Boris Johnson was shut out of the leadership race for delivering Brexit - Bernard Ingham

They called it the European Common Market in those days. It is now the European Union. And because Boris Johnson eased us out of it – “got Brexit done” (more or less), he has now realistically concluded he cannot unite the warring tribes of his Parliamentary party. There will be no second coming for him.

I am not saying that he should have been on the ballot paper. It was always arguable whether he was the right man to take over the reins again. But it is outrageous that a minority in his Parliamentary party should have tried – and succeeded – to shut him out of this week’s leadership election because he implemented a decisive referendum decision.

It is difficult to know the size of the Europhile campaign against him. But there can be no doubt about its zeal or aim. Lord (Michael) Heseltine has candidly admitted that with Boris gone comes the chance to get us back in the clutches of Brussels.

This is not merely undemocratic. It is treasonable in seeking to subject us to a foreign ‘power’.

The EU scarcely qualifies for that term these days as the Franco-German hegemony has demonstrated in its palsied response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, especially when it carries with it a threat to European freedom.

It is also undemocratic, bureaucratically bound in voluminous red tape, dictatorial, expensive, held together by bribery and horribly pretentious in seeking membership as a right of international institutions.

Unlike the single currency, which has damaged the economies of southern Europe, there is no common foreign policy any more than there is a single elected government. The EU is a con and in its present state an uncertain defender of Western freedom.

It is also hostile to our interests by threatening us with trade disruption if we do not behave and, in trying to annex Northern Ireland, could be promoting the break-up of the UK. After all, the benighted Scot Nats are already clamouring for EU membership once they have broken free of the English.

In short, the pestilence called the EU clearly rots men’s brains.

It follows that anyone opposed to Boris’s return as PM because by popular demand he broke with the EU is blind, devoid of judgement and a threat to democracy.

It is another matter whether Boris should have had a second go in No 10. He is the most charismatic, if flawed, politician in Britain. He gets things done – wins an election with the biggest Tory majority since 1987, implements Brexit and leads the world out of a pandemic that nearly killed him. And then he rallies the West against Putin’s war.

But he is disorganised, as a free spender not the man to clear our massive, debilitating debts and, as he has now belatedly recognised, not the man to bring his party to its senses.

This always made our new Prime Minister, ex-chancellor Rishi Sunak, the more comfortable but unexciting candidate. He is unlikely to frighten the markets but will almost certainly preside over another period of what is called austerity in trying to rebalance the economy. In spite of that can he weld his party into an electoral fighting force over the next two years?

That has been the problem with this crucial leadership election. The previous leisurely summer stroll that produced Liz Truss as PM never pointed to the dangers of a concentration on growth without explaining how she would steadily bring the British economy back into balance after the £400bn Covid bill.

The latest manoeuvrings have not identified a unifier, only a splitter. Nor have they given us any clear idea how the more orthodox Mr Sunak will bring a steady return to prosperity and growth from our present debilitated straits.

It is all to play for and the stakes are high. No one should imagine that Sir Kier Starmer is the answer, lumbered as he is with a deep Left-Moderate split, an addiction to tax and spend and the dead hand of his trade union paymasters.

We are flying on a wing and a prayer. But there is one absolute certainty: we shall come crashing down unless the Tory Parliamentary Party at last faces up to its responsibilities. They and they alone have put Rishi Sunak in No 10.

They owe him and us their concentration on essentials, not their petty quarrels, hates or Euro-pestilence.