Portrait of the week | 4 October 2018

Home

Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary, played a well-nourished Banquo’s Ghost at the Conservative party conference, where Theresa May, the Prime Minister, declared that Britain after Brexit would be ‘full of promise’. She had insisted that the Chequers proposals for Brexit were the only ones possible. Mr Johnson called them ‘deranged’. Mrs May felt obliged to tell Andrew Marr on television: ‘I do believe in Brexit.’ Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, mocked Mr Johnson’s way of speaking: ‘Boris sits there,’ he told the Mail on Sunday, ‘and at the end of it he says, “Yeah but, er, there must be a way, I mean, if you just, if you, erm, come on, we can do it, Phil, we can do it.” ’ Mr Johnson mocked Mrs May, who once confessed to having run through a field of wheat, in front-page pictures showing him running through a field of grass. To a large crowd on the conference fringe he advocated house-building and said ‘the authors of the Chequers proposal risk prosecution under the 14th-century statute of praemunire’.