Nick Boles: Appalling Choice contest must start the process of building something new

In years to come it will be known as the Appalling Choice of 2019. It will be cited alongside classical mythology’s Scylla and Charybdis — the one a six-headed monster and the other a whirlpool — spelling death and destruction for any passing ship. It will be recorded as the only election in modern times in which you wouldn’t trust either of the prime ministerial candidates to mind your children for an hour, let alone run the country.

In the blue corner we have a compulsive liar who has betrayed every single person he has ever had any dealings with: every woman who has ever loved him, every member of his family, every friend, every colleague, every employee, every constituent.

As a senior member of his Cabinet once put it to me: “You can always rely on Boris...to let you down.” His bumbling braggadocio disguises an all-consuming ego utterly without conscience, empathy or restraint.

In the red corner is a blinkered Pharisee, a man so convinced of his own rectitude that he sees no contradiction between his pious homilies about racism and equality and a lifetime of support for terrorists, murderers and racist thugs. Like all leaders of a totalitarian mindset, he is entirely uninterested in the lives of individual human beings. He cares only for classes and factions, and the struggle between abstract political forces.

I was elected to Parliament as a Conservative three times, most recently in 2017. I acted as Boris Johnson’s chief of staff for his first few months as Mayor of London in 2008. It ought to be natural for me to vote Conservative in the general election on December 12. But I cannot. Boris Johnson has turned the party of Disraeli and Churchill into a vehicle for shrill English nationalism.

He has purged its ranks of anyone who favours a close relationship with our European partners. He has sought to defy our courts, neuter our Parliament and deceive our sovereign. Nothing is sacred. He will betray the NHS in a heartbeat, if that is what it takes to get a trade deal out of his role model — Donald Trump.

Since quitting the Conservative Party at the start of April, I have worked closely with lots of Labour MPs on stopping a no-deal Brexit. I admire and like many of them.

Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn. Liz Kendall and Stephen Kinnock. Jess Phillips and Peter Kyle. These are all people I would be happy to see responsible for the government of my country. But all of them are standing in this election as Jeremy Corbyn’s candidates.

If Labour wins a majority next month, the public will vote to install an anti-Semite in No 10 Downing Street. A man who let Momentum’s stormtroopers hound a young Jewish mother, Luciana Berger, out of the Labour Party and stood by while they tried to deselect one of Labour’s leading lights in London, Margaret Hodge. A man who, as lifelong Labour supporter Ian Austin said last week, has made a career out of backing Britain’s enemies and attacking our friends.

The choice of whom to vote for in a general election is not only a choice of Prime Minister. It is a choice about the future of our country, the values we want it to stand for, the principles we want it to be governed by.

Voting Conservative implies that the arrogance and entitlement that oozed from every elongated vowel in Jacob Rees-Mogg’s interview about the victims of Grenfell Tower are acceptable in a Cabinet minister in 21st century Britain. Voting Labour involves believing that it is all right for a political leader to take the word of Russia’s president rather than that of our security services.

It involves turning a blind eye to Bashar al-Assad’s chemical slaughter of children in Syria and thinking that Britain was wrong to take part in military action to punish him for it. If you are not willing to do any of this, you must reject the Appalling Choice. Say no to Johnson and Corbyn and all of their candidates. Start the process of building something new.

We will not remake Britain’s political system in one day. But on December 12 we can make a start. Wherever you live, vote for whichever party is best-placed to challenge Labour and the Conservatives. In Camberwell and Peckham, where I live, I will vote Liberal Democrat. Not because I agree with all of their policies — their promise to stop Brexit by revoking Article 50 makes me profoundly uneasy.

But I will vote for Jo Swinson’s candidate because it will not entail the kind of moral compromise that voting Conservative or Labour would. Because I trust her to pursue the closest possible relationship with the European Union after Brexit.

And, most of all, because the Liberal Democrats will insist on electoral reform and the introduction of a proportional voting system, which is essential if we are ever to break free of the tyranny of the two big parties and open up British politics to new forces, new faces and new ideas.

When Henry Kissinger was asked about the Iran-Iraq war between Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein, he grunted: “It’s a pity they both can’t lose.” When you enter the polling station next month and are confronted by the Appalling Choice between Johnson and Corbyn, you can vote for both of them to lose. By picking someone else.

Nick Boles is the former Tory MP for Grantham and Stamford