Johnson is a proven winner. He alone has an electoral mandate

THE Conservative Party is in the intensive care unit and in such a perilous state that we need to throw everything we have at it in order to survive. Truly startling polling has shown that if there were a General Election today, the Tories would be left with just a handful of MPs. We would be the fourth party in Westminster, behind Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP. We would be in a far worse position than in 1997.

It has been less than three years since, under Boris Johnson, the Tories were elected to government with the largest share of the vote since 1979 and the biggest majority for 32 years. It’s not that long ago that we won the staggering by-election victory of Hartlepool. May’s local elections had been surprisingly good for a party in government for 12 years.

And yet Johnson was forced out by his own MPs before abdicating as Prime Minister. Even on that very day, the Tory Party was only a few points behind in the polls – still defying the normal gravitational rules of politics that very often see governing parties in the doldrums mid-term.

Compared to David Cameron’s 13-point poll slump mid-way during his term as leader, when he went on to form the first Conservative majority government since 1996, Johnson’s opinion poll deficit was trivial.

Yet here we are with Tories 38 points behind in the ‘Red Wall’ seats mainly in Northern English working-class constituencies. In the rest of the country, we are in a worse position than when Theresa May very nearly lost our majority in the 2017 Election.

The choice now is almost certainly between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Only Boris is a proven winner. If Sunak is chosen, I fear we would enter uncharted and potentially dangerous waters.

YES, I am very sure Sunak could reduce the poll deficit slightly and prevent the Tory Party from being wiped out. But don’t forget, the polls plummeted to minus 15 during the summer when there was a real possibility that he, not Liz Truss, might become Prime Minister. Only Johnson has a legitimate electoral mandate from the people. Make no mistake, that mandate is very important.

Those voters in the Red Wall seats who always voted Labour but switched to the Tories in 2019 did so because they were voting for Boris Johnson and Brexit. He was the man they knew would deliver Brexit – and he did.

People in places such as Bishop Auckland and Sedgefield were proud to say they voted for Boris. As soon as Boris was defenestrated, so this vote disappeared, too. I am convinced that Red Wall voters hadn’t had long enough to get used to the fact that it is the Conservative Party that has always been on the side of working people. They weren’t yet comfortable in our skin, the party is not yet imprinted into their voting DNA.

The ineluctable truth is Boris was the choice of the people in the seats that the Tories had never won before and whose support we will always need to win to form a government.

In contrast, I’m sure that Sunak would most certainly be Labour’s favourite to succeed Liz Truss. In the summer, the party’s deputy leader Angela Rayner said: ‘Boris had this Teflon coating… it’s like a little magic. Where he was able to get through to the public and get through to the places that I don’t see the others having…’

Any Tory MP who votes for Rishi Sunak tomorrow will be taking a risk with the future of the party. If he is chosen, power would be transferred out of the hands of the people who exercised their choice at the ballot box less than three years ago and placed into their own very privileged and already powerful hands. That would be an untenable and undemocratic position for us to be in.

If that happens, I have no idea how we would be able to look voters in the eye and deny them a General Election that Labour is screaming out for. Only one man can prevent us having to buckle under the weight of those demands and putting the country through this – the man who already has the electoral mandate from the people to govern.

People know who got the big calls right, who drove and delivered the vaccine development and roll-out, who lifted Covid restrictions when much of the world was still in various stages of lockdowns.

They know who was the first world leader to provide aid to Volodymyr Zelensky against all of the advice from Whitehall mandarins. They know who broke the Brexit deadlock.

Our party has almost flatlined, it needs a shock to jolt it back into healthy life. That can only be delivered by the return of the most electorally successful leader our party has known since the days of Margaret Thatcher. Make no mistake, we are fighting for our very life and if we get it wrong, the history books may show that next week was the week that saw the beginning of the end of the party many of us love.

Sir Keir Starmer is no Centrist like Tony Blair. He is much further to the Left. A Tory Party led into the next Election by anyone other than Boris Johnson would mean the country would be looking into the face of a Socialist government. We must put Boris back into No10 – and then we must unify. Our warring Tory family must put the past behind us and look only to the future and take the fight to where it should have been all along, to Labour.

If we get this wrong, it could be the beginning of the end of our party