Tell you which police haven’t been cut: ones outside Boris Johnson’s campaign events. Not only were there plenty to begin with outside the County Durham venue where the foreign secretary made a short speech on Tuesday in front of about 40 party supporters, but the presence of a similar number of Labour activists chanting outside apparently warranted a call for backup. Further officers duly arrived at the back door while Johnson remained secured inside the building.
“We were on a training day but we’ve been redeployed,” one officer said. “It must be bad because we’ve been called in.” Bad? Well, there were a couple of double buggies, a man in a wheelchair and some rather unmannerly shouts at local Tories departing in their X-types and so on. But we’re not talking the Iranian embassy siege. Easily the most disturbing aspect of it was the enthusiastic chant of “Backdoor Boris! Backdoor Boris! Backdoor Boris!” File that one under Movie Titles You Can Now Never Unsee.
Inside, things had been only marginally more seemly. “We’ve spent £31bn on Trident,” Boris enthused, in one attack on Jeremy Corbyn’s nuclear beliefs. “What is the point of sending it to sea with no missiles on board, so the whole country’s literally firing blanks!” Damn straight. That’s how we need to see Britain – as the sort of virile, charismatically rogueish country who can knock up a woman just by looking at her. (Probably easier all round if she doesn’t keep it, though.)
The speech was nominally about Britain’s decision to break up with the EU, with the warm-up music being Adele’s Someone Like You, a song about moving on – or otherwise – after the end of a relationship. We wish nothing but the best for Brussels, I’m sure. But as Boris explained: “It is time to lift our eyes to a wider horizon!” “We have so much to look forward to!”
Mmm. And sometimes it hurts instead. Perhaps keen to remember the good times, Boris was still trumpeting a McKinsey report that said Britain would be the largest economy in Europe by 2030 – a report that came out in 2015, the year before the Brexit vote. Then again, never forget that the only untruth that Boris Johnson corrected in the entire referendum campaign was the Sunday Times’s misapprehension that he dyes his hair.
Still, on with the show. “Just imagine the scene in Brussels if Jeremy Corbyn was to mosey in.” Team Corbyn negotiating would be “a family of herbivores at a watering hole for lions”. The EU was “a great glutinous conglomerate of privileged interests” (a line which would probably work better as his Twitter biography).
Boris’s rhetorical style is a matter of taste. The level of self-congratulation with which he produces a phrase like “tricephalous monster” marks him out as the classic stupid-person’s-idea-of-a-clever-person, but among the faithful it is undeniable that some of his most-recycled lines still bring the house down. And the lovely thing is, he’s never buried in the rubble.
What about the reports that the Italian intelligence agencies had warned their UK counterparts about the man named as the third London Bridge attacker? “I’m not familiar with the details of the investigation that you’ve just announced.” Look, he isn’t going to talk about something he hasn’t got a clue about – he’s not Diane Abbott.
Back when the election was called, Boris was briefed against as a liability who would be firmly sidelined throughout. Now – in seemingly less stable times – he’s been called up as a charismatic safe-hands figure. (A Bruce Grobbelaar, certainly.) Was it panic measures? Of course not, Boris insisted, almost able to keep the relish out of his voice. Theresa May and her team had done wonderfully. She had a plan. She had just made an excellent speech.
To which the only realistic response is: do me a favour. Even if the Conservatives win extremely well, many Tories believe that May has been found out by the campaign. There is – how to put this? – something of the shite about her. In fact, in terms of what it has exposed about May, calling the election has been the equivalent of the prime minister swimming a mile out into the Pacific and cutting off her arm. To adapt Peter Benchley’s famous opening line: the Tory big fishes are now moving silently through the night water.
For many people, Boris making another leadership comeback would be a plotline as preposterous and unwelcome as that of Jaws IV: the Revenge (the one where a disgruntled pal of the original shark follows Chief Brody’s widow to the Bahamas. Caine stars.) On the other hand, it’s the classic Bullingdon move: smash the place up by pulling off the Brexit vote, leave boring little Theresa to clean up that ghastly mess, then swan back in to take charge in 2019 on the slogan “Uncork the wine, Fallon, there’s a good chap.”
Whether Boris’s #massivelegend appeal would break up on contact with the Watford Gap is, of course, something that has never properly been tested. And as long as he keeps hiding in community centres, we will remain tantalisingly in the dark on that point.
