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Around this time last year, the crowd at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester was chanting Boris Johnson’s name before he took the stage to deliver a devastating leader’s speech. He could have expected an even more exultant reception this year after winning the game for the most part at Westminster for more than 30 years.
Instead, the coronavirus meant he delivered his speech Tuesday in an empty room where every joke failed and every rhetorical flourish was a reminder of the monotony of the format. His purpose was clear from the beginning when he declared that he had had “more than enough of this disease” and promised that life would return to normal in time for next year’s conference.
He dismissed as “seditious propaganda” reports, many of which come from his own MPs, that his own coronavirus attack “has somehow stolen my mojo.” But he said nothing about why Britain suffered more deaths than any other European country during the first wave of the pandemic and why its test-and-trace system is so inadequate at the start of the second.
Brexit talks
If he had little more than trivia to offer about the coronavirus, the prime minister had nothing to say about the other pressing issue facing his government: his trade talks with the European Union. Johnson last week revived his Oct. 15 deadline to move forward on a deal, but has yet to show any sign of making a negotiating move that helps make a deal possible.
To the extent that Tuesday’s speech contained policy announcements, most were overheated versions of existing commitments, such as expanding wind power, or floating ideas without any details, such as the introduction of a digital ID. After the speech, Downing Street was unable to realize any of the speech’s political proposals.
Johnson’s words were directed at the party loyalists rather than the general electorate and he tried to cheer them up with some traditional coup de grace at Labor’s expense. Here too he failed, portraying the opposition as unpatriotic, debauched and politically correct, as if he thought he was still facing Jeremy Corbyn rather than Keir Starmer.
It was as if the entire speech was an exercise in fantasy and nostalgia for the age of innocence a few months ago, when Johnson was a popular prime minister facing a despised opponent. Polls on Wednesday show the two sides side by side with Starmer’s approval rating far ahead of Johnson’s. Tuesday’s fancy flight is unlikely to move the needle.
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