BORIS JOHNSON's rousing rally cry to disaffected Tories

By Boris Johnson, Daily Mail 22:47 02 Jul 2024, updated 01:36 03 Jul 2024

Good evening everyone and can I say how grateful I am for everything you have been doing and for coming so late tonight – way beyond Keir Starmer's bedtime, we are told.

And if you are slightly surprised to see me, I want to be clear that I was glad when the PM asked me for help and I could not say no.

I am here for one reason and one reason only – the same reason as you.

We are here because we love our country and, whatever our differences, they are utterly trivial by comparison with the disaster we face if these opinion polls are right – and it is a big if.

I think the British people will still show more sense on Thursday, still draw back from the brink.

But if the polls are right then at the very moment when this country has beaten Covid, and beaten post-Covid inflation, at the very moment when we should be encouraging enterprise, and growth, and putting money back into people's pockets, Westminster is about to lurch in diametrically the wrong direction.

And so we cannot just sit back as a Labour government prepares to use a sledgehammer majority to destroy so much of what we achieved – what you achieved. 

Five years ago you helped to send Jeremy Corbyn and his then disciple Keir Starmer into orbit — and we got Brexit done. We restored democracy to this country.

It was because we got a proper Brexit – and remember how hard that fight was – that we came out of the EU single market.

We controlled our own regulation, and my friends, whatever they say, that national independence was vital when it came to approving vaccines faster than any EU country and getting the fastest vaccine roll-out of any major economy and the fastest economic rebound in the G7.

And let me ask you. Which of the 200 countries on Earth was the first government after all the miseries of Covid to put a licensed, approved and effective Covid vaccine into the arms of our citizens?

It was the British government, a Brexit government, a Conservative government.

It was thanks to Brexit – which you helped to deliver – that this country was able to take the lead in standing up for Ukraine and in delivering Aukus (the security partnership between Australia, the UK and the U.S. announced in September 2021) – taking back control of our money, our laws.

And it is thanks to Brexit that today we can finally control our own borders. And is it not the height of insanity, if these polls are right, that we are about to give Labour a supermajority which they will use to make us nothing but the punk of Brussels – taking EU law by dictation, but with no say in how it is made?

Paying into Brussels budgets again – you watch – scrapping the Rwanda scheme just as it is on the verge of coming into force, just as it is being imitated by governments across the world, just as it is actually beginning to act as a deterrent and bringing back uncontrolled free movement as the price of Starmer's deal with the EU.

Does this country really want to give Starmer that kind of mandate? Labour are so cocky that they are barely concealing their agenda any more: whacking up taxes on pensions and property, persecuting private enterprise, attacking private education and private healthcare – with all the pointless extra burden that will place on the taxpayer.

And all the time poor old Starmer is so terrified of disobeying Left-wing dogma that he is reluctant to explain the difference between a man and a woman and he just sits there with his mouth opening and shutting like a stunned mullet.

Do we want this madness?

Do we want ever higher taxes? Do we want more weird wokery imposed on our schools?

And yet all this is coming now, this week, this gigantic Labour majority pregnant with horrors – because even though Labour's share of the vote is far lower than ours was in 2019, and even though Starmer has record low approval ratings for a man in his position, our system will deliver that supermajority.

Too many good, kind, moderate Tories are about to vote for other parties and thereby get exactly the opposite of what they really want, even if those other parties turn out to be full of Kremlin-crawlers who actually make excuses for Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

They say Putin's a good operator, runs a tight ship; and if that's what they mean by a man who shoots journalists and poisons his opponents and murders thousands of innocent Ukrainian civilians, I say shame on them.

They can achieve nothing in this election except to usher in the most Left-wing Labour government since the war, with a huge majority, and we must not let it happen. Don't let the Putinistas deliver the Corbynistas. Don't let Putin's pet parrots give the whole country psittacosis, which is a disease you get from cosying up to pet parrots.

If you actually want higher taxes – if you feel you have a few thousand to spare – then vote Labour on Thursday.

If you want uncontrolled immigration, and mandatory wokery, and pointless kow-towing to Brussels, then go right ahead and vote for Starmer.

But if you want to protect our democracy and our economy and keep this country strong abroad by spending 2.5 per cent of our GDP on defence, then the only way to do that is to vote Conservative.

I know you will, and thanks again for everything you have done, and it is not too late to tell everyone else.