QUENTIN LETTS: Wit-laced acidity to chop by means of grease of Starmerism

As pub landlords were clearing their throats to say, ‘Time, please, ladies and gents’, and as the undertakers were screwing down the coffin lid… enter Hurricane Boris! Immediately the stench of defeatism was dispersed.

The former PM, never exactly on time at a shindig, bounced into the General Election campaign at Rishi Sunak‘s closing rally in London. As ten o’clock neared, weary Tory activists were invigorated by a speech of classic Borisian brio. It had the effect on them of a siphon-squirt of Baby Bio and soda on flopping lilies.

In an immediate dig at the Labour leader’s alleged work-shyness, Mr Johnson thanked activists for ‘coming so late tonight – way beyond Keir Starmer‘s bedtime, we are told’. He added: ‘I was glad when the PM asked me for help and I could not say no.’ Of course, Boris. We believe you.

I Was Glad, that great anthem set to music by Hubert Parry, has an ineffable ability to transform the listener. Boris’s insistent optimism perhaps has the same effect. Here, finally, was some wit-laced acidity to cut through the grease and make clear the ghastliness of five years of Starmer. ‘At the very moment when this country has beaten Covid and beaten post-Covid inflation, when we should be encouraging enterprise and putting money back into people’s pockets, Westminster is about to lurch diametrically in the wrong direction.’

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pictured with Attorney General and parliamentary candidate for Banbury, Victoria Prentis, during a visit to a farm on July 2

Rishi Sunak carrying McDonald’s breakfasts at Beaconsfield services in Buckinghamshire while on his election campaign trail on July 2

Mr Sunak pictured with Ms Prentis in a tractor on a farm in Banbury on July 2

Too late to alter the result of tomorrow’s result? No doubt. But Mr Johnson’s dramatic intervention, watched by a beaming Sunak, should encourage Tories not just to shrivel and wring their mitts through the looming terrors.

The 2019 majority winner rejoiced in the freedoms of Brexit. He predicted that Sir Keir will pay into Brussels budgets again –’you watch’. Labour were ‘so cocky now they are barely concealing their agenda: whacking up taxes on pensions and property, persecuting private enterprise, attacking private education and healthcare’, all while ‘poor old Starmer’ was unable to differentiate a man from a woman and just ‘sits there with his mouth opening and shutting like a stunned mullet’.

And yet the mullet flops and flaps its gills at the brink of power. It’s fishy all right.

E arlier I caught up with Mr Sunak at a farm near Banbury. He was doing his best to be perky. Give him that. But he has been a prisoner of his shyness and a ludicrous security bubble. From the hedgerows the furtive crunch of police sharp-shooters.

Reporters trudged to a barn where South Devon cows and Angus-cross calves were being tended by a cow-girl called Alice. One let rip with a jet of digested grass. The London Press corps gasped.

Mr Sunak leaned on a fence chatting to the farm’s owners, Julia and John Colegrave, and explained that he enjoyed the company of cattle. ‘My neighbour in Yorkshire is a dairy farmer and in the evenings I find hanging out with the cows is very calming,’ said Rishi.

The Prime Minister pictured during a visit to a Morrison’s bakery in Oxfordshire

Mr Sunak pictured during a visit to an Ocado distribution warehouse in Luton on July 2

Farmer Colegrave encouraged his VIP guest to climb into the cab of a Holland tractor. Once behind the wheel, Mr Sunak located the horn and gave it a toot. And another. And another. Demob happy?

An odd vignette. Rishi was tooting his horn watched by reporters, a few farm hands and a phalanx of security goons, some dressed as hedges. Not an obvious floating voter to be seen. Both Tory and Labour campaigns have been like this. Potemkin electioneering. Boris would never have settled for that.

‘Brilliant!’ raved Mr Sunak, by now taking tea with farm butcher Chris Treadwell. Rishi was keen to know what went into Chris’s sausages. A politician heading for the mincer becomes hypnotised by such things.

Mr Colegrave said of his visitor: ‘He’s all right. He wasn’t dealt a good hand. I’d employ him.’ Farmdog Madge, a Kelpie, got into a scrap with one of the police sniffer dogs. Madge won. But the real laurels last night went to the leader they should never have jettisoned.