Now bring Boris off the bench, Rishi. He’s your star striker

THE Labour Party is currently in a considerable mess. An obvious rift has opened up between Sir Keir Starmer and his Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in which Ms Reeves is currently the winner. Such conflicts are normal in government, but it is striking that Labour, torn between the desire to win the Election and to hold on to its green targets, is at war over how to spend the taxpayers’ money even before it has got its hands on it.

Sir Keir is vulnerable in many other ways. We really have very little idea of what he would do about crime and disorder or about the migration crisis. This is because he too does not know.

His main education policy is a spiteful attack on independent schools, which will not in any way hurt the truly rich, but will hit parents on modest incomes who value education above all else.

The dogmatic smallmindedness of this scheme, adopted to please the party’s punitive class-war wing, probably gives us a pretty good idea of the whole Starmer package once it is revealed.

Labour is still held back by its ancient desire to level down, while being newly encumbered with green dogma and the sexual radicalism to which Sir Keir himself (not as ‘moderate’ as he likes to pretend) is heavily committed. This is why he still struggles to define a woman, and always will.

However many times he claims to have accepted Brexit, many will wonder if he really means it or is just saying so for the sake of his political career.

Sir Keir is also under siege from his party’s many Muslim voters who are displeased by his cautious line on Israel’s actions in Gaza. But his past stern condemnation of the Corbynites for their dalliance with Middle Eastern extremist factions makes it hard for him to shift.

So there it is, the Labour Party, a vast open goal into which the Tories ought to be able to belt a succession of well-aimed footballs. Meanwhile, the

Liberal Democrats are stuck with a leader who struggles to escape claims that he was feeble, when in power, over the Post Office scandal. And the

Reform Party, supposedly a threat from the Right, still lacks a coherent or persuasive leader.

Opinion polls, as ever influenced by fashion and ‘what everybody thinks’, do not necessarily tell us what the voters will actually do when confronted with a choice. And so it is up to Rishi Sunak to work with all the strength he has to defy pundits, polls and conventional wisdom.

He would be foolish and ungenerous to refuse to employ Boris Johnson in the intensifying campaign. Mr Sunak has won and still holds that great prize which he sought, the Prime Ministership. If he wins a General Election against the odds, he will hold it still more firmly.

Winston Churchill advised magnanimity in victory, and he was right. There is bitterness between Johnson and Sunak, but it can and should be dispelled before it hardens into a permanent feud.

Why not – for the sake of the nation – take the help of the man who was responsible for the most convincing Tory victory of recent times, the Conservative politician who still speaks to

Red Wall England as nobody else can?

Johnson, like anyone with politics in his veins, must be bursting to play his part in this battle. By this we do not just mean writing a few letters to swing voters, but throwing himself (as only he can) into the hurly-burly of the campaign.

Millions of patriotic pro-Brexit voters still hold him in high regard, and those who loathe him will never vote for Rishi anyway. Bring back Boris, soon.