Even the very best conmen have their tells. Those little tics that give away the lies. And Boris Johnson has never been a particularly good conman. His tells are hidden in plain sight. The more pronounced the hand gesture, the greater the lie. You can just imagine the pounding the kitchen table must have got when he returned home after yet another IT lesson. But up until now, he’s got away with it – in his public life at least – because the country has been happy to collude with him. It wanted someone who could tell a few gags and promise that everything would be OK in the end. The narcissistic fantasist as national saviour. But the last eight months have changed all that. The country has grown up in the time of coronavirus. Tens of thousands have died; hundreds of thousands have become ill; millions are feeling frightened and insecure about their jobs. Yet even though the prime minister has had time to move on, he appears to have learned nothing. Boris may himself have wound up in intensive care, yet he still wants to be Mr Good Time Guy, with gags about losing weight and arm-wrestling. But it’s becoming more and more of a struggle. His eyes that used to sparkle from the acclaim are now mere dead hollows. It’s possible that not even Boris believes in Boris. The scepticism is contagious. These weren’t the circumstances in which he wanted to be making this year’s party conference speech. He needs to feed on the thrill of the lights, applause and laughter. But even if he had been addressing a full hall in Birmingham, rather than an empty cupboard, this would still have been the wrong speech at the wrong time. Seldom can someone have so badly misjudged the mood of an empty room. Boris began by saying that he and everyone else were fed up with the coronavirus and that he was working to get things back to normal, only to then contradict himself by saying there would be no going back to normal. Rather, it would be the trigger for major social and economic change. Try to think of the virus as an opportunity rather than a disaster. It wasn’t a million miles away from one of Donald Trump’s tweets. There was nothing on the toll the last eight months had taken. No apologies for government inaction, failure and incompetence that has seen the UK leap to near the top of the global Covid mortality scale. No mention of the black hole into which the “world-beating” test-and-trace app and Operation Moonshot have disappeared. Even more unforgivably, there was no acknowledgment that things could get much grimmer still over the next six months. More deaths, more local lockdowns, more confusing government guidelines and possibly millions of people being laid off as the furlough scheme ends. What Johnson wanted was a period of suspended animation from which we would awake into a “new Jerusalem”, as the postwar cabinet pledged in 1945. Of course, he was forgetting it was a national coalition that planned the rebuilding of a broken country and a Labour government that implemented it. From there on in we were into fantasy land with fantasy economics. The previous day, Rishi Sunak had said there were tough choices to be made and not all the manifesto promises could be delivered: Boris continued as though everything was still possible. Though none of it was costed. It was as if the prime minister was lazily running through a checklist of all the things he would quite like to happen. He was bored of talking about 40 new hospitals so now he was arbitrarily upping the number to 48. Social care would be fixed. He didn’t know how, but it would. The details were in the paper that he had said would be published a year ago but has yet to see the light of day. There would be so many teachers there would be one-to-one tuition for anyone who needed it. And the distinction between further and higher education was over because he had made a 15-minute speech about it last week. The bigger the lie, the harder Boris hit the lectern. Johnson then came to the top of the Santa wish list he had scrawled in front of him. Try to forget the next 10 years – too tricky and too much like hard work to experience – and imagine Britain totally reliant on offshore wind power. Yes, some people, including him, had rubbished the idea 20 years ago but now it was a possibility. Except even when he is telling a joke against himself he can’t resist lying. Because Boris hadn’t said 20 years ago that the idea was like “blowing the skin off a rice pudding”. He had said it seven years ago when he was the London mayor; about the same time Ed Miliband had been championing the green revolution. Boris was reinventing himself as Dr Feelgood again.
Thereafter, Boris just appeared to get a bit bored. Talking to a camera that stared back impassively was no substitute for the adrenaline hit of being on stage. Like Trump, he only knows he really exists when there are other people kissing his arse. So he took a sideswipe at “lefty, do-gooding human rights lawyers” – possibly the first time a party leader has spoken out against human rights in a conference speech – whittered on about home ownership and almost totally forgot to mention Brexit. After all, why bother? It wasn’t as if the negotiations were going badly or that people were worried about what a post-Brexit UK might look like. Having said almost nothing the country had actually wanted to hear for the past 25 minutes, Boris shuffled his papers and realised he had come to the end. “This is the moment when people would normally clap,” he said forlornly. But they were clapping, only he couldn’t hear the slow handclap. The conman can still just about con himself. But on this showing, not for much longer.