Rishi Sunak can’t say it, so let me say it for him. In three weeks, Sir Keir Starmer will become Prime Minister. Labour will form the next Government, sustained by its cohorts of radical lawyers, gourmandising quangocrats, public sector trade union activists, diversity, equity and inclusion consultants and woke academics.

The only question is how big its majority will be. Will we have a meaningful Opposition? Or will Labour have so many MPs that it can act unchecked?

Sir Keir Starmer gets set to board his election battle bus in Halesowen, Dudley, after unveiling Labour’s manifesto in Manchester on Thursday

We know that Labour will raise taxes. We know that, when it comes to public services, it will put producers before consumers.

We know that it will scrap the Rwanda scheme and invite the European Union to send us a quota of illegal immigrants.

We know that it will embark on an eye-wateringly expensive plan to decarbonise the national electricity grid by 2030.

We know that it wants another race quango. We know that, while it says 16-year-olds are too young to use a sunbed or get a tattoo, it will give them the vote.

What else might the party do if it has hundreds of superfluous MPs with no prospect of promotion, all of them keen to leave their mark?

Might it move definitively against private healthcare as well as education? Tax houses? Tax savings? Rejoin the EU’s customs union? Bring in race and gender quotas?

If the opinion polls are right, Labour will win with a majority of 200, possibly more. The Conservatives may be reduced to less than 100 seats – by far the worst election result in the history of their party, worse even than during the long Whig ascendancy of the 18th century.

One poll has the Lib Dems getting more seats than the Tories, which would mean that Sir Ed Davey becomes leader of His Majesty’s Opposition.

Yes, that’s the leader whose idea of campaigning, when the world is closer to a major conflagration than at any time in the past 60 years, is to keep falling into water with a goofy grin.

Do these numbers accurately reflect our national mood? Is the country so in love with Sir Keir that it wants him to enjoy a measure of power that none of his predecessors – not Gladstone or Salisbury or Churchill or Thatcher or Blair – ever came close to?

Perhaps. But I think there is a more straightforward explanation.

Many 2019 Conservative voters simply want to punish their former party. On July 4, some will stay at home, some will switch to Labour or the Lib Dems, but the single biggest bloc will vote for Reform UK.

Nigel Farage poses with a McDonald’s drink after a milkshake was thrown at him at a campaign launch event earlier this month in Clacton-on-Sea, where he is running to become an MP

One of the paradoxes of this election is that Reform is proposing very little with which the Conservatives disagree. This is unlike the situation in the EU, where there is a genuine ideological rift between the parties of the insurgent Right and established Christian Democrats who are more moderate.

But in this country, Nigel Farage is saying almost nothing from which any mainstream Conservative would dissent.

More police, higher defence spending, tighter immigration? All are Tory policy. Single-sex spaces, tougher sentencing, tax cuts? Tick, tick, tick.

The one major difference is that Reform wants to scrap the House of Lords and introduce proportional representation.

That is not to say that the Tories are blameless. After four terms in office, they have inevitably made mistakes. Some of those mistakes were excusable in the context of the time.

The coalition with the Lib Dems meant that it was impossible to scrap the Equality Act or the Human Rights Act. The Covid lockdown, for which Nigel Farage was initially a much louder advocate than Boris Johnson, forced up taxes and prices.

But other errors were unforced – above all, thinking they could twice change the Prime Minister without holding a General Election.

And so, understandably in many ways, people want to clobber the Tories. This emotion, if my unhappy canvassing experiences over the past two weeks are anything to go by, overwhelms any detailed interest in what Labour will do.

The irony is that, in clobbering the Conservative Party, Right-of-Centre voters may end up clobbering the country.

If you think that taxes, spending and borrowing are too high now, I agree. But can you doubt that they will be higher still under Labour?

If you are fed up with trying to get an appointment with your GP, I sympathise. But do you imagine that Labour will take on the NHS unions and get more productivity in return for the record money the system has absorbed?

If you are sick of public sector strikes, just wait until the unions are dealing with a Labour government that they will see as owing its victory to them.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak attends the Ukraine peace summit at the Burgenstock resort in Switzerland this weekend, while the election battle heats up at home

If you wish we had been quicker to take advantage of our Brexit freedoms – and I certainly do – watch what happens when David Lammy, under the guise of fixing the Irish border, signs us up to an EU customs arrangement and promises unilaterally to adopt future EU regulations, making it impossible for us to agree meaningful trade deals.

You might respond that you have no intention of voting Labour, that Reform is not committed to any of these things, and that therefore your hands will be clean.

Fair enough. But consider how our voting system works.

According to most opinion polls, Reform UK won’t win a single seat. Even at their most optimistic, its leaders can’t be hoping for more than three or four MPs.

The Conservatives are the only party that might prevent a Labour super-majority.

Perhaps you want a different kind of party to emerge on the Right, possibly following a merger between the Tories and Reform, as happened in Canada.

Again, I agree. Indeed, I argued for a Tory-Ukip deal even before the 2015 General Election.

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DANIEL HANNAN: The people of Europe are in revolt

I rather like Farage, with whom I worked well when we represented the same region in Brussels. True, he went a bit off in the 2010s, surrounding himself with some dreadful people and becoming, as one of his MEPs put it at the time ‘snarling and thin-skinned’. But I put that down to the painkillers that he was on following his horrific plane crash.

In any event, he seems back to his cheerful old self now.

There are important differences, though, between Canada in 1993, when the governing Tories were reduced to just two MPs, and Britain in 2024.

The biggest is that the Canadian Reform Party, unlike Reform UK, already had a regional base in the Western prairies, and won 52 seats in 1993, almost all in Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia. Even so, it took another 14 years before Canada’s two Rightist parties merged and ousted the government.

Do we really want Labour in office until 2038, benefiting from a divided opposition? Imagine what it could do in that time.

I understand that some people want to punish the Tories regardless. But in any realistic scenario, the Tories are already going to be punished very badly.

The question is whether there will be any opposition left at all, anything from which to build a future alternative government.

Picture one of those Looney Tunes cartoons where a character, troubled by the buzzing of a fly, is pursuing it with a heavy sledgehammer. Now the fly has landed on the character’s toe, and the cartoon character (for which read the electorate) is raising its mallet with a determined expression.

Will it draw back in time? We’ll know soon enough.