Boris Johnson’s speeches at Tory conference have normally been dedicated to making the audience laugh. As Mayor of London, he was freed from the constraints that Cabinet Ministers must labour under and so could have more fun than any other speaker. But as Foreign Secretary, Boris is constrained both by the conventions of diplomacy and a Number 10 that is keeping a particularly close eye on him.
Now, Boris being Boris he didn’t totally obey the usual diplomatic niceties. He began by telling the audience how when he met the Russian Foreign Minister in New York at the UN general assembly last month, he had told him that Russia’s problems were down to how the West had ‘imposed democracy’ on the country in 1990. There were also a few more jokes than you’d have got from his predecessor Philip Hammond—including one rather good one about how the EU was imposing a global ivory ban despite its president being called Donald Tusk.
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