BORIS JOHNSON: Unless Keir Starmer revokes his endorsement of a Corbyn premiership, he is simply not fit to be Prime Minister

So thank you, Keir Starmer, for finally being so clear. Thanks for telling the world what we really needed to know. The Labour leader told BBC Question Time last night that he wishes Jeremy Corbyn had won the last election. He wishes Corbyn were now Prime Minister.

I have to tell you I find that admission utterly terrifying. It shows that we may now be only days from electing a Labour government that has simply no idea how dangerous the world is today, and how important it is that Britain is strong in the face of our adversaries.

Keir Starmer genuinely believes that in the past five years, Jeremy Corbyn would have made the right decisions as Prime Minister for the security of Britain and the planet.

Really? Does Starmer seriously believe that?

If so – and he has not so far distanced himself from his remarks – Starmer has revealed something truly spine-chilling about the putative Labour government that he wishes to lead. Let us leave aside the mad teenage Marxist economics espoused by the Corbynistas.

Draw a veil over Corbyn’s disgusting judgement that the Hamas terrorists were his ‘friends’. That’s right, Starmer, we would have had a government, under your preferred Prime Minister, that deemed the authors of the October 7 massacre to be ‘friends’ of this country.

It is an astonishing and sick-making thought, but let us temporarily banish it from our minds. Let us focus for a moment on one issue alone: the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This is the biggest and most savage war in Europe since 1945, in which tens of thousands of totally innocent Ukrainians have been killed – and are being daily bombed in their homes – because of the criminal folly and miscalculation of one man: Vladimir Putin.

The Ukrainians have defied pre-war predictions, and are fighting back heroically. They will win, mainly because they have the courage of lions, and unlike Putin’s miserable conscripts they are fighting for their homes and their country. They will win, because at root this is a war for independence, and wars for independence tend only to end one way.

They will also win because they now have fairly sizeable – if woefully intermittent – access to Western weaponry; and that is a noble thing. I am proud of the role that the UK played, right from the start, in ensuring that the equipment started to flow.

It is absolutely right that we should support Ukraine – and indeed we should be doing more – because they are fighting for all of us. The Ukrainian fight for freedom is the cardinal struggle of the early 21st century: it is the fight that will determine the direction of the next few decades, because the Ukrainians are defending principles that matter universally.

They are fighting for democracy, the rule of law, for freedom of speech – and they are fighting against the tyrannical changing of borders by force. To judge by the polls and the flags I still see in their windows, most people in the UK believe that, after more than two years of conflict, the Ukrainians have an unimpeachable moral right to defend themselves and their families.

Most people believe that the UK was and is right to support them with weaponry. But that is emphatically not, repeat not, what Jeremy Corbyn thinks.

I always thought that Corbyn was, wittingly or unwittingly, a tool of Moscow. That appeared obvious to me during the Salisbury poisonings, when he seemed to query the blatant evidence before us, and to suggest – satirically – that Russia might not have been responsible for using Novichok on British soil. Even so, I was amazed at his response to Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Jeremy Corbyn called for an arms embargo – of Ukraine. ‘Pouring arms in isn’t going to bring about a solution,’ he said on TV. He said it again and again – that the UK and other Western powers should not be arming Ukraine.

So let us imagine that Starmer had got his way, and Corbyn had actually been running this country in February 2022. It would have been Jeremy Corbyn sitting there in those crucial early meetings – of the G7, of Nato, of all the key groupings of Western powers.

It would have been the CND-backing member for Islington North giving fellow world leaders the benefit of his views, at the very moment when the West had to decide the key question: were we effectively going to let Putin get away with it as we had in 2014, when he invaded Crimea and the Donbas?

Or were we going to help the Ukrainians – not least by giving lethal weaponry? Remember, at the time the idea of giving military assistance was still controversial. The French and the Germans were leery, to put it mildly. People warned of ‘escalation’, and the risk of Nato countries being dragged into a conflict with Putin.

There was really only one P5 country – with a seat on the United Nations Security Council – that was actively campaigning to support the Ukrainians in their fight, and that was the United Kingdom. If Corbyn had been there – as Starmer wishes – there would have been zero UK leadership on this issue.

The UK would not have been the first big European country to send lethal weapons to the Ukrainians. On the contrary, we would have been the backmarkers, the foot-draggers, the most reluctant of all. 

We would not have sent the 2,000 Belfast-made NLAW shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles, which were so useful to the Ukrainians in the first few weeks. We would not have helped set up the operation at the Ramstein air base in Germany, which began to coordinate the growing Nato support.

Of course not: the UK under Prime Minister Corbyn would have been trying to veto the whole thing. With Corbyn, and without UK drive, I am afraid the Western response would have been very different, and much worse – perhaps decisively worse – for the people of Ukraine. And yet that is what Starmer wants.

That is the hideous outcome he endorses by saying he wishes, even now, that Corbyn had been the man in charge at the time of the invasion.

We have now only 13 days until what could be a climacteric election, in which the British people may decide – purely out of frustration – to turn sharp Left, when so many other electorates are going centre-Right, and when Western democracies face such a challenge from the autocracies. 

From now until polling day, someone needs to challenge Keir Starmer, and ask him whether he sticks with his remarks to BBC Question Time.

Does he really believe that we needed Corbyn to lead us during the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Because if he does, then he must accept that Britain would have instantly forfeited any leadership role, and would have left the Ukrainians to their fate. That is a terrible, terrible admission.

By endorsing a Corbyn premiership, Starmer has cast serious doubt on Labour’s commitment to Ukraine, and Britain’s commitment to Ukraine under Labour. He has reminded us that so many in his party still genuflect to their past, and display a weird deference to ‘Moscow’ – as though Moscow was not now run by a kleptocratic gangster.

Starmer must now be put remorselessly on the spot. He must take it back. You can’t back Corbyn and back Ukraine at the same time. Unless he revokes his endorsement of a Corbyn premiership, and makes explicit his support for Ukraine, Keir Starmer is simply not fit to be Prime Minister.