Last week at the Labour conference Keir Starmer dismissed Boris Johnson as a “trivial man”. This week, at his own gathering, the Tory leader went out of his way to prove it.
Boris Johnson’s rollicking speech to the Tory conference might have been a crowd-pleaser but in a country hammered by the highest number of covid deaths in Europe, where cars queue for petrol, livestock are being needlessly slaughtered and empty supermarket shelves greet shoppers, it was as removed from reality as his soaring jokes would allow.
This was a vaudeville act of a speech, glued together by bluster and boasts, and cringing gags, thrown out by a showman with one purpose in mind, to distract voters from the disaster unfolding across the country.
The speech had the feel and the delivery of a man in a hurry, of homework completed on the school bus.
There was barely a pause as roved across the landscape, with broad strokes of optimism but no policies and no agenda to deliver, just promises of a brave new Brexit world.
With the reality of what Brexit means hitting home, Johnson has decided that attack is the best defence, blaming business and global forces for his failures, promising voters high wages on the day his government took £1,000 a year from the working poor with cuts to Universal Credit.
Either the Tories are supremely confident about what their focus groups tell them about the state of the Labour party or they are in danger of underestimating Keir Starmer’s appeal to decency. Nothing else can explain the slack complacency of the speech and the whole shrug of the shoulders attitude to the coming cost of living crisis.
But the last laugh may come from the trivial man.
Despite the shape of the country, the bungling Boris is still ahead in the polls. His pitch for an emotional response, a bit of a cheering laugh, may find its way to the heart of voters if not their heads.
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