What was the point of Boris Johnson’s speech? It didn’t contain any announcements for Tory activists to clutch as they left the hall. Details of his proposals to resolve the Brexit stand-off were missing, and will instead be unveiled to parliament later today. It even finished on a strangely low-energy note, rather as if Johnson had ended up emulating the electric cars he had been praising by running out of battery sooner than expected. Yes, there were jokes, but many of them, particularly his fish-themed mocking of Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, have turned up in conference speeches of years gone by. So why bother?
Before he appeared to run out of energy, Johnson was giving a tub-thumping election rally speech, which the members loved. He wasn’t in the middle of trying to reposition the Conservative party as part of the sort of lengthy project that a leader can do when in the middle of an electoral cycle.
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