At one point during Boris Johnson’s speech today he asked the audience: ‘We all want to make Britain less insular, don’t we?’
Silence.
Media-training experts use an initialism to try to get journalists and other talking-heads to come across well on television – BLT. Does the audience believe you? Do they like you? Do they trust you? The Foreign Secretary has never had a problem with the middle one, perhaps the most important of the three, but during the EU referendum there was certainly an issue with belief, since some of the more nationalistic rhetoric of the campaign clearly sat ill at ease with this ‘esoteric product of millennia of Eurasian toff miscegenation’, as Rod Liddle once described him.
Today’s speech was very much more plausibly Boris’s worldview, a Whiggish, liberal international vision in which Brexit is ‘not about shutting ourselves off; it’s about going global’. As he put it:
‘Brexit is about re-engaging this country with its global identity, and all the energy that can flow from that…So let’s instead unite about what we all believe in – an outward-looking liberal global future for a confident United Kingdom’.
He also mentioned the British diaspora, living not just in the EU but in Australia, Canada and the EU, but also visiting Thailand, where ‘they get up to the most eye-popping things’.
That’s all well and good, but this is not what most Brexit supporters asked for back in June 2016.
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