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Last laughs before polling day: on tour with Boris and Dave

The Prime Minister laughs at all the Mayor’s jokes: why can't Boris return the compliment?

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(Image credit: 2015 Getty Images)

published 6 May 2015

A joint appearance by David Cameron and Boris Johnson at a utilities firm in north London yesterday gave the newspaper sketch-writers a field day.

Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail:

“Boris went first, howling his way through a lively, ten-minute speech about how the capital had gone awry under Labour.

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"Now, thanks to the Tories, it was a magnet for ‘fin-tech, bio-tech, med-tech, Aztec’.

“The youngsters blanked his surreal Aztec joke but Boris’s wife, Marina, on a rare outing, smiled on the sidelines.

“‘Chaos, stasis, paralysis,’ was what Labour could bring, said Boris. When was ‘stasis’ last used in an election oration?”

Michael Deacon in the Daily Telegraph:

“The Mayor of London warmed up the staff with a characteristic onslaught of whimsy.

“‘We have such a dynamic entertainment sector, assisted by George Osborne’s tax breaks,’ he trumpeted, ‘that at one stage we succeeded in exporting Russell Brand to America! Although he seems mysteriously to have been returned!’

“Mr Cameron laughed at this. Indeed, he laughed at all the Mayor’s jokes. Now I come to think of it, I don’t recall the Mayor laughing at any of Mr Cameron’s.”

Marina Hyde in The Guardian:

“Just a theory, but is there a possibility that UK productivity growth is low because Cameron brings a couple of business parks a day to a standstill so he can stage election events in them?

“Here it was workers for an energy provider being kept from their day jobs, making the PM not the only salesman in the room who wasn’t likely to hit his targets.”

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Jack Bremer, The Week UK

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Jack Bremer is a London-based reporter, attached to The Week.co.uk. He has reported regularly from the United States and France.

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