Whatever gloss he tries to put on his policies, Boris Johnson is still saying: ‘F*** business’

Why the hell did I waste my time with that?” I wonder how many of the business leaders who assembled at the CBI to hear Britain’s political leaders making their “pitch to business” said that to themselves at the end of the day?

Precisely 12 seconds of Johnson speaking makes me want to cut myself. Business leaders are, it seems, made of sterner stuff. However, they must know that Johnson is the great conman of British politics who looks set to give the country the chance to repent at leisure.

“We have to get Brexit done,” he declared, while blustering about the “will of the people”. He’s obviously too scared to test that via a confirmatory vote because he knows he’d probably lose it.

Instead we have a general election that could hand him a majority with the support of less than 40 per cent of those who brave the winter chill to go to their local polling booths.

Johnson knows he can’t sell the economic benefits he touted during the EU referendum campaign or the “opportunities” his tribe keep banging on about to an audience that knows full well that there aren’t any. So his pitch to the CBI was that he’d offer “certainty”.

Trouble is, that’s no less of a steaming heap of doggy doo, as the CBI’s president and director general made clear before he even stood up. Anyone who’s been following this knows that getting the “deal” he’s agreed signed off by parliament isn’t a route to any kind of certainty. Throw in simplistic arguments, artificial deadlines, and silly red lines, and you have a recipe for a complicated and very painful disaster.

The future trading relationship between the EU and the UK remains up in the air and the likelihood that we end up Brexiting without it being sorted – no deal via the back door – remains scarily high. A complicated trade package will have to be negotiated in a matter of months by team Johnson in the absence of an outbreak of common sense. That’s not very likely, before you even get to the problem with his team: it has less talent than the average pub football second 11.

He sought to answer the criticism with a Blue Peter analogy. Here’s one we made earlier. It’ll all be fine.

No wonder confidence in Britain is ebbing away. Outside of Brexit, he dangled some tax breaks and a promise to look at business rates, which the Tories have spent 10 years listening to complaints about without doing anything meaningful in response.

But as one hand was giving the other was taking away, which leads us to the biggest headline: Johnson’s promise to row back on the Tory plan to cut corporation tax to 17 per cent because the money’s needed for the NHS. A welcome note of realism? It didn’t last. Don’t even get me started on immigration and the damaging effect Conservative proposals in that area are going to have on UK plc.

“Politics is holding back the country,” Johnson said, showing the lack of self-awareness that’s become his calling card. It’s his politics and those of a Tory party that has completely lost its mind doing that.

The harsh reality is that he’s still saying “f*** business”, however he chooses to dress it up.

Jeremy Corbyn had a go next. Tough for him given that much of the assembled probably view him as the devil incarnate. On Brexit, he is offering a vote, and even if his promise to negotiate his own softer deal looks no less shaky than what Johnson is serving up, that in itself gives him the edge.

The rest of his programme is nothing like as extreme as it’s sometimes portrayed, a point he tried to make.

Business will pay a bit more, some parts of the economy will come back into state hands, like in much of Europe.

It’s interesting to note that his headline grabbing plan for “climate apprenticeships” drew a favourable response from another business group, the Institute of Directors, because of its “wider proposals for more flexibility in the (much hated apprenticeship) levy system. The IoD, it should be noted, is hardly a Corbynista fifth column.

“I just want to live in a decent society. And I know you do too. It doesn’t have to be an either/or choice because the opportunities created for businesses under a Labour government will be immense,” Corbyn said.

The chief problem with his programme is that it looks awfully busy. Too busy. The chief problem for Labour’s chances of putting it into effect, however, is that its leader has a perception problem and some of the people around him have a real talent for scaring the children and preventing it from getting a decent hearing. I doubt this changed anything in that regard.

Jo Swinson, meanwhile, might be right when she says the Liberal Democrats are the “true party of business”. Trouble is they’re struggling for a hearing with the voters as much as business is struggling for a hearing with politicians.

With the campaign moving on to other pastures, that will be made increasingly clear.

It isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You can make the case that business has had too loud a voice at points in the past and that this has played a role in creating the current volatile conditions and the grotesque inequality that plagues Britain. Corbyn was correct to highlight that, by the way.

However, there is also an argument that the pendulum has today swung too far the other way. And when sensible voices like the CBI’s are being marginalised, it’s a strong one.