Like a ray of sunshine, here comes Boris

Here comes the sun, doo doo doo doo! Six long weeks ago, I told Radio 4 that Jeremy Hunt would be lucky to get 30 per cent. Since then, the Boris Bashing Corporation and the legions of Johnson haters have done their damnedest to derail him. Laura Kuenssberg, BBC’S political editor, refused to concede defeat, announcing that there was “anecdotal evidence of a Hunt surge”. As if. Conservative members had been waiting for this moment since 2016. They wanted Boris. It was always Boris. Yesterday, with a sense of elation and excitement, they finally got him.

According to taste, the blistering heat was either evidence of a brighter tomorrow or a harbinger of the “hot mess” one exultantly grim BBC correspondent warned was facing the incoming prime minister. There is certainly no shortage of critics wanting to rain on his parade. “I know

there will be people… who question the wisdom of your decision,” Boris observed drily after Dame Cheryl Gillan announced the huge mandate he had been given to sort out Brexit. He could have been referring to the Defence Secretary. Poor Penny Mordaunt looked as queasy.

Brace yourselves for lots of fatuous Trump comparisons and warnings, like the one yesterday, from a Labour MP about “the alt-right takeover of the country”.

Hysterical nonsense. Less tiger of populism, more Tigger of Pop (the Eton society), Prime Minister Johnson will be a cosmopolitan centrist far closer to the politics of Tony Blair than Jeremy Corbyn. He struck a rather lovely chord when he spoke about how it is Conservatives who have best understood “how to manage the jostling sets of instincts in the human heart”. After the punishingly prosaic Mrs May, it

sounded like pure poetry. Boris knows his premiership will live or die according to his ability to rally the troops to leave the EU by October 31.

Yesterday, he mocked the naysayers and summoned the can-do spirit he means to govern in. “Do you look daunted?” he demanded in best pantomime manner. “Do you feel daunted?” It fell a bit flat, but only because the audience of Westminster stiffs failed to reply. It is the way the public responds to him that counts.

In his book on Churchill, Boris wrote about the way he transformed himself into John Bull. “He has channelled that portly gentleman who for two centuries or more has embodied the truculent-but-jovial response of the British to any great continental combination. He is fat, jolly, high-living, rumbustious – and patriotic to a degree that many have always considered hyperbolical and unnecessary, but which now, in the present crisis, seems utterly right.”

You want the plan? That’s the plan. Jovial defiance, patriotic spirit, national unity. We must all hope he can pull it off. Sun, sun, sun, here it comes.