Not so much a speech, but a meaningless digression. An extended trailer of the speeches he could give at some future dates, not yet specified, along with some minor announcements of things that will almost never happen. Politics to the fullest.
Boris Johnson is running with smoke. The Black Knight of Monty Python tries to convince himself and those around him that he has only suffered minor injuries to his flesh when everyone can see that he has mortally damaged goods. So on Thursday he saw the convict in Blackpool and Fylde College – the closest thing he is up to these days is the weird day in the Northwest – where he tried to convince himself that he had some sort of future. According to today’s evidence, the 211 deputies who sided with him in Monday’s censure vote will wonder why they were upset.
It was a pity. Grotesque even. The desperation to try to talk about anything other than Partygate only exposed the poverty of the Prime Minister’s ambition and achievements. It is indicative that the only concrete proposals he has put in place – on refugees in Rwanda and changes to the Northern Ireland protocol – involve breaking the law.
Johnson began by saying that things were not as bad as in the 1950s when there was rationing and lower life expectancy. He played the lectern insistently, as if annoyed that his audience was no longer grateful.
He then headed to Ukraine and rising energy costs. These were out of his control, so no one should blame him for not doing much. But at some point I would do something else. Not just now. Because now was not the time. I knew people were already struggling with the cost of living, but they just had to keep going until they knew what to do. But if it was a consolation, it was a global problem, so that people could be comforted that they were dying in company.
The convict looked up to see if anyone else was still listening. Or following. Because it didn’t seem to be, as there were several times when he either lost his place or started to stop. One minute he was talking about investing in the NHS and the other about how there was no money for anything. His was a government of tax cuts, he lied, even though he had imposed the highest tax burden since the 1940s. But everything would be fine because it would further cut the civil service. All in all, there would be no need to staff the Passport Office, as no one would go abroad.
It was almost as if Johnson was on autopilot. It’s just making its way through a selection of issues that had been clogging your inbox for the past few months. People shouldn’t expect higher wages because that only fueled inflation, so people should eat a little less until things get back to normal.
That they would soon be due to Brexit. Leaving the EU has had innumerable benefits. So many, I couldn’t remember what they were. He now began to chop openly the farmers, wondering why they were not doing more to produce British food. Eh … because all the EU workers who were willing to do poorly paid work have gone home.
At this point, at least 20 minutes after a speech that had revealed nothing except that the government had run out of ideas completely, the convict unleashed his three major plans to reclaim the country. First, it would reduce tariffs on bananas and olives. He then announced that he was going to reduce the number of staff working at the train ticket offices. And finally, I was going to do a review of the functioning of the mortgage sector, with the intention of introducing a 98% mortgage for people with housing benefits. Because nothing fully captured the aspiration of ordinary working people other than the possibility of entering into negative equity. All that was needed was the reintroduction of the cone hotline.
It was a measure of how dissociated Johnson has become (he is increasingly physically abandoned, as if his body had given up) that he really seemed to believe he was offering the country a way out of its economic crisis. So he continued to reinvent a housing policy that David Cameron had introduced in 2015 and that had been dead when he arrived then.
Things from the back pack of a beech. Someone in policy unit number 10 must have spent 15 seconds thinking about it. “Shit, the boss will make a speech about Operation Save the Big Dog tomorrow and we urgently need some ideas to fill the rest of the nonsense. Anything he does. They don’t have to be good. Or even viable. Because of all ways will not happen “.
The convict’s understanding of his own reality is tenuous at best, but his understanding of that of others is non-existent. He seriously believes that people with profits will be able to save £ 16,000 more than that and lose state support, and that they will be able to buy a house for around £ 105,000. In addition, Johnson had the impression that sales would be in a hurry to build more affordable social housing. Despite decades of evidence to the contrary.
We will build an economy with high wages and growth, he concluded. Johnson often contradicts himself, but rarely in the same speech. Still, this was a useless collector’s item. Something did not lose the media that had accompanied him to Blackpool.
“Did you really make everyone come here just for that?” it was the underlying theme of each question. And Boris had no real answers. His response to why people should trust him was to lie about building more houses than Labor as mayor of London. And it was only in denial that Jessica Elgot of The Guardian asked why she believed the OECD ranked the UK’s economic growth as the second lowest (Russia at the bottom) of the G20. I can’t wait for this exciting announcement when we can until the 18th.
Stay with Boris. The United Kingdom. Go nowhere fast.