What really excites Tory donors and MPs about Boris isn’t the antics on a zip wire but his ability to make Conservative arguments in an appealing and commonsensical way. The latter is the quality that Boris himself values most in politicians: it was the reason he gave for backing Ken Clarke for the leadership in 2001 despite their differences on Europe.
On the Today programme this morning, Boris managed to make Conservative political hay out of the Olympics without sounding like a crass partisan. In a jolly manner, he argued that the Olympics were profoundly Conservative in that you saw that competition drives up standards and that there’s a ‘direct correlation between effort and achievement’ which is ‘a wonderful Conservative lesson about life’ for young people.
But what struck me most was the way in which Boris segued into talking about how the Olympics should give Britain confidence as a country that it can adapt to a world without easy credit, in which life is ‘considerably tougher than it was before the crunch.’
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