BORIS JOHNSON: Starmer’s majority is built on sand – it’s 1.5 miles wide and 1 inch deep. Here’s my ten-point guide to attacking Labour and returning to power

Well, my friends, there is no escape. Our worst fears have come true. Unless you have lived in the jungles of the Philippines, you will have heard of the atomic bomb that exploded over the British political landscape.

Things developed, in Hirohito's immortal phrase after Nagasaki, not necessarily in the interests of the Conservative Party; and you will now be familiar with the recitation of appalling superlatives.

We Conservatives have had the worst electoral performance since our party was born almost two centuries ago.

We allowed Keir Starmer, a north London lawyer with a speech impediment, to lead Labour to one of its greatest victories, greater even than Labour's post-war victory in 1945.

A record number of ministers have lost their seats.

The media is treating this election as the political equivalent of the asteroid that crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula and killed the dinosaurs, and frankly, I understand why. Too many former colleagues lost their seats in a vote-canceling process that was in many ways unfair, even absurd.

It was painful to watch, and it took me a while to get off the couch and sit down at the keyboard to compose my thoughts. Like everyone else, my congratulations go to the victors, my condolences to the vanquished, but those who really need our prayers are the conservative survivors: the 121 decrepit remains of the explosion.

They are about to perform a vital function on behalf of the entire British public, namely to hold this supermajority that emerged from Starmergeddon to account, and it is essential that we give them every encouragement possible.

If you look closely at the numbers, you will discover that Starmer's landslide is not what it seems.

He got fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and 2019. His own majority in Holborn and St Pancras was halved. He lost two shadow cabinet members.

As for its vote share, it is one of the lowest in modern history, at around 34%, almost ten points less than the Conservatives' vote share in 2019.

There is a mystery surrounding this landslide: how could the Conservatives have suffered such losses, when support for Labour was so lukewarm? The answer is as complex as the extinction of the dinosaurs. But the Yucatan asteroid in this catastrophe was obvious: it was the Reform Party.

I have just spoken on the phone to an old friend and colleague who was expecting to win by a huge majority until he realised at the last minute that thousands of good Tory voters were voting for Reform, and that the deduction from his total was enough to put Labour in the lead.

Repeat this phenomenon on the political scene and you begin to understand the cause of this landslide.

I fear that the cigar-smoking Pied Piper of Clacton has played a major part, as he probably intended, in the destruction of the Conservative Government. The question now facing the 121 Conservatives, as they limp away from the guns of Balaclava, is how they are going to react.

How to rebuild? How to come back? Can we come back?

Of course we can and we will, sooner than you think. My friends, the situation is not as bad as it was in 1997, although statistically it looks even worse.

The Labour majority is built on sand; it is a mile wide and an inch deep; and if the experience of the last five years proves anything, it is that the electorate can overturn a seemingly impregnable position like a child demolishing a Lego fortress.

I say to my Conservative colleagues that we are the oldest and most successful political party in British history. We are capable of regenerating ourselves all the time. We do not need to try to absorb other parties, to try to acquire their vitality like a transfusion of monkey glands.

We have to occupy the space ourselves and my humble suggestion to the 121 is that they need to rebuild that giant coalition of 2019, go back to some of the big themes that proved so effective that we won seats across the country.

I don't know who the leader of the opposition will be, but here is my ten-point starting plan: how to attack the Labour Party and return to government as quickly as possible.

1. Immigration: Starmer will stupidly abandon the Rwanda plan, the only plan so far designed to defeat cross-Channel gangs. Hit him on that.

2. Housing: Labour governments always build less housing than Conservative governments because they don't like private ownership and prefer social housing. Emphasize this and give young people the hope of having a home, the main reason to vote Conservative.

3. Brexit: Starmer will try to sneak back into the EU and turn this country into a satrapy of Brussels. He will try to subject this country to EU rules, but without any say in the matter so that those rules become an undemocratic abomination. Be critical of this from the start.

4. Taking it to the next level: Starmer is now claiming that this campaign was our idea and our plan. It is the right thing to do for the country, and Labour must be held mercilessly accountable for everything from high-speed rail (on which we should revert to our 2019 policy) to the reversal of Labour’s shameful anti-nuclear policy.

5. Crime: Starmer believes in reducing prison sentences and he sides with Sadiq Khan in opposing identity checks. He is soft. We are tough and we support the police. We have to say so.

6. Net zero emissions: this is a good idea provided we use it to promote green technologies in the UK and millions of jobs in the British private sector. Starmer seems simply interested in state control and regulation. Our approach is better.

7. Taxes and growth: Starmer is clearly about to raise taxes, when they are already at very high levels, and when the government is not always spending our money well. Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves think they can get away with these unnecessary tax rises. Don’t let them.

They also want to impose all sorts of crazy new employment rules, like reporting ethnic pay gaps and banning contact with colleagues outside working hours – which will further hamper the UK’s productivity. Fiercely oppose these measures.

8. Public services: Starmer is viscerally opposed to investing more private money in our services. He seems to hate both private education and private healthcare. His position is grossly illiberal and economically absurd. He is also likely to cave in to the unions’ unreasonable pay demands. Say no.

9. Wokery: Starmer wants more mandatory wokery. It's important to be sensitive to people's feelings, but some of this stuff is crazy and needs to be fought.

ten. Global Britain: There is a real danger that traditional pro-Moscow sentiment within the Labour Party could lead to a softening of the UK's position on Ukraine. That would be a tragedy.

One last thing to think about when we are back in power: don't be too hasty in getting rid of leaders who have won elections. As I never tire of repeating, some polls gave us only two or three points behind, at the time I was forced to resign in what was really just a media frenzy. As for reform, it regularly got zero points in the polls. I am only pointing this out…