As the race to replace him as prime minister narrowed in Westminster, Johnson told attendees at the Farnborough Air Show that after “three happy years in the cockpit and having done some pretty difficult if not amazing feats”, he would “hand over the controls seamlessly to someone else,” but added, “I don’t know who.” In a typically Johnsonian speech filled with jokes, metaphors and unscrupulous historical references, he likened the pace of technological change in aviation to a fight between a “Tyrannosaurus rex and a killer whale”. Describing the flight he took from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire last Thursday, he said: “Like a vertical firecracker, we slipped the noisy bonds of Earth – as the poet Magee puts it – and danced the skies with silver wings of laughter.” The wing commander on board asked him if he wanted to go, but Johnson checked to be sure because the jet cost £75 million and there were only 148 in the RAF fleet. “Don’t worry, you can’t break it,” he was told. “I thought, ‘Oh, well, famous last words,’” the prime minister said, recounting maneuvering the gear lever to make “a plane cylinder,” “an imaginary loop the loop” and then “a more complicated thing called a cylinder barrel”. . He said: “We started pulling a few Gs, as they say, and when I regained consciousness I could see the sea getting closer and closer.” Johnson recalled his view of wind farms and his love of “clean, green energy” that would help end “any dependence” on imported Russian oil and gas. “That daydream must have gone on for a while because my colleague said, ‘Hey, I’m taking control again now,’ and we went home happy,” Johnson said. He asked how the Typhoon would fare against the first RAF plane he flew – an F-15E Strike Eagle – 25 years ago in South Carolina and likened it to asking “what would happen in a fight between a Tyrannosaurus rex and a whale killer”. Johnson said: “They said it would be no contest.” In a criticism of his critics, including several Tory leadership contenders, the Prime Minister spoke of his hope that the UK would launch its first satellite, adding: “And I leave it to you to imagine who, in that stage, will like to send into orbit. Perhaps a volunteer could be found from the green benches of parliament. I leave it entirely to your speculations.’ Johnson did have a serious message to deliver, stressing that with temperatures in England “higher than the Sahara”, there was a significant need to tackle what he called the “comfortable coal tea heating our planet to destruction”, which caused in the place by aircraft emissions. He said: “We know we have to fix it. we know that time is running out.”
