Daily catch-up: Boris wins the Tory leadership beauty contest

George Osborne gave a clever speech, Theresa May a serious one, but the Mayor of London swept them both aside

I commented on George Osborne's speech yesterday. In today's Independent, I have short reviews of contestants nos 2 and 3 (not online yet so I reproduce them here):

Contestant No 2 in the Conservative leadership beauty parade was Theresa from the Home Office. Angular, stylish and with one of the most difficult sales pitches in the competition, she was going to sell herself as the Competent One.

This was despite being responsible for the Prime ­Minister’s unkeepable promise to get net immigration down below 100,000 a year. I halved it from 320,000 to 154,000, she boasted, but then the numbers doubled again. “One of the reasons is student visas,” she said, so she wasn’t going to give in to “university lobbyists” who want her to ease the rules on international students. But neither was she going to say much about the other reasons the target was becoming more distant.

She was going to make a thoughtful Tory case for further efforts to prevent abuse of the asylum system, so that help could be given to those who really need it. What we have we hold, said the Respectable Candidate.

Then it was the turn of candidate No 3. The Boris. I’ve seen him deliver many disappointing speeches, but this wasn’t one of them. This was the speech of his life, pitching hard for the job he really wants. It was very funny, very One Nation and very Eurosceptic.

He has finally succeeded in harnessing the buffoonery and word play to a serious argument about social justice. The heart of the speech was a concern to close the gap between the rich and the poor, with an aside pointing out that contestant No 1, the Chancellor, who spoke the day before, had stolen his policy on the living wage. “The only type of crime currently going up is the theft of City Hall policies – a crime I entirely condone.”

Not since the days of Michael Heseltine has Tory conference adored a speaker so. Like him, Boris has wide cross-party appeal. He made George and Theresa look boring and very Tory.

• The outgoing Prime Minister speaks today. Stephen Bush spoke to Anthony Seldon, author of Cameron At 10, about him:

[He is] the least damaged and therefore you could say the least interesting of the last five prime ministers.

Seldon's book (which I reviewed here) is a monumental first draft of history.

• I am not sure how genuine this is (via Sam Freedman and Tyler Cowen), but who can disagree with this abstract of a paper by Nathan J Robinson of Harvard University:

Can Philosophy Be Justified in a Time of Crisis?

September 3, 2015

Abstract:

In this paper, I take the position that a large portion of contemporary academic work is an appalling waste of human intelligence that cannot be justified under any mainstream normative ethics. Part I builds a four-step argument for why this is the case, while Part II responds to arguments for the contrary position offered in Cass Sunstein’s “In Defense of Law Reviews.” First, in Part I(A), I make the case that there is a large crisis of suffering in the world today. (Part I does not take me very long.). In Part I(B), I assess various theories of “the role of the intellectual,” concluding that the only role for the intellectual is for the intellectual to cease to exist. In Part I(C), I assess the contemporary state of the academy, showing that, contrary to the theory advanced in Part I(B), many intellectuals insist on continuing to exist. In Part I(D), I propose a new path forward, whereby present-day intellectuals take on a useful social function by spreading truths that help to alleviate the crisis of suffering outlined in Part I(A).

• And finally, thanks to Moose Allain ‏for this:

"Welcome to Book Binding Club. Please make yourself a tome."