THE moment called for a serious, sober analysis of the multitude of crises that the UK is currently facing.

It called for leadership and a detailed plan for dealing with the energy, fuel, food, cost of living – and everything else – crisis.

Unfortunately, when the moment called, the only person around to pick up the phone was Boris Johnson.

So instead, what we got was the only thing he ever offers: bluff, exaggeration and spin.

Boris Johnson’s big leader’s speech was as light as air and deeply unsatisfying, reminding us once again that he is the political equivalent of a pack of Quavers.

Or, as Keir Starmer put it in his own conference address last week, Boris Johnson is a deeply trivial man.

He showed just how trivial during this speech, delivered as it was in his usual scattergun “I’ve got to dash off, I think I might have left the hob on” style of speaking.

READ MORE: Lesley Riddoch: Borish Johnson plays to English crowd but alienates Scots with every word

There were jokes aplenty, as you would expect. Few of them were good jokes, right enough, but the party faithful in the hall forced themselves to laugh along, in the same way you do when your drunk uncle tells fart gags during Christmas dinner.

To get the crowd going he made reference to Michael Gove’s Aberdeen nightclub jaunt (“Jon Bon Govie”) and talked about how both he and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who have (approximately) 12 children between them, are doing their bit for population growth.

There was another joke about SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford, something about a billiard room and fibre-optic broadband. I’m sure it sounded better on paper.

And then, of course, there was “build back beaver” – the unasked-for sequel to “build back batter” and “build back butter”.

It was a speech that was so light on policy that you’d be forgiven for forgetting that the blundering idiot gesticulating from the stage was actually our prime minister.

Instead, we were treated to a series of vague ambitions and phrases so broad that they could have been delivered by any politician with access to a microphone.

We want people to have a job! It would be nice if people lived in homes! During the pandemic, the NHS was quite useful!

One of the many things the speech was missing was Greta Thunberg heckling from the side of the stage. Blah, blah, blah indeed.

Forgetting that his party has been in power for over a decade, Boris Johnson said that he would end the “delay and dither” and “reshape our society”.

He was spitting the platitudes out so fast I wished I could reshape my eardrums.

It felt like a campaigning speech, not the speech of an incumbent prime minister years out from the next general election.

READ MORE: RECAP: Boris Johnson's Conservative Party conference speech

His key point, insofar as it was possible to find one, was on “levelling-up”. Nobody knows what it means. But Boris Johnson had a wine reception to get to and didn’t hang around to enlighten us.

After 45 minutes of bizarre and incoherent rambling, his speech came to a sudden and abrupt halt.

It was so sudden that there was a brief lull before the attendees realised it was time to jump to their feet and applaud.

In the post-address autopsy, some commentators sought to glaze over the ridiculousness of both the speech and the man, by talking-up Boris Johnson’s apparent energy and charisma.

I saw neither. What I saw was an ageing clown whose bag of tricks is looking threadbare.