Boris Johnson’s final major speech marks a reluctant farewell

Nuclear announcement had PM’s familiar hungover, unrehearsed, couldn’t-care-less quality, says Sean O’Grady

Boris Johnson at EDF’s Sizewell nuclear power plant in Suffolk on Thursday (PA)

In the coming days, we may see more valedictory interviews and articles from Boris Johnson. He’s not the sort of man to share the limelight, not even with his successor as prime minister, and the temptation to defend his reputation will hardly dissipate simply because he’s no longer in office – a “tragedy” he chooses to blame on snakes and plotters in his party and the media, rather than his own manifest shortcomings.

So it was with his appearance on Thursday in Suffolk at the site of a new nuclear power plant, Sizewell C. “My intention – and what I certainly will do – is to give my full and unqualified support to whoever takes over from me,” he declared – before immediately taking a sideswipe at Liz Truss.

In contrast to Truss’s enthusiasm for locally supported fracking (an important and possibly fatal caveat in densely populated Lancashire), Johnson was sceptical: “Tell everybody who thinks hydrocarbons are the only answer, and we should get fracking and all that: offshore wind is now the cheapest form of electricity in this country ... Of course it’s entirely clean and green.”

It’s an interesting footnote to the Johnson premiership, because this was one area in which he used his popularity with the membership to get them to agree to net zero targets and accept the shift to green energy – things about which they are deeply suspicious. Truss, on the other hand, simply tells them what they wish to hear about anything, whether she means it or not.

At one point in the final hustings she gave the impression to those who would dream of such things that she wanted to abolish speed limits on motorways and make it possible to drive at 200mph down the M4, which would certainly cut the time taken by Londoners to reach their second homes.

Johnson’s speech must also have reminded Conservatives of why they wanted to oust him in the first place. So abysmal have the Truss and Rishi Sunak campaigns been that many Tories are getting “sellers’ remorse” about Johnson (though Tory activists probably never thought he’d done much wrong). The prime-ministerial advice to those facing unaffordable gas and electric bills was to buy a new kettle. This is because the investment of, say, £20 would pay for itself rapidly, with a prospective £10-a-year saving. It was almost a self-parody, a kind of meta-performance from a man who never took his job entirely seriously. He even stumbled over his words.

The Sizewell C “kettle” speech was reminiscent of the notorious “Peppa Pig World” appearance in front of the CBI, and the “Kermit the Frog” address to the UN General Assembly – the familiar hungover, unrehearsed, couldn’t-care-less quality that the public eventually came to tire of.

As for substance, Johnson made a fair point that the last Labour government had failed to invest in nuclear power, and attacked Nick Clegg for opposing Sizewell C in the past. Yet in doing so he also highlights the fact that the Conservatives have been in power for 12 years, and that very little was done to improve our energy security by the Cameron, May or Johnson governments. Truss stands accused of scrapping Britain’s gas storage facilities when she was a Treasury minister.

Deliberately or not, Johnson also glosses over the reasons why ministers from all parties found nuclear power unpalatable – the vast cost of construction, safety concerns, and disposing of the waste – all of which made the case for it much less compelling. The accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima also gave governments pause for thought.

In any case, there will be much more of these sorts of interventions from Johnson. He is too young to retire, and he can’t afford to even if he wanted to. It’s become clear that he is even idly dreaming of a comeback. Truss will quickly find him a distracting annoyance.