Boris Johnson today vowed to “send Jeremy Corbyn into orbit” and “get Brexit done” as he delivered his first speech to the Conservative Party conference as prime minister.
The address came as Johnson prepared to unveil his plans for the post-Brexit Irish border to EU leaders.
“Johnson made the Brexit offer the centrepiece of his speech – but he also laid the groundwork for a ‘people v parliament’ general election, blaming MPs for trying to stop Brexit,” says The Guardian.
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He put further pressure on Labour to accept an election, saying: “We have the astonishing spectacle of the leader of the opposition being prevented by his colleagues from engaging in his constitutional function which is to try to remove me from office.”
And he launched a series of attacks on MPs, joking that “if parliament were a reality TV show, the whole lot of us would have been voted out of the jungle by now.
“But at least we could have watched the Speaker being forced to eat a kangaroo testicle,” reports The Sun.
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The Times says the Prime Minister used the speech to “rehearse his campaign pitch aimed squarely at wooing Labour voters”, appealing to the opposition heartlands on Brexit, the NHS and crime.
Yet Johnson also insisted that he and the UK were not anti-European, saying: “We love Europe. We are European.”
Janet Daley at The Telegraph calls it “the best speech of his career”.
“It was the best version of his good humoured, resoundingly forceful self that we got. And it rang true,” she says.
Daley thinks the PM was “brave” to “give such a positive account of a future that had created such a sense of national crisis”, but that it was “absolutely the right thing to do”.
Many commentators, including Sebastian Payne from the Financial Times, noted that there were no new domestic policies announced.
But Norman Smith, assistant political editor for the BBC, believes Johnson had a different audience in mind as he “went out of his way to adopt a rather more emollient approach”.
“Be in no doubt that amongst those listening most closely, most intently, will be leaders in other European capitals, trying to gauge whether Mr Johnson is serious about a Brexit deal or whether he is paving the way for no-deal and looking to blame the EU,” says Smith.
“You sense Mr Johnson has calculated for the next few hours and days that the really crucial audience in terms of his premiership, and for his future, is not here in Manchester - it’s in capitals around the EU.”
