Permanent Revolution

Boris Johnson declares year one, again; some notes on the profusion of dog breeds; and the German Greens give us the rail map of the future.

I lasted about half of Boris Johnson’s speech at the Conservative party conference this lunchtime. Now I’m freelance there’s relatively little chance of someone popping up behind me and demanding I write some mean jokes about it, and without that incentive I found it was just too painful. 

It was a speech given in a parallel universe, in which the Prime …