Tories try to rewrite history by bringing back the Morlock

Boris Johnson Saves the World is probably the movie that our disgraced former prime minister sees himself starring in as he ascends the stage at the National Army Museum in London, surrounded by the tattered colours and worn muskets of past battles lost and won – Waterloo, Dunkirk, Goose Green.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Here he is, then, the man of the hour, launching himself at his audience of the Tory just-about-still-faithful, firing aimlessly the usual fusillade of lazy rhetoric, lamentable jokes and shameless exaggerations at the Tories’ two principal threats. As Johnson sees it, their enemies are the “Putinistas” (Reform UK) about to help deliver “the Corbynistas” (Labour) a “supermajority”.

Johnson claims, not for the first time, that Keir Starmer, is about to lead the “most left-wing government since the war”, which is such a preposterous claim it is very difficult to think that even Johnson, the man who gave us a record tax burden, actually believes it himself.

He made for an extraordinary spectacle. He obviously wasn’t preparing for this event. His speech was a mildly rehashed version of his most recent newspaper column – itself not the most considered of essays – and he looked like he’d emerged from a hedge that Carrie had recently pushed him into for some marital misdemeanour or other. A man with the morals of an alley cat and a complete lack of self-knowledge made some risky remarks about a Labour majority “pregnant with horrors”.