Boris Johnson's Brexit speech was a return to his bullish British optimism, but it lacked substance

Mr Johnson’s vision of the emerald city of post-Brexit Britain was, superficially, all-encompassing. Except that, under the slightest scrutiny, it was also all too apparent that it was quite devoid of meaning

A tale told by a Brexiteer, full of sound and bluster, signifying nothing (PA)

The Foreign Secretary’s speech on “the road to Brexit” was reminiscent of the Yellow Brick Road. Boris Johnson set out to persuade the Remainers, the (in his universe) cowardly, the stupid and the tin-eared to join him and his little Highland terrier (Toto Gove) on his exciting journey to somewhere over the rainbow. He wanted to tell them how much he understood their feelings, and why there was reason enough to allay them. Fears of loss of GDP and jobs would melt away like lemon drops: Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are blue.

It was a typically Johnsonian performance; larded with mythological references (and not just those relating to cabinet unity); laced with Greek and Latin (it is a long time since we heard the phrase post hoc ergo propter hoc drop from the lips of one of Theresa May’s ministers); and some big words: “teleological”, “lapidary”, “spitzenkandidaten”. He even coined a new double-portmanteau expression of his own: Brexichosis, the melancholic state that sections of the British population currently suffer from, and for which speeches by Theresa May and Mr Johnson are the prescribed antidotes.

From Moses to Konrad Adenauer, from Estonia to Thailand and from Toblerone to cabbage, Mr Johnson’s vision of the emerald city of post-Brexit Britain was, superficially, all-encompassing. Except that, under the slightest scrutiny, it was also all too apparent that it was quite devoid of meaning. The audience may have had their vocabulary expanded a little, and enjoyed some risqué jokes, but they would be left none the wiser on the unmentioned subjects of the Irish border, the rights of EU citizens and, crucially, how the British will enjoy some sort of EU free trade deal and continue our economic relationship with Europe at the same time as chasing the “exciting opportunities” presented by Brexit, which do not become any more real no matter how many times the Brexiteers repeat the phrase.

For example, Mr Johnson says that British exports to the EU have grown only 10 per cent since 2010, but exports to the US are up 41 per cent, to China 60 per cent, to Saudi Arabia 41 per cent and to South Korea 100 per cent. He failed to add that all of these expansions took place not only from sometimes very low bases but also when the UK was firmly tied into the supposed double straitjackets of the EU customs union and single market. It was not his strongest line of logical argument. There has never been, and is not now, any restriction on the UK expanding its trade with these nations, and our membership of the EU – a large and powerful economic bloc – enables us to make another trade deal with them than the UK could possibly achieve on its own.

It was cake-and-eat-it all over again.

Mr Johnson may be full of bullish British optimism, but perhaps he could also benefit from a dose of continental pessimism.

The speech was, in essence, a series of aunt sallies. Mr Johnson said that Britons could still fall in love with Italians – who said that would be outlawed under Brexit? He observed that the English Channel, when viewed from the air, is very narrow indeed. Well, whoever said otherwise? He thought that British bridegrooms and their chums would still invade ancient European cities to organise Bullingdon-style stag parties. Well, who’d have thought it?

It was all couched in the kind of airy idealistic rhetoric so beloved of Europhiles, which would have been a clever trick had Mr Johnson chosen to chuck any sort of substance into the mix. He did, of course, not do so because the Cabinet hasn’t yet formed a policy. That is why Michel Barnier and the EU Commission are doing it for us.

Mr Johnson, to be fair, was right to point to the lack of a pan-European party political system, of public debates in a common language and about common problems discussed in bars and living rooms and TV studios from Helsinki to Lisbon. There is not, as he called it, a European “demos”. Yet the cause of further political integration in Europe is, to all intents and purposes, already moribund, and the UK had a strong network of like-minded nations across the Nordic countries and in Eastern Europe who cherished Britain’s role as one of the EU’s major powers questioning the democratic deficit in its institutions. The sorrowful words of Swedish ambassador Torbjorn Sohlstrom during his interview on the BBC Today programme bore witness to the damage the UK’s exit from the EU will inflict on the institution itself: not enough to destroy it – far from it – but enough to set it in the wrong direction, weaken it and add to its problems.

When at the end of Mr Johnson’s speech the assembled journalists crowded in to ask questions, it was like they were peeking behind the curtain of the grandee organist, discovering that Mr Johnson was no Wizard of Oz, but just an old faker trying it on again, his bravado and pretence at conciliation gradually bumbling away from him. He pleaded with them that he had to reach out, because otherwise people would say he “wasn’t trying”; he felt compelled to repeat the notion that the British had been conned in the 1975 referendum about the real nature of the European project; and he blustered about the country having to “get behind this project”.

But which project would that be? Brexit? Or the project to get Mr Johnson into No10 at whatever cost to his country and his party? Maybe that is the teleological process he should have been trying to anatomise.