Are Boris’s pro-business promises the defibrillator we’ve been waiting for?

Back when Boris Johnson was editor of this magazine and MP for Henley, I was with him at a Tory party conference in Bournemouth. He was about to speak at a meeting on transport policy. An intern rushed up with some random downloaded pages, having evidently been told to Google ‘transport policy’. Boris grasped the papers, ran his hands through his hair, revved the rhetorical engine, launched into an old gag about how many times his bicycle had been stolen — and brought the house down. His improvisations swooped, soared, hit and missed for a hilarious quarter-hour before the big finish: ‘Jogging along your lovely seafront here in… ah, err, Bournemouth this morning, I came across a padlocked kiosk that bore a sign saying “This kiosk is alarmed”. Ladies and gentlemen, if even the humble seaside kiosk is alarmed, shouldn’t we all be alarmed… about the state of… ah, err… our transport policy!’

How the crowd roared. The episode, and the technique behind it, came to mind this week as I tried to make sense of our prime-minister-in-waiting’s campaign pledges, which have been designed to make him sound friendlier to business than was previously thought. His promise to ‘save our high streets’ by ‘immediately unlocking’ a £675 million fund already announced by Philip Hammond was a low-hanging fruit — and less helpful for struggling entrepreneurs than his rival Jeremy Hunt’s wider offer to slash business rates and corporation tax. But it was accompanied by nitty-gritty measures — to curb cash-machine closures and overhaul planning rules that restrict changes of use for commercial premises — that it’s easy to imagine Boris grasping out of the hand of the intern who came up with them seconds before reading them out from the podium.

Then there’s his proposal in the Telegraph this week to give preferential tax treatment to companies that look after their employees’ mental health; apart from a couple of brushstrokes about Churchill’s ‘Black Dog’, that one didn’t sound like Boris at all.