Boris Johnson’s speech was a triumph

If you were listening to the Prime Minister’s keynote address to party conference, you would not for a second have suspected that the country’s petrol stations were empty, its service industries hopelessly short of staff, its pigs being slaughtered on farms for want of abattoir workers and its Christmas turkeys on the line. You would have left the hall with the sense that here was a nation in boisterous good health and irrepressible high spirits.

That, among other things, was why Boris Johnson’s speech was a triumph. No doubt the factcheckers will rip it to tatters. No doubt there will be grumbles among hostile political scientists about its vagueness on policy. No doubt various sobersides will deplore its frivolity, its refusal to address the gravity of our present difficulties.

But it did what a political speech of this sort needs to, and it succeeded for just the reasons that the naysayers will have been enraged.