Romantic Boris searches for the right words

He has come bearing flowers for Rosie Remain.

And a card with the verse: "Roses are red, violets are blue, we've got a great future, outside the EU."

When Number 10 shuffles Boris off in the direction of the guns, you know one thing. They need somebody to risk falling flat on his, or her, face. Take one for the team.

Boris falls flat on his face. He gets stuck up zip wires. He stands in front of buses. He is Boris the Bold, Boris the Brave, Bonkers Boris.

He is a politician like no other, with a special quality. His critics, and even some of his friends, think he is a bit of a clown.

It was billed as a speech, but it wasn't, as Boris doesn't do speeches as such. It was more a cheerful, upbeat bumble.

He had made an effort to impress, wearing a best suit, and possibly having brushed his hair, although it is never easy to tell.

Then he got on to the serious business of wooing and reassuring the Remainers that he was not about to take them down a dark tunnel, or even to offer them a ride home (q.v. Amber Rudd), but into bright, sunlit, global Britain uplands.

His pitch was sprinkled with lots of Boris-esque classical illusions, metaphors, and fancy intellectual words.

And with devastating precision he put his finger on a major flaw with the EU.

It has no demos.

That will have been well understood, if not necessarily agreed with, by his more scholarly listeners. However, I am afraid that I had no idea what he was talking about, nor even how to spell it.

I couldn't even find the word in my dictionary. Whatever demos is, he told us that the UK has "never felt part of it" when it comes to the EU.

(After a bit of research demos turns out to be "the populace of a democracy as a political unit.").

Boris gave his speech in Central London, which is twinned with Brussels, and is the MP for a London constituency, which gives the context for one of his off-the-cuff points: "How many people can name their Euro MP? Those who greet me with cheery four-letter epithets in the street at least know who I am and roughly what I do. Generally speaking."

There will be many summaries from media outlets of the contents of his bumble, but the I think another of his colourful phrases sums up the message quite well: "I absolutely reject that it's (i.e. Brexit) some un-British spasm of bad manners. It is not some great V sign from the cliffs of Dover."

Oh, he also described Brexit as a "great liberal project of the age." Lower case, of course.

When it comes to substance, his bumble was lacking, as no doubt his critics will fall over themselves to say.

Yet when you are a-wooing, you have to make all the right noises before you start discussing the placing of the furniture in your new home, or whatever.

A romantic pitch to the Remainers then for Valentine's Day.

Yet I have a suspicion that when Remainers tell him where to put his proffered flowers, it won't be in a vase.