Voters must now face the reality of a Labor government

I remember my profound astonishment, when I was at the Foreign Office in 2017, at Theresa May's disastrous decision to call an early election. In 2019, sitting in Downing Street, I played a small part in Boris Johnson's election poker game and his subsequent rout of the anti-Brexit opposition in December. Now, in 2024, our repeal of the Fixed-Term Parliament Act, that unfortunate constitutional innovation introduced by our current Foreign Secretary, has put the power to call elections back in the hands of the Prime Minister. Today he lit the electoral paper.

GOOD. A summer election might be better than a dreary November election. The economic news could easily get worse, not better. And anyway, when politics is dominated by the electoral calendar, it's time to have those elections: the window to do anything substantial has disappeared.

Of course, we can all see the opinion polls. For many months I have been highlighting here what they entail and what we should do to change them. Nothing happened. It is therefore very risky to call elections now.

But it also imposes a real choice. Every voter must now really ask themselves whether they really want to give Keir Starmer and his reformed Labor Party carte blanche for the next five years. You know for sure that you will get higher taxes and more spending. You know for sure that the bloated and creaking NHS will continue to fail us. The fantasy of electricity produced solely from renewable sources will drive up your bills and lead to the demise of our industry. The unions will be back. And immigration, legal and illegal, will start to increase again.

You know above all that everything we have done to reestablish our national independence will be threatened. Labor will blame everything that goes wrong on Brexit. They want, to begin with, new agreements on foreign policy and commercial cooperation with the EU. They will pay the necessary price, subordination to the court and the EU institutions, because deep down they do not believe that we are capable of managing our own affairs. Before you know it, you will be back in the customs union, in the single market, and running to Brussels with every crisis. And everything we have fought for together since the Brexit referendum will be under threat.

I know many of you are frustrated, you, our former Tory voters, you who voted for us for the first time in 2019, you who want a different country that we have not yet delivered. I know many of you don't fear Labor, or perhaps you think that, as bad as they are, they can't be any worse than us. I've certainly heard in my conversations across the country since resigning from Cabinet in 2021 that many of you are completely fed up and want to kick us.

I do not blame you. I share your frustrations. I wish we did better. I tried to get us to do better. But the moment of truth is now coming. We need you. I want you to come back.

And the Party must help you come back. We can make it a lot easier for you to rally around the colors if we give you something to rally around. Our manifesto is not yet written. I hope that leaders will use it to develop a real conservative program: reduce the tax burden; rethinking net zero; take a good look at what the NHS is doing with all the money it gets; build more houses where people want them; scrap the Equality Act; get more prisons and more powers to fight crime; and above all, cap legal immigration and leave the ECHR if it becomes necessary to stop the boats.

I had hoped to run in this election myself. This is now in the hands of the Party. We will see. But what is now in your hands, readers and voters, is the decision over the next six weeks. This election will decide something very important for all of us. It will decide whether we fall back into the torpor of being a quasi-province of Brussels or, as I hope, whether the fight continues.

Conservative friends, supporters of Brexit, we must now wake up. Don't let Labor turn us into a European satellite. Give us the strength to fight back. And help us get back on track.