Boris Johnson praises Peppa Pig and loses his place in muddled talk | Boris Johnson

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Boris Johnson criticized civil servants’ creativity for not conceiving the children’s cartoon character Peppa Pig, giving a rambling speech to business leaders in North East England in which he also compared himself to a Moses and imitated the noise of a speeding car.

Speaking at the Confederation of British Industry’s annual conference, the prime minister toured a variety of topics – confirming the announcement read out overnight by Downing Street that new regulations would force developers to install electric car charging points and herald the start of a new green industrial revolution.

However, he also became distracted at some points, asking executives to raise their hands if they had been to Peppa Pig World in Hampshire, where he was said to have taken his son, Wilf, with his wife Carrie for the weekend.

Johnson insisted that “government can’t fix everything, and sometimes government has to get out of your hair”, claiming that “the real engine of growth is not government” but in fact the private sector, which he praised for its energy and originality.

To illustrate, Johnson explained: “Yesterday I went, as we all should, to Peppa Pig World. Raise your hand if you’ve been to Peppa Pig World!”

“Loved it. Peppa Pig World is very much my kind of place. It has very safe streets, a system in schools, and a lot of focus on new mass transit systems. Even if it’s a bit stereotyped about Daddy Pig.”

Labour’s shadow adviser, Rachel Reeves, criticized the “shameful” rhetoric. She said it showed “how not seriously British business is taken” and the lack of a government plan for growth, adding: “No one was laughing, because the joke is not funny anymore. Labor is the real Labor party.”

Directing his firework at the BBC and Whitehall, Johnson continued: “But the real lesson for me was about the power of creativity in the UK. Who would have believed that a hairdryer-like pig or perhaps a Picasso-like hair dryer, a pig rejected by the BBC and now exported to 180 countries have theme parks in both America and China as well as in the New Forest – a company worth at least £6 billion for this country – and it’s still going.

“Now I think that’s pure genius, isn’t it? No government in the world, no government employee in Whitehall, can be conceivable with Peppa.”

Johnson also spoke about his first experience with electric cars, which he said he tested as an automobile reporter for GQ magazine, at which time he imitated the sound of an accelerating car.

The prime minister noted that one looked like a “rabbit cage on wheels”, while the other was the first Tesla car for sale in the UK – although he said they appeared to be “unused outdoor sports equipment”. However, Johnson heralded the advent of electric cars, saying, “The tipping point has come.”

At one point, he lost his spot during the speech and spent 20 seconds repeating the phrase “Forgive me” while shuffling the pages printed on the podium at some semblance of order.

Johnson also compared himself to Moses, because he came up with a “10-point plan” to help companies invest in tackling climate change. He described it as “new Wills I produced exactly a year ago” — and added: “When I came down from signing, I told my officials, the new Ten Commandments are ‘You should develop’ industries like offshore wind, hydrogen, nuclear power and carbon sequestration.

Pressing the serious issues of a conspicuous rollback of welfare reform and rail investment, Johnson was deeply on the defensive.

Despite being accused of “betraying” voters in northern England who helped him get to Downing Street, Johnson insisted on critics of the plan to scrap the eastern part of HS2 and not build a new line that would allow trains to travel through Bradford between Manchester and Leeds. Point”.

He said the government didn’t want to “wind your way endlessly through the pristine countryside” and instead preferred to use existing routes and bring them back into service, adding, “We’re doing the opposite of Beeching style.”

He said the £96 billion investment was “huge” and added: “It’s not going down, it’s better.”

After criticism from other Labor figures that the speech was “clustered” and a “national embarrassment”, Johnson defended his performance in a short clip with broadcasters.

“I think people got the vast majority of the points I wanted to make, and I think it ended well,” he said.

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