Why the next election will be harder for the Tories

Ever since Boris Johnson’s disastrous decision to try to stay the standards committee’s guilty verdict against Owen Paterson, things have started going wrong for Downing Street. The roots of the government’s problem can be traced back to a speech, though. Not Johnson’s rambling address to the CBI earlier this week, but his speech at Tory party conference last month.

Johnson wrote much of the speech on various plane flights. David Cameron’s conference speeches, in contrast, were normally the result of long, painful writing sessions for him and his aides. Yet one advantage of writing the Prime Minister’s speeches by committee was that it forced everyone involved to think through what the government’s priorities were, what it was actually trying to achieve.

Johnson’s conference speech was the ultimate Boris Johnson address: good jokes, but not much policy. It went down a storm in the hall and few politicians could have pulled it off.