Many seemed surprised by the Peppa Pig speech, but not me

There was plenty of anger at Boris Johnson’s speech to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). It was disrespectful, shambolic, unprepared.

Yes, it was all those and more. As someone who has studied his style – indeed, I once interviewed him about his management approach – I was not in the least bit surprised.

When it comes to much of what he does, Johnson is a busker, a chancer. Not towards everything – he can be calculating and strategic when he needs to be. But the delivery of an address? That’s piffle: a quick stand-up, tell a few jokes, make some points, get them laughing and smiling, sit down to warm applause and move on.

It’s not altered from how he was at university: go to the tutorial, say something intelligent, try and convince the don you’re on top of the subject, wait for the hour to pass and leave. Next!

Having been through the same system – and, I admit, occasionally not read up on a subject beforehand – his behaviour is immediately recognisable. Ah, but was it not insulting to our leaders of industry to treat them that way? Possibly, although if you’ve spent years exhibiting disregard for eminent professors and guests of the Oxford Union (where Johnson was president), you’re not likely to change for a bunch of managerial salarymen in dowdy suits.

Johnson has no time for commerce. If it’s anything to him it’s as the means to an end: it pays the bills, but the craft of generating wealth is of no interest. That’s what tradespeople do, and they have their own entrances.

He can’t take them seriously. I once interviewed him for Management Today about how, as mayor, he tackled running London. It was a performance; he was performing. His mind said, “Business magazine, in which case act tough, how commercial chieftains are.”

So when I asked about his style, he ran his fingers through his hair and laughed. He set his jaw and frowned. “I’m as hard as nails,” he boomed. “I’m the Lee Iacocca of London government! I walk around this place, I creep up behind people in my rubber shoes, I steal into their offices and peer over their shoulders. If they’re playing sudoku, I stick a self-propelling pencil into their ears. They stop playing after that!”

Cue attempt at stern face. “Seriously,” he said, lowering his voice, “I have a good team working with me. Each of them has a defined brief. I believe in giving them all ownership of something.” He banged the table. And raised the volume again. “And, by God, they’ve got to deliver!”

As he spoke, he was laughing. He didn’t believe it, either.

I raised his short-lived business career. It was all of one week working as a trainee management consultant for LEK Consulting – “Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix and stay conscious.” So, how can anyone honestly expect Johnson to gen up for a room full of people who spend their lives poring over profit matrices and, unlike him, don’t fall asleep?

He maintained, though, earnest point, that he did stay on top of his brief. “I read all my stuff. That over there is my mayoral ‘red box’.” Except it wasn’t a briefcase, or a file, but a scruffy cycling rucksack. Again, he was half-chortling as he spoke.

It was all a hoot – he was an entertainer, a commentator, who had ended up in charge of one of the greatest cities in the world. Now he controls the whole country. Nothing has changed.

So, what did he do? “Persuasion and uplift”. He slapped the table, beaming. “There’s no culture of terror here!”

Here is what he said about speech-making: “I look at all my speeches for the day. They’re all blocked out. Everything in my diary is colour-coded – green says it’s an ordinary meeting, red means I’m performing. I usually make two or three speeches a day – my diary is full of big red blocks.” Those italics are mine. Performing. It’s not about what he is going to say, exactly. It’s a gig, another bout of stand-up. In one year, I heard him give the same speech five times – the one about how he was the equivalent of the mayor of a large city in France because so many of London’s inhabitants were French.

He did prepare: “I like to have an idea of what I’m going to say. I do my thinking on the bike on my way in.” That was the extent of it, conjuring up a few japes as he rode from Islington in north London to City Hall. It was how he was at Oxford, how he was as mayor, how he is today as prime minister. Nothing has changed – and despite the best endeavours of others, nothing will change: Johnson has not got as far as he has by (as he once said of David Cameron) being a “girly swot”.

He’s also found his path to be easy. His gift for knockabout, in voice and in writing, meant that within a few years of leaving Oxford, after proving to himself he could not go into business and deal in numbers, he was a newspaper columnist.

That’s what he did when he sat down on Sunday evening to dash off a few words for the following day’s CBI; to link seemingly disconnected thoughts, about his trip to Peppa Pig World and about cars (“vroom-vroom”), as he would have done back when he had a column to write and – also like in his uni days – had not studied or read, and had nothing meaningful to impart.

Once, in reply to a question on business concerns over Brexit, he replied: “F*** business.” His CBI turn was never destined to be any different.