Boris Johnson’s final major speech marks a reluctant farewell

Nuclear announcement had PM’s familiar hungover, unrehearsed, couldn’t-care-less quality, says Sean O’Grady

Boris Johnson at EDF’s Sizewell nuclear power plant in Suffolk on Thursday (PA)

In the coming days, we may see more valedictory interviews and articles from Boris Johnson. He’s not the sort of man to share the limelight, not even with his successor as prime minister, and the temptation to defend his reputation will hardly dissipate simply because he’s no longer in office – a “tragedy” he chooses to blame on snakes and plotters in his party and the media, rather than his own manifest shortcomings.

So it was with his appearance on Thursday in Suffolk at the site of a new nuclear power plant, Sizewell C. “My intention – and what I certainly will do – is to give my full and unqualified support to whoever takes over from me,” he declared – before immediately taking a sideswipe at Liz Truss.

In contrast to Truss’s enthusiasm for locally supported fracking (an important and possibly fatal caveat in densely populated Lancashire), Johnson was sceptical: “Tell everybody who thinks hydrocarbons are the only answer, and we should get fracking and all that: offshore wind is now the cheapest form of electricity in this country ... Of course it’s entirely clean and green.”