What went wrong with Boris Johnson’s CBI speech — and how he can fix it

The Prime Minister has had a bad press for his speech to the CBI on Tyneside. The media, following unnamed Government sources, criticised his “chaotic” performance, with “stumble after stumble” in delivery said to be indicative of a loss of authority. Even Downing Street was critical of its own boss. Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC quoted a source there who said: “Business was really looking for leadership today and it was shambolic.”

What went wrong? It is true that Boris Johnson’s delivery was uncharacteristically hesitant. Towards the end of the speech, he lost his place: there was an awkward, Pinteresque pause while he shuffled his papers, apologising to his audience as he did so. Normally Boris is a master of the ad lib and would have brushed this mishap aside with a joke.

But he had already tried the patience of the assembled captains of industry with his imitation of an accelerating car, his invocation of Lenin’s “electrification of the Soviet Union” and a passage in which he described his ten-point plan for a Green economy as “a new Decalogue that l produced exactly a year ago when I came down from Sinai”. A thought bubble formed among those listeners alert enough to catch the Biblical reference. “So the PM thinks he’s a new Moses, does he? How many of the Ten Commandments does he keep?”

The section which followed went down even worse, even though it was classic Boris. “Yesterday I went, as we all must, to Peppa Pig World.” He asked who else had visited the venue. Only one person put their hand up — hardly surprising, as this children ’ s attraction is in Hampshire , six hours’ drive away from South Shields where he was speaking. “Not enough,” said Boris breezily. Offence was taken by the PM’s chippy friends from the North, who had come in the hope of new promises of “levelling up”.

What they got was this: “Peppa Pig World is very much my kind of place. It has very safe streets, discipline in schools, heavy emphasis on new mass-transit systems, I notice. Even if they’re a bit stereotypical about Daddy Pig.”  

Of course: Boris is the proud father of Wilfred who is nearly two and, like all his contemporaries, loves Peppa Pig. Quite a few business leaders listening must also be parents or grandparents, quite familiar with the cartoon character beloved of toddlers everywhere. But to bring up Peppa at a business event was, apparently, too infantilising for the suits. They were Not Amused. Labour’s Rachel Reeves pounced: the PM’s speech showed “how unseriously he takes British business”. The Shadow Chancellor is a former British girls’ chess champion. It’s safe to say that nobody has ever accused her of being unserious.

So what lessons should the PM draw from this episode? First: be prepared. As one of the best public speakers of his generation, he arouses high expectations. That means his preparation must not just be good, but superlative. As he well knows, Churchill spent hours rehearsing his speeches, often learning them by heart. Boris disdains the autocue, preferring old-fashioned notes, but that entails making sure that his pages are in the right order before and not after he stands up. Winging it is part of his appeal, but usually this is an act. If the audience senses that he really is at sea, he will lose them — and the wider public who are not present.

Second, if in doubt, cut it out. As a star columnist, Boris may have forgotten the old journalistic rule. But he badly needs an editor. Jokes are fine, indeed necessary, but irony seldom works. And audiences — especially those composed of bosses — expect to be flattered rather than belittled. The Peppa Pig franchise may indeed be a great British success story, worth £6bn globally, as the PM claimed. But this thin-skinned audience seems to have felt patronised by the whole shtick. And the watching media picked up on their discomfiture. Carefully edited clips of bumbling Boris did the rest.  

Thirdly, what turned a less than optimal day into a new chapter in the hostile narrative of Boris in decline was the anonymous briefing from insiders. The Downing Street source who is dripping poison into Ms Kuenssberg’s ear needs to be identified and fired. A Prime Minister who cannot count on loyalty from his own staff is in trouble.

The truth is that very little of what is wrong with the way Britain is governed is the PM’s fault. As Dame Kate Bingham, the heroine of the pandemic, writes in The Times (behind a paywall), the real problem is still the “Blob” in Whitehall: “The machinery of government is dominated by process, rather than outcome, causing delay and inertia. There is an obsessive fear of personal error and criticism, a culture of groupthink and risk aversion that stifles initiative and encourages foot-dragging.”  

Boris Johnson was responsible for putting Dame Kate in charge of the UK’s vaccination programme, which has probably saved about 150,000 lives so far. He gets her message better than any other politician of the day. It is, incidentally, not only an anti-bureaucratic but also a pro-business message. And it is there in his CBI speech, in the following passage: “No government in the world, no Whitehall civil servant, would conceivably have come up with Peppa.”

Only free enterprise, the free trade of free countries in the free world, could create the wealth and prosperity on which Western civilisation depends. This is the message that business wants to hear, loud and clear. No Labour politician, not even the serious-minded Ms Reeves, can match Boris Johnson in defending the free market. He could have got away with Peppa Pig if the economic message, backed up by examples from the “levelling up” regions, had been more unambiguous.

The Prime Minister is certainly not a prophet, but he has plenty to blow his own trumpet about. His decision to reopen the economy last summer was much criticised at the time; he has been vindicated. In the public sector he has drafted in business talent, including Kate Bingham, and for the most part resisted the Blob. But nobody else will blow Boris’s shofar for him.

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