We were some 18 minutes in to Boris Johnson’s speech to the CBI when disaster struck. Iceberg right ahead.
Houston! We have a problem.
He’d been babbling incoherently about internet rollout when, all of a sudden, he began shuffling his script around like a gin-soaked croupier.
His voice was spluttered, and then he emitted a plughole grumble.
As he fidgeted with the shirt tails, a look of panicked schoolboy spread across his shaky cheeks.
Darn it, if the Prime Minister hadn’t only gone and lost his ruddy place.
A loss of words yesterday: South Shields PM
‘Urggghhhh… Christ,’ he muttered. ‘Urghhhhh… forgive me… forgive me… forgive me… forgive me…’ Mondays, eh?
We watched for 30 seconds as Boris struggled to regain his feet.
Did it blow a bale full of tumbleweed across the stage? A tavern’s sign squeaking in the breeze?
The assembled crowd in South Shields sat down in the front and smoothed out their Brylcreemed hairs.
Relations between the PM and the CBI’s shiny-suited poohbahs have never been fragrant.
They’re a rampantly pro-EU bunch for starters.
Nor have the sensitive dears easily forgotten that ‘f*** business’ remark Boris once made.
In secret, they would all have enjoyed his mischief.
After much paper tossing, the Johnsonian cogs spun and whirled again. Whether he’d found the right place or not wasn’t clear.
He’d flung so many sheets around he may as well have been reading from the venue’s fire alarm instructions.
But it didn’t really matter. It had been a strange sounding mix of speeches from the past and columns taken out of old newspapers on the morning train ride to London.
They’re a self-important bunch the CBI. They love to have their chins tickled and be socialized with. Blair. Brown. Cameron.
We watched for 30 seconds as Boris struggled to regain his feet.
They were prime ministers who felt at home in leather chair city boardrooms. While they admired the flashy business cards of these Prime Ministers, they used their own lingo.
Boris, however? Boris refuses to be a part of their corporate, pompous world. Instead, he regaled them with tales from his time as GQ magazine’s motoring correspondent, where he enjoyed listening to the ‘porridge-like burble and pop’ of some of the world’s biggest combustion engines.
He claimed that he drove one of the very first battery-powered Tesla cars and it died in traffic.
Was he oblivious to charging it?
It seemed that his script was becoming more and more bizarre. He referred to himself in the third person as he described the ‘great funkapolitan hive’ of Battersea Power Station he helped create.
He likened himself to Moses and climbed Mount Sinai to give his Ten Commandments to reach net zero to his Cabinet followers.
At one point, he suddenly began imitating the phlegmy ‘rrrum rrrum rarrr’ of a Ferrari’s engines starting up.
This was a possible first for the CBI. I certainly don’t remember Theresa May ever doing this.
He went off on an odd tangent regarding Peppa Pig, right after the muddled page fiasco.
At one point, he suddenly began imitating the phlegmy ‘rrrum rrrum rarrr’ of a Ferrari’s engines starting up
‘Hands up, who’s been to Peppa Pig World?’ he asked. Eh? Quizzical faces. A single mitt was eventually suspended from the air.
‘Not enough!’ Boris cried disappointedly. He’d been on a family excursion there over the weekend. Turns out Peppa Pig World, in Hampshire, was the PM’s ‘kinda place’. Streets that are safe. School discipline.
Boris could have been freewheeling by now as he floated and skimmed across the joint.
Backstage, it was obvious that his communications team had been trying to find out from whom he was reading.
Had he accidentally gone on stage with one of baby Wilf’s colouring books?
His abrupt ending came after about 25 minutes. He was probably urged to stop by one of the panicked comms men who appeared in the background. Anxious laughter.
There was a little applause.
It was a mess. It brightened up an otherwise dull Monday morning. This was far more interesting than the Sir Keir starmer show later.