With Theresa May’s legacy of dancing, coughing, being handed a P45 and having letters fall off a promotional board behind her, Boris Johnson had a low hurdle to clear in his first speech to Conservative party conference as prime minister. Here are seven times he failed the task.

Kangaroo testicles for Bercow

Johnson may well have been the first British prime minister to use the words “kangaroo testicle” in a conference speech. In a segment in which he bemoaned people having more control over voting on celebrity reality shows than they did with parliament, he suggested that “if parliament were a reality TV show the whole lot of us would have been voted out of the jungle by now”.

But, he added: “At least we could have watched the Speaker being forced to eat a kangaroo testicle”. In 2017, Johnson’s own father, Stanley, appeared in the ITV show I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!, declaring before he went into the jungle that he did not “know that a lamb’s testicle is different from kangaroo testicle”.

Konstantin Chernenko – who?

Johnson is well known for his classical references, but it was the 1980s cold war era he plundered for his speech. Suggesting that the Scottish National party was trying to drag Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, unwillingly towards No 10, he cited the example of Konstantin Chernenko. He also suggested people look it up. A severely ill Chernenko was elected to succeed Yuri Andropov as head of the Soviet Union, and lasted only 13 months, during which time he could frequently not attend official functions. After his death, in 1985, he was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Mother knows best

After a few weeks during which Johnson has had some difficulty with his family – his brother resigning, his sister suggesting there might be other motives behind Brexit – he revealed that his mother had voted to leave the EU.

He suggested she was the origin of his one nation Toryism: “My mother taught me to believe strongly in the equal importance, the equal dignity, the equal worth of every human being on the planet.”

Sajid Javid applauds himself

Johnson dropped a quick unscripted “thank you, Saj” in the direction of the former home secretary and now chancellor, when he referenced the Conservatives’ plans to reinstate the 20,000 police officer jobs axed during the previous 10 years. This led to the awkward sight of Javid furiously applauding himself in the audience.

Pulling the skin off a rice pudding

In a section addressing the UK’s energy usage, Johnson said there were some days when wind and solar power were delivering more than half of the UK’s energy needs. He explained this was in defiance of the sceptics who had once said that “wind farms couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding”. The source of that quote? One Mr B Johnson in 2013.

He also cited the pioneering work of the nuclear fusion research team at Culham, Oxfordshire. He was quieter about the fact that the work had been partly funded by Euratom, which Johnson has committed to leave by 31 October.

Bus nut SEO strikes again

Fans of the conspiracy theory that Boris Johnson keeps saying things like “model of restraint” or that he makes model buses to take control of the Google search results for “boris johnson model” or “boris johnson bus” got another boost today. Describing himself as a “bus nut”, Johnson trotted out the bus-making anecdote again as he announced an ambition to improve bus services.

Corbyn in space

If Bercow was going to end up eating kangaroo testicles, a worse fate awaited Jeremy Corbyn. In a section on planned space ports, Johnson suggested there was one “communist cosmonaut” he would like to “coax into the cockpit”, and later suggested figuratively, if not literally, putting the Labour leader into orbit.

He also at one point claimed that Corbyn wanted to abolish the British armed forces, a rather inaccurate reading of Corbyn’s 2012 speech, which said: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every politician around the world, instead of taking pride in the size of their armed forces, did what Costa Rica have done and abolished their army, and took pride in the fact they don’t have an army.”

Fish puns galore

“You could see that one coming,” said Johnson as he floundered his way through a pun-laden routine, arguing that despite having “names like Salmond and Sturgeon” the SNP did not want to take control of Scottish fishing. “We want to turbo-charge the Scottish fishing sector; they would allow Brussels to charge for our turbot,” he said.

Still, what with the kangaroo anatomy references earlier, at least his speechwriter avoided using the word pollocks.