mr Hunt’s position had changed last night, as he made a direct pitch to keep his job.
Asked if he would be prepared to carry on as Foreign Secretary if Boris Johnson won, he said: “It would be a huge honour to serve Boris in a way that unites the party.”
Few, if any, of their supporters believe either scenario will come to pass, but for now, at least, the two contenders can finally breathe out, knowing the only thing left to do is wait.