Boris Johnson makes surprise decision to avoid Tory defeat

(Bloomberg) — Boris Johnson made an unexpected appearance on the British election campaign trail, urging Conservative voters to deny Labour a landslide victory in a final throw of the dice by Rishi Sunaks' Conservatives to try to avoid the huge losses expected in Thursday's vote.

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We cannot stand idly by while a Labour government prepares to use a landslide majority to undo much of what we have achieved, the former prime minister said in an unscheduled speech in central London on Tuesday night, his first public appearance of the election campaign.

Johnson, who is not running in the election, repeated Conservative campaign arguments that Labour leader Keir Starmer would use a supermajority to raise taxes and allow uncontrolled immigration, allegations the opposition party denies. He urged former Conservative voters not to vote for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which he called Kremlin creeps and Putinists, a reference to the right-wing party leader’s comments about his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The intervention of Sunak’s penultimate predecessor, who left office in 2022 after a series of scandals, will prove controversial as the final day of campaigning begins on Wednesday. Starmer told reporters on Wednesday that Johnson’s late involvement in the campaign had only served to highlight the flaws that make the Conservatives unfit to remain in government.

“I’m not worried at all,” Starmer said during a campaign visit to south Wales, when asked if Johnson would help revive support for Sunak’s campaign. After six weeks of arguing that they were chaotic and divided, the resurfacing of Evidence A with 24 hours to go has vindicated that argument.

Labour is on course to win this week's election with a landslide majority, a result that would end 14 years of Conservative rule in Britain. So far, 11 of 12 MRP polls conducted during the campaign predict the opposition party will win more seats than Tony Blair won in a landslide in 1997. The latest, conducted by Survation on Tuesday, predicts a majority of 318 seats.

Boris Johnson, who led the United Kingdom from 2019 until his resignation in 2022, remains a politically controversial figure. He won the 2019 general election by a landslide and retains the support of Brexit supporters and some core Conservative voters, the kind of people Sunak is trying to convince to turn out to vote on Thursday.

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“If these polls are right, we are about to give Labour a supermajority that they will use to make us the thugs of Brussels,” Boris Johnson said on Tuesday. The former prime minister, who blames Sunak for his role in his downfall, only referred to the outgoing president once in his speech, and the two men did not appear on stage together.

Over the past two weeks, Sunak has adopted a strategy of acknowledging defeat rather than imploring typical Conservative voters to go to the polls and support his party, rather than staying home or voting for the right-wing Reform UK party led by Farage, another Brexit supporter. A Labour government would have a blank check to do whatever it wants if it wins a majority in line with what opinion polls suggest, Sunak said at a series of campaign events earlier Tuesday.

Sunak’s close ally, Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride, conceded on Wednesday that Labour looked set to win a record majority. “I totally accept that the current polls suggest that tomorrow Labour is likely to win the biggest landslide majority, the biggest majority this country has ever had,” he told BBC Radio 4.

Starmer warned that Strides' comments are part of a wider Tory strategy to suppress the vote.

“They are trying to incite people not to exercise their democratic right to go and vote,” he told reporters. “They are trying to discourage people from going to vote.”

Johnson’s involvement in the so-called Partygate scandal, which involved parties breaking rules in Downing Street during the Covid pandemic, for which he and Sunak were both fined by police, caused his popularity to plummet with the general public. When he left office, he had a net personal approval rating of -53 percentage points with the YouGov pollster.

Johnson has played a secondary role in the Conservative campaign, spending most of the last six weeks abroad on holiday. This is partly due to his poor relationship with Sunak. Some of Johnson’s allies blame the current prime minister, who served in Johnson’s government as chancellor of the exchequer, for his ouster, as Sunak’s resignation from Johnson’s cabinet is widely seen as hastening his downfall.

Until Tuesday evening, Johnson's campaign activity had been limited to posting endorsements for some Conservative candidates on social media and writing articles attacking Labour in the Daily Mail newspaper.

–With assistance from Irina Anghel and Isabella Ward.

(Updated with Keir Starmer's response from 4th paragraph.)

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