Boris Johnson (Image: Dan Kitwood/Pool Photo via AP)

Phwoar uh gosh uh crumbs uh Peppa Pig uh arugah arugah. Who else could it be but UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson talking to the Confederation of British Industry on the new British industrial revolution.

Well, that’s what it seemed to me about. But in what was not so much a ramble as a bush trek through his obsessions, Boris passed through reflections on his career as a motoring correspondent for GQ, Lenin’s views on electrification, imitating a Tesla, and asking the audience if they’d visited Peppa Pig World, which he advocated as a model for the future while distancing himself from Father Peppa’s sexist attitudes.

He then lost his place entirely and hummed and haahed for half a minute before getting back on, allegedly, track. 

Typical Boris, in other words: too lazy to learn a boring but important speech, thinking he could wing it on goofy charm. Everyone who has known or followed Johnson’s several careers knew his prime ministership would come to this: winging it on charm and bluster, essentially performing a comic parody of the role until it just stops being funny.

Now the UK government has had to issue a statement clarifying that the PM was not seriously ill — it being less damaging to market confidence apparently to implicitly confirm that he is an idiot. 

Yet what was most remarkable about the latest BoJo debacle du jour was not that he had no speech to give, but that he had a very important one.

Or, rather, two speeches tangled up in each other. One was the boosterist pitch that he’s been giving for years: that the phwoar gosh dynamic power of British industry will rise up and roar and extend prosperity to all etc etc.

Distinctively, Boris doesn’t distinguish between the state and property when he does this routine. The pitch is distinctively post-Thatcherite, drawing as much on Labour titan Harold Wilson’s notion of the “white heat of technology” as delivering the good life, as on the virtues of the market.

It’s this sort of message, beyond his cartoon jingoism, that gives Johnson the ability to gain working-class votes in a way that few recent Tory leaders have been able to. But being head of the Tory party, speaking to the CBI, he had another duty and that was to give a report to his bosses.

So, amid the palaver, Boris was quick to clarify that the government would simply be setting the frame for the great green revolution he had in mind, and letting the animal spirits of capitalism rip on solar, nuclear, hydrogen power, nuclear, nuclear, carbon capture, nuclear etc. In other words, tax breaks, capital gifts, wage suppression and opening the immigration tap again post-Brexit.

The speech coincides with a very Thatcherite move which has cut across the general promethean state-private blather: the cancellation of part of the high-speed rail link to Leeds and the East Midlands, and the gutting of a program called the Northern Powerhouse, which was intended to link the north’s cities as one mega productive unit.

These moves represent a flat betrayal of the promises made by the Tories to the north during the last election, and which played a part in shattering Labour’s “red wall” of safe seats. Brexit was most of it, but reassuring the north that Tories were no longer Thatcherites was necessary to its success. 

But the contradictory pressure on right-wing parties is both the general market fitness of the state’s finances and the particular demands on business, and those demands are swinging around again after a decade of cheap money. With inflation-as-measured steadily rising, despite the general curtailment of quantitative easing and no great recovery in the actual productive sectors of the Western economy, there is going to have to be a reckoning soon. The UK government’s cancellation of these fairly open-ended programs is the start. 

This will sweep across the right now, and it will have to act if it is going to guarantee its corporate backing, the conditions of its existence. In the United States, early Trumpists such as Josh Hawley were crowing that the “Republicans are a working-class party now” due to the combination of cultural populism and big-ticket economics.

True enough at the moment, with the Republicans scoring more than 60% of white working-class votes on a regular basis. But that breakthrough only occurred when the US right abandoned its pro-property and anti-spending rhetoric, and began attacking corporations as much as they had earlier attacked big government.

For years the Republicans believed that the US working class shared their pious belief in self-striving small government and wondered why they could never break through in the rust-belt states. Donald Trump cured them of that, and his promise of a huge infrastructure push was waved through by business on the grounds that it would be a fantastic boondoggle for capital, which was how similar programs were greeted round the world.

But there are contradictory capitals, with contradictory needs — and protecting asset value is starting to become more important than stimulating global demand. Scott Morrison’s sudden tack rightwards, to attack big government is, of course, a proximate reaction to COVID measures and a use of the federal-state split in responsibilities to wedge.

But it is also a first instalment on a new right politics it would seem, in which an attack on “big government” also involves an attack on “big spending”. Whether this can be held off until after the election, or whether it would be wise to do so, remains to be seen.

The need to shift to this position is fraught with risk for the centre-right, since it is not wholly geared to electoral success — business will demand representation of a certain type irrespective of electoral success. A certain case must be made.

Populist right parties may benefit from this before centre-left parties do, trapped as the latter are in progressivist cultural politics and the language of fiscal responsibility.

A populist right, ranged against woke big business while demanding full employment and higher wages, could effectively and finally split the right entirely in two, sundering the Thatcher formula for ever.

Johnson, one suspects, was a shambles because, well, he’s a shambles, but this time because he realises the contradictions he is heading towards, and that it will take a lot more energy than is available to avert a return of some actual material politics. Phwoar.