Boris Johnson returns to his happy place: upbeat, vague and incoherent

The prime minister wants us to clap for capitalists', but will it be loud enough to reach their tax havens?

The past few months have been a bit of a downer for Boris Johnson - just one bad news story after another. So it was time for a rewrite. The equivalent of Dallas series nine when it turned out everything had been a dream. Boris would go back to his happy place of last year's general election campaign, when all he had to do was turn up and say the same old bollocks about getting Brexit done" and levelling up the country" and people would be fawning over his every word.

So at the Dudley Institute of Technology in the West Midlands, Johnson rehashed one of his old campaign speeches for the relaunch of Love Boris". Only without the bits about Brexit, which was well and truly done now, given that this was the last day he could have asked the EU for an extension to the transition. Here was Boris at his most upbeat. His most vague. His most incoherent. God help baby Wilfred if Boris ever gets round to reading him a bedtime story.