The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Isabel Harbman and I'm joined by Katie Balls and James Forsyth.

Well, Boris Johnson has had a slightly awkward 24 hours after making a joke that a lot of

people didn't take as being that funny about the green contribution that Margaret Thatcher closing

the coal mines. James, was this a wise joke from the Prime Minister? No, it wasn't a wise joke.

And I think there's an irony here.

One of the Boris Johnson's books, he talks about when he stood in Clued South,

realising the difference between being a columnist and a politician,

that he went and he made a speech about Labour's mishandling of an agricultural crisis full of jokes. And he was slightly

perplexed why when he thought these were good jokes, he got so few laughs. And then one of the

members of the association came up to him after and said, look, you've got to understand for a lot of

people in this room, this is real to their lives. Like the government's mishandling isn't

just comic. It's costing them their livelihoods.

And I think this was the same mistake, if you see what I mean. It might have worked as a quip in a

column about the effect of Fatscher's desire to kind of break the power of the National Union of mine workers.

But it doesn't work in the context when

you're talking to some of the communities that ended up as kind of collateral damage in Scargill's

power play. And so I think that is tricky. I also think the location is particularly tricky.

One thing that is often said with some truth by Boris Johnson's defenders is, look, yes, people

get outraged by his jokes, but the people who vote for him aren't the kind of people who get

outraged by his jokes. Now, I think that the reaction of some of the 2019 Red Bull Tory MPs

...