BORIS JOHNSON: Unless Keir Starmer revokes his support for Corbyn as prime minister, he is simply not fit to be prime minister.

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

I have to tell you that I find this admission absolutely terrifying. It shows that we may be just days away from electing a Labor government that simply has no idea how dangerous the world is today and how important it is that Britain be strong against our adversaries.

Keir Starmer sincerely believes that over 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 this?

If so, and he hasn't yet distanced himself from his remarks, Starmer has revealed something truly frightening about the putative Labor government he wishes to lead. Let's leave aside the crazy Marxist economics espoused by the Corbynists.

Draw a veil over Corbyn's disgusting judgment that Hamas terrorists were his friends. That's right, Starmer, we would have had a government, under your favorite Prime Minister, that saw the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre as friends of this country.

It’s an astonishing and unhealthy thought, but let’s temporarily ban it from our minds. Let's focus for a moment on one issue: the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This is the largest and most savage war in Europe since 1945, in which tens of thousands of completely innocent Ukrainians have been killed and are being bombed in their homes daily because of the criminal madness and the 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 this is fundamentally a war for independence, and wars for independence tend to only end one way.

They will also win because they now have fairly significant, albeit unfortunately intermittent, access to Western weapons; and that is a noble thing. I am proud of the role the UK played, from the outset, in ensuring equipment started flowing.

It is absolutely right that we support Ukraine and, in fact, we should do more because they are fighting for us all. The Ukrainian struggle for freedom is the cardinal struggle of the early 21st century: it is the struggle that will determine the direction of the coming decades, because Ukrainians stand for principles that matter universally.

They fight for democracy, the rule of law, for freedom of expression and against the tyrannical changing of borders by force. Judging by the polls and the flags I still see in their windows, most Britons believe that after more than two years of conflict, Ukrainians have an unimpeachable moral right to defend themselves and their families.

Most people think that the UK was right to support them with weapons. But this is absolutely not, don’t repeat, what Jeremy Corbyn thinks.

I always thought that Corbyn was, consciously or unwittingly, an instrument of Moscow. This was evident to me during the Salisbury poisonings, when he seemed to question the blatant evidence we had and satirically suggest that Russia may not have been responsible for the use of Novichok on the British soil. Despite this, I was surprised by his response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Jeremy Corbyn has called for an arms embargo on Ukraine. The arrival of weapons will not bring a solution, he declared on television. He has repeatedly said that the UK and other Western powers should not arm Ukraine.

So let's imagine that Starmer had won his case and that Corbyn had actually led this country in February 2022. That would be Jeremy Corbyn sitting there at those crucial first meetings of the G7, of NATO, of all the key groups of the West. powers.

It would be the Islington North MP, a CND supporter, who would have shared his views with fellow world leaders at a time when the West had to decide the key question: were we actually going to let Putin get away with it like we did? in 2014, when it invaded Crimea and Donbass?

Or were we going to help the Ukrainians, including providing them with deadly weapons? Remember that at the time the idea of ​​providing military assistance was still controversial. The French and Germans were wary, to say the least. People have warned of an escalation and the risk of NATO countries being drawn into conflict with Putin.

There was actually only one P5 country with a seat on the UN Security Council that was actively campaigning to support the Ukrainians in their fight, and that was the UK. If Corbyn had been there as Starmer wanted, the UK would have had no leadership on this issue.

The UK would not have been the first major European country to send deadly weapons to the Ukrainians. On the contrary, we would have been the latecomers, the stragglers, the most reluctant of all.

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

Of course not: the UK, under the leadership of Prime Minister Corbyn, would have tried to veto all of this. With Corbyn and without the will of the UK, I fear that the Western response would have been very different, and much worse, perhaps even decisively, for the Ukrainian people. And yet this is what Starmer wants.

This is the hideous outcome he endorses, saying he wishes, even now, that Corbyn was the man in charge at the time of the invasion.

We have just 13 days left before what could be a decisive election, in which the British people could decide, out of sheer frustration, to turn sharply to the left, when so many other electorates are turning to the center-right and that Western democracies face such a challenge from autocracies.

Between now and polling day, someone needs to challenge Keir Starmer and ask him if he stands by his comments on BBC Question Time.

Does he really believe we needed Corbyn to lead us during the Russian invasion of Ukraine? For if he did, then he had to accept that Britain would have immediately lost any leadership role and abandoned the Ukrainians to their fate. This is a terrible, terrible admission.

By endorsing Corbyn as prime minister, Starmer has sown serious doubts about Labour's commitment to Ukraine and Britain's commitment to Ukraine under Labour. He reminded us that many members of his party still genuflect to their past and display a strange deference to Moscow, as if Moscow were not now ruled by a kleptocratic gangster.

Starmer must now be mercilessly put in the hot seat. He has to take it back. You can't support Corbyn and support Ukraine at the same time. Unless he revokes his support for Corbyn as prime minister and explicitly expresses his support for Ukraine, Keir Starmer is simply not fit to be prime minister.