He’s back! Boris Johnson joins campaign trail at 11th hour

Appearing before Rishi Sunak at a Tory campaign event, Boris Johnson warned a Labour win was ‘pregnant with horrors’ and derided Nigel Farage as a ‘Kremlin crawler’.

Boris Johnson talks at a campaign event at the National Army Museum in London. Picture: Getty Images.

Boris Johnson has joined the election campaign trail at the eleventh hour, warning that a Labour landslide victory is “pregnant with horrors” and deriding Nigel Farage as a “Kremlin crawler”.

The former prime minister appeared before Rishi Sunak at a campaign rally in central London in a last-ditch attempt to win back disaffected Conservative voters.

Johnson had been expected to sit out the election campaign but is said to be “vociferously angry and upset” about the prospect of a Labour landslide. He warned Tory voters that Labour would “whack up taxes” and “persecute private enterprise and education and healthcare”.

“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 — because too many good, kind, moderate Tories are about to vote for other parties and thereby get exactly the opposite of what they really want.”

Johnson directly criticised Farage over his claim that the West provoked Putin into invading Ukraine, and highlighted the Tories’ pledge to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent by 2030. Johnson has previously accused Farage of “parroting Putin’s lies”.

Rishi Sunak talks at a campaign event at the National Army Museum. Picture: Getty Images.

He said: “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.”

Johnson’s intervention comes after Sunak sent him a message last week asking him to do everything that he could to help the campaign as it enters its final stage.

Speaking after Johnson, Sunak told activists that they had “48 hours to save Britain from a Labour government”. He added: “I know you are tired, but we have to give it one last push. We have to fight for every vote. We have to fight for our values.”

The delicate negotiations between the two men were carried out between Isaac Levido, the Australian strategist who is overseeing the Conservative Party’s election campaign, and Lord Kempsell, an aide to Johnson.

In a sign of the continuing tension between them — Johnson blames Sunak for his downfall as prime minister — they did not appear on stage together during the rally. Johnson has avoided referring directly to Sunak in any of the messages of support he has sent to his allies.

Earlier, in a video in support of Priti Patel, the former home secretary, Johnson said: “Unless you vote for Priti in Witham, there is a risk that we’ll get an even bigger Labour majority, a really big Labour majority, with more wokery, more illegal immigration, more pointless, limp kowtowing to Brussels and of course ever higher taxation for you and your family under Keir Starmer and the Labour Party.”

Sunak will meanwhile warn of a permanent left-wing “supermajority” as he makes his final plea to those who have deserted the Tories for Reform to return.

The prime minister has seized on analysis by The Times suggesting that only 130,000 voters in 100 seats could decide the result of the election, making the difference between a 200-seat Labour majority and a hung parliament.

“If you are one of those 130,000 voters who could stop a Labour supermajority, lend us your support for we are the only party that can stop a supermajority and stand up to Labour,” the prime minister will say at a rally in Hampshire on Wednesday.

“The Liberal Democrats won’t do that, they’ll just nod through whatever Labour proposes and Reform can’t do that because they just won’t win enough seats.”

Johnson’s appearance will be welcomed by Tory candidates defending red wall seats, where the former prime minister is still more popular than Sunak.

However, it will be met with reticence in some other areas in the south, where Johnson is a divisive figure as a result of Downing Street parties and Brexit.

Nevertheless party strategists believe that he is a valuable asset in convincing 2019 Tory voters who now say they will vote Reform to return to the fold.

Tory campaign chiefs fear that former Conservative voters who have switched to Labour will not be won back, so they are targeting the larger group who have switched to Reform or are not intending to vote.

An analysis of YouGov’s MRP poll finds there are about 810,000 people in the 100 tightest seats planning to vote Reform. To deprive Labour of a majority, Sunak would need about 337,000 of them to switch to the Tories, about 0.7 per cent of the electorate. This is higher than the number of Labour voters Sunak would need for the same result, as those moving from Starmer’s party effectively count double by reducing Labour votes.

A quarter of the 100 closest seats are projected to be won by other parties, mostly the SNP, with the Tories second to Labour in the other 75. To reduce the projected 200-seat majority to 54 seats, Sunak would need 182,000 Reform voters, about 0.4 cent of the electorate, to return to the Tories in the 73 constituencies where receiving their votes could mean a Conservative win.

These 73 seats are heavily Brexit-leaning, with just eight of them voting to stay in the EU. On average 59 per cent of their voters supported leaving the EU, more not only than the population as a whole but also the 56 per cent in the 108 seats the Tories were projected to hold by the poll.

Sunak is focusing on the concerns of such voters and will claim on Wednesday that Labour would revalue council tax, introduce road pricing and require “expensive net-zero changes” to homes.

“If you are worried about an unchecked, unaccountable Labour government you can stop that by offering us your support so we can stand up for you and be your voice in the next parliament,” he will say.

Although commentators have pointed out that the term “supermajority” has no meaning in the UK electoral system, Sunak will argue that a landslide would allow Labour to “shunt our politics to the left and change the rules to ensure that they can stay in power for decades”.

Claiming it is his “duty” to “wake people up to this danger” he will add: “If they get the kind of majority, the supermajority that the polls suggest, they will set about entrenching themselves in power.”

A senior Tory source said that the campaign regarded the approximately 15 per cent of 2019 voters who had switched to Labour as “gone” but believed they could win back those tempted by Reform by stressing the dangers of Labour, saying: “That’s where the campaign is.”

Asked on Tuesday whether Johnson and Liz Truss had damaged the Conservative campaign, the prime minister said: “You’ve got to just play the cards that you’re dealt. No point sitting there going, ‘Well I wish someone actually had given me four aces.’”

It has been one of the most delicate negotiations of the election campaign. For weeks aides to Johnson and Sunak have been attempting behind the scenes to convince the two men to do a joint event — a show of unity to prevent the apparently existential wipe-out that faces the Tories when voters go to the polls on Thursday (Steven Swinford writes).

The raw antipathy has made it almost impossible. Johnson still blames Sunak for bringing down his premiership. Sunak has described the legacy he inherited from Johnson and Truss as the “worst hospital pass for decades”.

Their rapprochement last night — fleeting though it was — was born of mutual necessity. Sunak is spending the final days of the campaign attempting to avoid one of the worst results in electoral history. His legacy, his hope, is to keep the Tories within touching distance of Labour. Johnson needs a party that still stands a chance of returning to power if he is ever to fulfil his long-term ambition of another spell in No 10.

Sunak messaged Johnson last week asking him to do all he could to help. While a message between two former colleagues may not sound much, given the scale of the psychodrama that envelops them, it was a significant moment. Allies of Johnson had previously made clear that he was willing to support Sunak only if the prime minister contacted him directly, something he had been unwilling to do.

Even when Johnson made his intervention last night, his support came with inherent caveats. The former prime minister made clear that he was backing the Conservative Party. Sunak was not mentioned by name, and the two men did not appear on stage at the same time.

But otherwise it was a reprise of what has become the core message of the Conservative Party’s campaign — that a vote for Reform is a vote for a generation of Labour government. Direct attacks on Farage and Starmer over their character. Extolling the virtues of the Conservative Party’s commitment to spending 2.5 per cent on defence.

Of course it is too late to turn the Conservative Party’s electoral fortunes around. Any ambition of winning the election is long gone. But the hope is that interventions from Tory big beasts past and present — including those that have little love for one another — will be enough to avert a disaster.

The Times