BRITAIN’S fractious Tories gather in Manchester on October 1 for their annual bloodletting… sorry, their annual conference. Coincidentally, that Sunday the good citizens of Catalonia will be voting in their independence referendum – assuming the Guarda Civil does not interfere (which is more than likely). Tory conference deliberations will, of course, be dominated by matters European, though I doubt if the likely attack on democracy in Catalonia will merit much of a mention. Instead, following his Telegraph calling card on Friday, this year’s Conservative conclave should be christened The Great Boris Bake Off.

Last week the redoubtable Fraser Nelson used his own Telegraph column to bemoan the fact that the Foreign Secretary seemed to have gone AWOL over the summer, or at least was keeping uncharacteristically below the media radar. How unlike Boris! True, the Blond One was getting the most mileage out of his Foreign and Commonwealth sinecure by dashing off round the world on photo ops, such as seeing what’s left of Libya after Nato bombed it back to the Stone Age in 2011. But you could see his heart wasn’t in it.

For the rest of the world was happily taking the mickey out of our Boris. In August, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, the UK’s former ambassador in Washington and at the EU, published a withering piece in the Evening Standard (editor: George Osborne) more or less saying that Boris was joke. Then an anonymous Tory minister briefed The Times: “There is not a single foreign minister there who takes [Boris] seriously. They think he’s a clown who can never resist a gag.”

Much worse, Theresa May was openly patronising the Foreign Secretary, having artfully side-lined him from direct involvement with the actual Brexit negotiations – technically the job of David Davis. For instance, Fiona Hill, May’s former joint chief of staff, made a habit of heckling Boris Johnson at meetings of the National Security Council while the PM pointedly failed to rebuke her. Ms Hill took the rap for May’s disastrous decision to call a snap election but Boris is still smarting. The man has an ego the size of a red London bus, but it’s a fragile one.

So it was only a matter of time before we heard from the Blond One again. Our Boris is a noted classical scholar but he wasn’t going to stay brooding in his tent like Achilles after he fell out with Agamemnon. Instead, we got the Boris Leadership Manifesto on Friday, timed perfectly to dominate the Tory conference. Never mind upstage the PM’s forthcoming speech in Florence, on Brexit.

This is a leadership bid by Boris, and no mistake. But an artful one. At a single stroke, the Foreign Secretary has re-defined the Brexit debate in the UK and by doing so reinforced the deep fault lines inside the Conservative Party. Ultimately, Boris will never lead the Tory Party as we know it because his intervention creates the dynamic towards a split in the party and the eventual emergence of a new, pro-EU centrist grouping in the UK. The net result – assuming Boris does not bottle it – will be another round of crisis in the disintegrating British state.

Let’s look at what Boris said in more detail. The speech – like Boris - is absurdly optimistic. It outlines a utopian, post-Brexit Britain, led by an ardent pro-Brexiteer like himself: “the second most powerful country in the world” as he refers to it. It is easy for rationalists to sneer at the Foreign Secretary’s naïve view of a Britain on its own making free trade deals, reviving the Commonwealth and smiting its enemies. On the contrary, rather than ruling the waves, Britannia will crushed economically and politically between the big power blocs, after a hard Brexit.

But the truth or falsity of the Boris vision is not the point. His speech was calculated to the nth degree. It was not his usual off-the-cuff article. We know it had been pre-prepared with his inner circle and was notified to 10 Downing Street too late for the PM’s office to intervene. What Boris wants is to destroy the new political axis that has formed between David Davis and Chancellor Philip Hammond. And he has probably succeeded.

OVER the summer, it is the Chancellor – backed by the City – who has been getting his way. Hammond can’t roll back Brexit but he is determined to get the softest exit possible. He and Davis have conspired to go for a European deal involving a long “transitional” period in which the UK stays in the single market, or as near as dammit. That will involve the UK contributing heavily to fill the £50 billion black hole in the EU budget caused by Brexit. It may also require paying “fees” for market access rights.

All of this is anathema to true blue Brexiteers. Yet with Davis and the PM on board, and Corbyn’s hapless Labour MPs in tow, it looked like the project of a soft Brexit (on the City’s terms) was doable. The only possible danger lay in hard-line Brexiteer like, say, Jacob Rees-Mogg rallying the Tory faithful for a last stand of the Brexiteers. But Rees-Mogg was always a straw man – hence the summer media game of building him up only to ridicule him later on. Boris is an altogether different kettle of political fish.

Boris-type populism is designed to appeal to the masses - like his flawed hero, the dictator Julius Caesar. The new Boris manifesto is written deliberately to win votes. Witness his disinterment of the political corpse of the £350 million a week Brexit bonus for the NHS. Witness his proposal to abolish the ‘tampon tax’ after quitting Europe. Or the ban on “foreigners” buying property in the UK. Or the promise (Trump-like) to boost public infrastructure investment through borrowing. This will be the talk of the corridors and bars in Manchester.

Boris is playing political roulette. The last thing Tories of any stripe want is another election soon. That would run the risk of putting Jeremy Corbyn in charge. Much better to get a Brexit deal done before going to the country. On the other hand, Boris needs to brand any Brexit outcome as his own, if he is to be PM. Which means he has to take on Hammond and Davis, even if it risks a debilitating split in the Tory ranks.

Boris has decided to make his own luck by setting the Tory agenda now before his rivals can impose their own Brexit vision. Will lazy David Davis climb back on the political fence? Will Chancellor Hammond retaliate with populist measures of his own; ie cutting student tuition fees in England? And what of that increasingly lonely and irrelevant figure, Theresa May?

In Scotland, it will be a disaster if we simply await developments. As our friends in Catalonia grasp, just waiting around for the independence Godot to arrive is a fool’s dream. We might start by our SNP MPs being less accepting of the rigged Westminster debating rules that left them twiddling their thumbs on the green benches during most of the debate on the Great Repeal Bill. After the Boris intervention, British politics is tinder dry. Let’s use that to Scotland’s advantage