PM forces Bill Gates and other investors to stomach a net zero speech peppered with recycled gags
Sit back and enjoy the ride. Here was Boris Johnson in his comfort zone. A conference room at the Science Museum where he could indulge his fantasy as the Bertie Booster of British politics by giving his standard upbeat, cut out and keep after dinner speech – never mind that it was actually shortly after breakfast – to an invited audience of some of the world’s richest men and women at a Global Investment Summit.
This was Boris at his most optimistic. No need to mention the inconvenient truths of food and lorry driver shortages. Covid infection rates increasing at an alarming rate could also be safely ignored. Those were all just present day irritants. The story he wanted to tell was of a future in which Britain would lead the world to the promised land of net zero by 2050. A speech that was light on detail but peppered with recycled gags. Not that Boris got many laughs. Perhaps billionaires don’t have the same sense of humour as the rest of us. Or maybe they’d heard them all before at Davos.