It's not every day you see Daily Mail content in the hallowed liberal walls of the Guardian, but this evisceration of Boris Johnson by Max Hastings made both papers, perfectly skewering that "OMG Boris is a legend PM for life LOL" bollocks that so many otherwise intelligent adults continue to blurt:
If the day ever comes that Boris Johnson becomes tenant of Downing Street, I shall be among those packing my bags for a new life in Buenos Aires or suchlike, because it means that Britain has abandoned its last pretensions to be a serious country.
[...] Most politicians are ambitious and ruthless, but Boris is a gold medal egomaniac. I would not trust him with my wife nor – from painful experience – my wallet. It is unnecessary to take any moral view about his almost crazed infidelities, but it is hard to believe that any man so conspicuously incapable of controlling his own libido is fit to be trusted with controlling the country.
His chaotic public persona is not an act – he is, indeed, manically disorganised about everything except his own image management. He is also a far more ruthless, and frankly nastier, figure than the public appreciates.
Still at the Grauniad, still with the conference, there's this deliciously written sketch of the party faithful:
[...] Every party looks slightly scary when reduced to its rump, and in the Tories' case the look is particularly alarming. There are the angular, curiously pointy young men in three-piece suits, with staring eyes and towering foreheads, and chins that either jut out abruptly or do not appear to exist. There are alice-band girls in pearls with horsey laughs, bald middle-aged dandies in pinstripe, and the pensioners in blazers with features permanently fixed into expressions of sharp suspicion. These are the party's loyal, true-blue members – and they are emphatically not modernisers.
