It was a tale of two Tories.
Theresa “hard as nails” May focused her entire conference speech on cracking down on bogus migrants and asylum-seekers with not the merest whiff of a humorous remark while Boris “tight-head prop” Johnson scattered so many jokes through his keynote address that his serious message of One Nation compassionate Conservatism got lost amid the audience’s belly-laughs.
The jostling to succeed David Cameron has begun with Mrs M doing her best to look and sound as prime ministerial as possible.
So her speech was bookended by soft, compassionate language about Britain’s humanitarianism and its role as a “beacon of hope” to genuine refugees but in the middle was the uncompromising attack on abusers of the nation’s kind-heartedness and the suggestion the UK simply had too many in-comers.
Minutes later, the straw-haired darling of the conference bounced on stage to gee up the troops; he did not disappoint.
Whacking the comrades always goes down well, so there were roars of laughter when he referred to Miliband’s infamous “Ed stone” as the heaviest suicide note in history and how Labour had been piratically taken over by the £3 Corbynistas “in a kind of social media twitstorm”.
On migration, Boris took a slightly less draconian tone than Theresa, explaining: “It is not that we object to immigration in itself – I speak as the proud great grandson of a Turk who fled his country in fear of his life to Wimbledon, for some reason, and who was then assassinated by his political opponents; a fate I intend to avoid - it is about who decides; it is about who is ultimately responsible; it is about control.”
In what might not have been the smartest analogy to use Bozza kept referring to England’s rugby world cup humiliation and his time as a teenage prop.
“The crucial thing you have to do as a tight-head – in fact, just about the only thing you have to do apart from grunting and trying to stop the other guy sticking his fingers up your nose - is to bind on tightly and correctly; in my case to the hooker. Insert joke here as Jeremy Corbyn’s autocue would say.”
The rugby scrum, he explained, provided the metaphor for his political beliefs; society as a gigantic collective effort in which one person’s bulk made up for another person’s slightness of stature; where everyone was tightly bound together and one person’s forward progress drove another’s. It was, Bozza told the delegates, the idea of and belief in the “united society”.
But the Tory question is who in the race to succeed Dave will get the ball over the line? No-nonsense Theresa or smart funny Boris. Or, most likely, calculating George.
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