Boris Takes Leadership Battle To Osborne

Boris Johnson will be given a Cabinet position once he stands down as Mayor of London, David Cameron has said. Normally the relationship between the content of Boris’s speeches and the event he has been asked to speak at is so loose as to be non-existent.

Home ownership has always been a totemic issue for the Conservative Party. If I never hear another gag about selling cake to France again, it will be too soon.

In a conference speech pitched at winning over disaffected centre-left voters from the Opposition, he said: “Failing to run a sound economic policy is the most unkind, uncaring thing a government can do”. It was at turns amusing, politically cutting and strategically smart.

In a sharp attack on the Marxist views of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell, Johnson said that the Conservatives “don’t believe in destroying capitalism, because for all its faults capitalism is the best means humanity has yet found of satisfying our wants and needs”. There were repeated boasts about his record in London and his two election victories over Labour.

His performance puts the London mayor right back in the ring for the Tory leadership title.

Philip Hollobone, Tory MP for Kettering, said: “Given that it is what everyone that is talking about in the country, it might have been appropriate for the PM to have made more of immigration in his speech”.

“It is the rugby scrum that provides a metaphor for my political beliefs”, he told conference.

Mrs May announced a shake-up of the asylum system so that people who have travelled through safe countries before reaching the United Kingdom will be given the “minimum stay of protection” and “no automatic right” to live here, although the most vulnerable will be offered a longer stay.

He insisted that the Tories must show they care about inequality. We face a choice as a country – we can either decline, allow the welfare bill to become the biggest bill by far in Government, squeeze out spending on our National Health Service, fire teachers and nurses and the like…

“We already have a tax system where income tax takes no account of family responsibilities so at the very least, if tax credits are going to be phased out, tax reliefs should be phased in for families”.

He claimed that in 1980 a FTSE 100 chief executive earned around 25 times the average pay of an employee. What do you think the multiple is today? “I’m taking my hat out of the ring”.

“A working single parent about to lose out under the proposals is going to struggle to understand how they are expected to work harder”.

The Chancellor said the impact of the tax credit cuts on workers would be offset by the introduction of a “national living wage” of £7.20 an hour for over-25s from next April – and that it was “not the truth” that families were having their income reduced. And then there is an even more important requirement.

This is about as compelling an argument for compassionate Conservativism as any Tory has made in recent years.

Technically this is correct; but the reality, as Tony Blair before him discovered, is that the moment David Cameron outlined his plans to vacate Downing Street his authority began to wane.

Of course his usual strategy of being “both pro-cake and pro-eating it” was evident.

Not everyone at the conference is a fan of Boris.

Ms. May spoke at the center-right party’s first conference since Mr. Cameron fired the starting gun on a leadership race earlier this year by saying he wouldn’t run for another term in office.

The three Tory big beasts with their eyes on succeeding the prime minister all dutifully pledged loyalty but, with varying degrees of success, started to lay down markers for the battle ahead.

He will say the government will amend planning policy to encourage developers to build affordable housing to meet heavy demand – part of the Conservatives’ drive to shed their image as a party that only looks after the rich and privileged and to attract support from lower earners.