Convenience Big Store: Can bouncy Boris deliver on his promises?

7 October, 2021

In the headlines

The PM's speech at the Tory party conference was "vintage Boris, full of bluster and braggadocio, boosting his party's confidence and boasting of its achievements", said The Times. Actually, it was a speech full of "ruthlessness and truthlessness", offering "little more than pledges of a better tomorrow", said The Guardian. Commentators were equally divided: "pitch-perfect," said Janet Daley in the Telegraph; "facile, silly and fundamentally unserious," said Reaction's Iain Martin; "a tipsy middle manager at an office party would have delivered a better address," said Kevin Maguire in the Mirror. There were no mass job losses after furlough ended, early data suggests. The scheme finished last week and, despite concerns, employers reported almost record low redundancy numbers. Andy Murray has lost his wedding ring. The tennis player keeps it tied to the shoelaces on his trainers, but they were stolen while he was training in America. "I need to find it," he told his Instagram followers. "I'm in the bad books at home."

Comment of the day

Boris Johnson giving his conference speech yesterday. Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

Can bouncy Boris deliver on his promises?

The PM's "full-throated roar of optimism" yesterday meant Boris fans went home happy, says Trevor Kavanagh in The Sun. We have the fastest-growing economy among the West's richest nations, according to the prime minister. A million jobs await the hundreds of thousands suddenly freed from furlough. There were digs at "seriously rattled bus conductor" Keir Starmer. There were booming tributes to "level-up flashdancer Michael Gove": living proof the Tories are the "most jiving, hip, happening and generally funkapolitan party in the world". This was vintage "Boris boosterism".

But "bouncy Boris" could not conceal the rocks below the surface: a Great Barrier Reef of national debt, surging inflation and labour shortages. Ministers fear Britain's ballooning debt and the spectre of inflation running out of control. There are even – shock horror – more tax rises to come. Johnson protested that "Margaret Thatcher would not have ignored the meteorite that has crashed through the public finances". But the PM's adoring legions are starting to doubt him. Most voters have forgotten or never experienced the rampant inflation of the 1970s or interest rates hitting 15% on Black Wednesday in 1992. Ministers remember, though. Boris says "these are problems no government has had the guts to tackle before" as if he were leading a brand-new party. And in a way he is. That spells trouble. This time next year we won't be cheering.

Russians expect their leaders to be corrupt

Russians account for 14% of the 27,000 companies named in the Pandora Papers for allegedly avoiding taxes. But it's hardly surprising, says Mark Galeotti in The Moscow Times – do any Russians really think "these people weren't fiddling the books"? For instance, few of them are shocked that Sergey Chemezov, CEO of the state defence firm Rostec, is said to have a superyacht registered through an offshore company. Frankly, they'd be less surprised to find out it was moored at "a secret Pacific island hideaway populated by genetically engineered unicorns". What is suspicious is that the magnates of China and the US are absent from the investigation.

It's possible to see why, say, the revelation that Tony and Cherie Blair sidestepped £312,000 in stamp duty on a £6.45m London townhouse might bring "meaningful transparency" to a legal loophole in the UK. But not here in Russia. Which is a big problem for Alexei Navalny and his team. His video of Putin's palace was a big hit last year, but I suspect many watched it not for the forensic analysis of how the Russian president's Black Sea retreat was financed, but for its "pole-dance hookah bar". Where does Team Navalny go from that when there is a widespread assumption in Russia that "everyone is a crook and a thief"? The journalists behind the Pandora Papers should be praised. But unlike Pandora's box, in Russia "there's unlikely to be hope at the bottom".

Why it matters

Putin's richest friends have enabled the security services to extend their "weaponised corruption" far beyond Russia, says Shay Khatiri in The Bulwark. One example: Victor Pinchuk, a pro-Putin oligarch implicated in covering up the death of a Ukrainian journalist in 2000, has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the US's Atlantic Council think tank and donated to the Clinton Foundation.

Quirks of history

A sonnet written by Mary, Queen of Scots on the eve of her execution in 1587 has been discovered by the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The Catholic cousin of Elizabeth I scribbled the poem to her brother-in-law Henry III, the king of France. It includes the lines: "Alas, what am I? What use has my life? I am but a body whose heart's torn away."

Gone viral

HBO has put out a trailer for its spin-off Game of Thrones TV show, House of the Dragon – it's due for release next year and the teaser was viewed 8.4 million times in 48 hours after it dropped on Tuesday. When will it stop, says Danielle Cohen in The Cut. The only film and TV that gets made now is spin-offs, reboots or sequels. They're all terrible: Sex and the City is in its third, dreadful revival and Gossip Girl is back and boring. Even the Sopranos prequel was a slog. Let Game of Thrones die.

Inside politics

Donald Trump endured a colonoscopy without anesthesia in November 2019 to stop Mike Pence from taking charge for even an hour, reveals former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham in her memoir, I'll Take Your Questions Now.

Love etc

A Covid-induced loss of taste and smell puts people off their lovers as well as their food, according to a study published in the journal Plos One. Blunted senses hinder sexual stimulation. It's worse when the virus makes things taste and smell "rancid", as some participants reported. One person said they avoided kissing their boyfriend because the taste was too awful.

Snapshot

Tomorrow's world

Melting Russian permafrost – frozen land that was expected never to thaw – could cost the country $68bn in busted infrastructure by 2050, says The Wall Street Journal. Gas plants, pipelines and whole Siberian cities are warping and corroding as the defrosting earth shifts beneath their foundations. In spring 2020 a cracked tank leaked 20,000 tonnes of diesel because of melting permafrost, setting fire to the Arctic tundra.

Snapshot answer

It's Grimes. Hounded by journalists after she split up with her billionaire boyfriend, Elon Musk, the singer decided to "troll" them by sitting on a pavement in Los Angeles, reading The Communist Manifesto. Cue a flurry of tabloid headlines, outraged that the second richest man in the world's ex was reading Marx. "There are some very smart ideas in this book," Grimes said on Instagram, which kept the local communists happy. It's a "textbook case of all publicity being good publicity", a Communist Party USA representative tells TMZ.