He's a very naughty boy, but on the Tory fringes Boris Johnson remains the messiah

A day after the death of Rainbow’s Geoffrey Hayes, along came Bungle to cheer a mourning nation. Or a mourning One Nation as Boris Johnson would now prefer it.

From a great statesman so well defined by his consistency, the rebranding comes as a shock to send you to bed with a family-size bottle of tramadol. To travel at maximum warp, via one speech in Birmingham, from burqua-deriding Baby Trump to Harold MacMillan… well, only an idiot or a genius would try that.

Into which category he falls is a question to split One Nation into two. Or even three, factoring in those who place him in the Enoch Powell tradition of the clever fool with an intellect in direct inverse proportion to his judgment.

There are those, for example, who would have recoiled from pastiching Theresa May’s youthful lollops through fields of wheat for fear of highlighting a contrast. If this was the worst thing she ever did as a girl, he has been a very naughty boy.

But on the Conservative conference fringe, the former foreign secretary with the platinum sheepdog fringe remains the messiah. He could shoot someone in Parliament Square without losing their support. No holiday of a lifetime for guessing who specifically he has in the crosshairs of his telescopic lens.

Whether or not this speech marks the moment he loaded the silver bullet, our undead prime minister will have been less wowed by it than the live audience of worshippers who queued around the block like Barry Manilow fans armed with cigarette lighters. When you’re a star of his candescence, you can grab ’em by the ears with a recitation of anything – a particularly opaque chunk of Aeschylus in the original; the Exeter-Tavistock section of the 1936 Bradshaw railway guide –and be sure of finding their G-spot.

In fairness to Johnson, he was slightly more entertaining than that.

Admirers of subtle symbolism will have noted how Sky cut off May mid-sentence as she outlined the new immigration policy to cross to his arrival on stage. If she timed it to deflect attention from her would-be assassin, it wasn’t going so well.

What then emerged from Johnson’s mouth was unworthy, in strict truth, of his hero Winston Churchill. A natural-born orator he is not. He scratched his head as if auditioning for a reboot of the old PG Tips chimpanzee ads as he addressed his very own Tea Party. He spoke at bemusing length about being the first foreign secretary for 52 years to visit Peru, which he loved, though sadly not enough to reciprocate for Paddington Bear by emigrating. The point of his musings on Uxbridge’s part in putting Toblerone bars in Saudi airport duty free shops, if any, only he could possibly guess.

He made two perplexing references to the 14th century, one about a statute with a Latin name he claimed puts the authors of Chequers at risk of prosecution for giving a foreign power jurisdiction over our affairs.

This is a real worry. It’s an equally real worry that it remains illegal, as it’s been since Tudor times, for able-bodied men not to practise archery on a Sunday.

He darted from topic to topic almost at random, introducing the tangents with a casual “by the way”. For a while, he ummed and erred like a man not necessarily given to over-rehearsing a speech.

But while to "errrrrr" is authentically human, forgiving Boris his inadequacies is more than the divine right of his worshippers. It is their passion.

Admittedly they didn’t seem wild about his One Nation stuff, such as when he recalled his anguish at the hideous housing conditions as a young reporter in nearby Wolverhampton. They preferred his clarion call for the the reintroduction of blanket stop-and-search powers. For a nanosecond, it was almost as if his One Nation wouldn't have very much room for young black guys who commit such offences as innocently walking down a street.

But they were delighted with the crude partisan stuff, from Steve Bannon’s new bestie, about Corbyn and antisemitism. And inevitably they were close to delirium, if not a full-blown collective orgasm, when finally he turned the power of his mind to Brexit.

Mercifully reining in the gags, Johnson's intent (borrowing from a memorable Craig Brown parody of Martin Amis) was to convey this. “I am a serious”.

The ribcage-shatterer of common myth was shackled. Here in his stead was a gravitas-drenched deep thinker on the defining generational issue.

In taking his cudgel to Chequers again, this deadly foe of Project Fear deftly avoided the hint of hypocrisy.

One of the things those Eurocrat swine have been considering, he mentioned, is banning diabetics from driving. In which case the thoughtful thing to not do, you felt, lest Brexit is delayed long enough for this eccentric idea to become law, is deprive a well-known diabetic of her chauffeur-driven car.

Somehow, that act of kindness didn’t strikingly appear to be his intention. He came to bury May, or at least dig the grave a little deeper.

In that cause, cunningly disguised as it was, he ended on a note of infectious optimism by declaring: “If we get Brexit right, we can and will have a glorious future.”

The rain has been falling unceasingly for more than two years. What Johnson offered in its place may not last as long as the fan club’s beatific smiles as he shambled off the stage suggest they believe. But by piercing the deluge with shards of sunlight, as only he can, Bungle had made a rainbow.