Oh dear. Boris Johnson’s much-trailed speech to the Confederation of British Industry has caused something of a social media storm – but not for the reasons the Prime Minister will have wanted. In a confused, shambling performance, the Tory premier lost his place repeatedly throughout the speech and spent three minutes riffing on his family trip yesterday to a theme park based on the fictitious children’s cartoon Peppa Pig. He asked the assembled businessmen ‘Hands up how many of you here have been to Peppa Pig World?’ before adding:
A pig that was rejected by the BBC, now exported to 180 countries around the world. No Whitehall civil servant could have come up with Peppa.
Indeed, in the space of just twenty minutes, Johnson managed to refer to himself in the third person by praising the ‘vision’ of the former Mayor of London, quoted Vladimir Lenin’s ‘Report On The Work Of The Council Of People’s Commissars’ when discussing the ‘electrification’ of the British economy and impersonated the ‘vroom, vroom, rah, rah’ of petrol cars.
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