BORIS JOHNSON: The nation doesn't really want Sir Keir or his tax-hiking, EU-loving, soft-on-illegal-migration agenda. There's still time for us to swerve from the cliff edge of Starmergeddon

No it's not too late. There is still time between now and Thursday for the nation to swerve from the cliff edge.

We can collectively come to our senses. We can dodge the bullet.

All we need to do is snap out of the trance – burst from the poll-driven media-inflated balloon of hysteria about the so-called inevitability of the result.

There is nothing inevitable about the decision we must all take, together, on July 4.

Keir Starmer's approval ratings are the lowest ever for an Opposition leader on the verge of entering Downing Street

So let us all pause. Let's collect our thoughts, and have a few lungsful of air. Let's consider the paradox – the mystery - at the heart of this election campaign. It is in its way unlike any other election of modern times.

If the opinion polls are to be believed – and I retain my doubts – then the British people are about to confer on Keir Starmer and the Labour Party an absolutely colossal parliamentary majority.

Britain is about to jump the points and jink left, abruptly, in what could be a Left-wing socialist supremacy that lasts for a decade or more.

And yet Starmer's own approval ratings are shockingly low – the lowest ever for an Opposition leader on the verge of entering Downing Street, let alone of a triumph on the scale currently predicted.

Poll after poll says the same.

The people view him with apathy, with resignation, as you might look at a dish of limp lettuce. You have to ask yourself why. Why, after 14 years of Tory government, and all the vicissitudes we have been through, is there so little active enthusiasm for Starmer?

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The answer is simple: people don't really want him, or his agenda; or certainly not in the way they actively wanted Tony Blair.

I remember 1997, the dawn of the New Labour era – the ecstatic crowds ululating in Whitehall, the chanting of 'Things can only get better'.

Tony Blair seemed to incarnate a new politics, brilliantly triangulating between Left and Right, a Labour leader who cracked down on crime but kept the top rate of tax at 40 per cent, yes 40 per cent.

That is very obviously not the Starmer agenda, and people can see it. Elections in the UK are determined by a large number of sensible and civilised people who occupy the middle ground, and who could be called small-c conservatives. If you look at what they actually want, now, it is the opposite of what Starmer & Co are offering.

Take the No1 issue that people raise with pollsters – the problem of illegal immigration. For too long we have had gangsters endangering people's lives by bringing them across the Channel in small boats, and finally we have a plan to fix it – sending them to be processed in a third country.

This policy, the so-called Rwanda policy, was always going to take a huge effort to enact fully, as I explained when I announced it in April 2022. I said then that we had a highly litigious culture in which human rights lawyers (eg Starmer) would do their best to frustrate the popular will. But it is the right policy. Governments around the world are following suit.

Thanks to Conservative persistence, we have finally got it through Parliament. The mere prospect of being sent to Rwanda is already having a deterrent effect on illegal migrants – and yet Starmer would simply junk it, and put nothing in its place.

I thought Rishi Sunak utterly skewered his opponent on this point in the TV debate on Wednesday night, and on other points; because the more you dig into Starmerism, the more Left-wing and dangerous it turns out to be.

In 1997 Tony Blair seemed to incarnate a new politics, brilliantly triangulating between Left and Right

Watch Starmer try to explain the difference between a man and a woman, the stammering, stuttering, blinking contortions of a man desperately trying to appease the bonkers ideologues in his party, but without offending the common sense of Middle Britain. It would be comical but for the fact that Labour is genuinely planning to make it easier for pre-pubescent kids to identify as a different sex.

Is that really what the people of this country want? Is that the change they are gagging for? I don't think so.

Or take the UK's relations with the EU, where after years of effort this country finally reached a deal that allows us more or less perfect democratic independence. Now, Starmer proposes to unscramble the whole thing, and to make this country the punk of Brussels – taking rules from the EU, with no say in making them.

Is that what the people want – more years of Euro-tedium, more rancour, more dispute? I don't think so. I think on the whole people would much prefer a proud, dynamic and confident government that made a success of Brexit, doing free trade deals with the U.S. and with India, and others.

Will Starmer do any such thing? Of course not: it is clear his plan is to take us back into the single market like a whipped cur, even if it means free movement from the EU to the UK.

And then there is the economy – the biggest single reason why people are rightly viewing Starmer with such hesitation. We have just been through Covid. The state was forced to huge but unavoidable exertions to look after people and businesses. The tax burden simply had to rise.

But that pandemic is now over. Do the British people want to be hit with yet higher taxes now after they have already paid so much? Do they really need to?

No, they certainly do not – and yet that is what Starmerism means. The Labour Party is now so confident of victory that they no longer even bother to conceal their agenda to clobber your property and your pension and much besides.

Take it all together – the grim reality of Starmer's agenda – and the mystery is easily solved. That is why Starmer is so oddly unloved, for a man on the verge of triumph. It is not just that Starmer lacks Blair's charisma; he lacks the broad appeal of Blair's policies.

Blair and then Home Secretary David Blunkett believed in banging up criminals. Starmer believes in cutting their sentences and letting them out early. He wind-bags away about his time at the CPS, but ask any policeman about his tenure. It was known as the Criminal Protection Service.

Blair actively encouraged wealth creation, and the private sector, and discouraged envy. Starmer's hatred of private enterprise rises off him like a vapour – so actively resentful that he is preparing to attack private education, and force many schools to close.

He now tells us he wouldn't even use private medicine to save his own family. Is that really in line with the instincts of moderate, centre-Right Britain? I don't think so.

Let's face it, the only reason Starmer is (allegedly) about to get such a landslide is that so many Tory voters are fed up, and preparing to stay at home or vote for other parties like Reform – even if they turn out to be Putin's pet parrots.

It would be a huge mistake. In the last debate Rishi showed what he can do, and on any fair reading he won. It is by no means too late to tilt the steering wheel in the direction of common sense, avert Starmergeddon, and prevent this country from going in completely the wrong direction.

Vote Tory this Thursday!