Boris Johnson’s bid to get back in the leadership contest

The Tory conference this year is so stage-managed that not only did the party manage the no mean feat of sending out a check-against-delivery text of Boris Johnson’s speech before he stood up, but the Mayor then stuck to that text almost entirely. That text contained new jokes, rather than recycled ones, and was the better for it. He made quite clear that he wasn’t giving up on the leadership contest, and that a difficult first term doesn’t mean he’s not a serious option to lead the party in the future.

The reason Boris managed to show he was a serious option to lead the Conservative party was that he used those new jokes to show the appeal of Conservatism and the folly of the Left. He described the Corbynistas as ‘trots and militants with vested interests and indeed interesting vests’, and picked apart their ‘economic class war’ using jokes:

‘In the words of John McDonnell, an avowed Marxist who is seriously putting himself forward as the man to run the economy, fermenting – sic – the destruction of capitalism and I know there is a generation of young people who can’t remember communism and who think it might be a good idea to ferment anti-capitalism as if it were some fruity alcopop and so I say to all those £3 corbynistas – we tried that;

‘We tried fermenting anti-capitalism in the soviet union; we have tried brewing it in Britain in the 1970s and in many other parts of the world and the result has been the kind of toxic moonshine that sends you blind.