Boris Johnson offered an unusual version of Martin Luther King Jr’s famous “I have a dream” speech during the Conservative Party spring forum in Blackpool.

       During his speech at the Winter Gardens, the Prime Minister spoke about a man he had met while out running on Saturday morning who was looking for lugworms on the beach to help him catch some bream.

       Mr Johnson told the conference: “I want you to know that we Conservatives back everybody in this country who gets up early and invests their time, their skill, their energy and their effort in the hope of a bigger return.

       “You need to use a lugworm to catch a bream, my friends, and I have a bream, as they say,” Mr Johnson added, provoking laughter from his audience.

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       He continued: “I have a bream. I have a bream of a vision of a one-nation Conservatism that takes that capitalist spirit and uses our wonderful free market system to make sure that we have the revenues further for (Chancellor) Rishi Sunak to pay for our fantastic NHS, the 50,000 more nurses and the thousands more doctors that we’re hiring.”

       Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr (PA)

       (PA Archive)

       Mr King, an American civil rights activist who was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, delivered his famous “I have a dream speech” in Washington DC in 1963.

       Speaking at a march for jobs and freedom to a crowd of more than 250,000 people on the steps of Lincoln Memorial, Mr King called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism and racial segregation in America.

       He told the crowd in 1963: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”