I have lost count of the number of times Labour supporters have asked me whether I now regret backing Boris Johnson at the last election.

Whenever the government or its ministers attract criticism, particularly after the “partygate” revelations, they demand I recant for my “treachery” or “betrayal”.

People who obeyed the rules during the pandemic, unable to see relatives or even bury loved ones, are furious about events in Downing Street. But you only need to look at the hard left’s reaction to the invasion of Ukraine to see how important it was to make sure they were beaten as heavily as possible.

The so-called Stop the War Coalition took a break from campaigning against Israel to issue a statement before Putin invaded Ukraine demanding that NATO “call a halt to its eastwards expansion”.

The group — of which Corbyn remains deputy president — said it “refutes the idea NATO is a defensive alliance”. It accused the UK Government of “aggressive posturing” and “inflaming tensions and indicating disdain for Russian concerns”.

Eleven Labour MPs — including John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, Richard Burgon and Ian Lavery, who all served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and would presumably have been running the country if he had won an election — signed the letter, too.

Imagine how Britain would have responded to Putin’s aggression with that lot in charge. Would Corbyn have flown to support NATO countries like Estonia or supplied weapons to the Ukrainian armed forces?

The hard left blames NATO for the problems in Eastern Europe, just as it blames Israel for all the problems in the Middle East. We’re talking about a weird bunch of extremists, Trotskyists and Islamists who hate everything the West stand for, even NATO — which a Labour government took the lead in setting up, and which guaranteed peace in Europe during the Cold War.

Fair play to Keir Starmer, who insisted they remove their names from the letter or lose the whip. It took the hard-left standard bearers — who posture as the most principled in the party — less than an hour to comply. 

Sir Keir knows his electoral chances are jeopardised by any perception that his Labour Party shares his predecessor’s anti-Western view of the world.

That is why, at this week’s meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, he said those who attack NATO will be kicked out: “Let me be very clear. There will be no place in this party for false equivalence between the actions of Russia and the actions of NATO.”

Fine words, but he’ll be judged by his actions. No one believes for a minute the MPs who signed the letter have changed their views, so he really needs to go much further and kick them out. Going back to the days of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, when the hard left was humoured and ignored as an irrelevant and harmless fringe, is not enough. Firstly because having run the party for five years, they can no longer be regarded as irrelevant. And secondly because, given the huge damage they inflicted on Labour, its reputation and electoral prospects, they certainly can’t be regarded as harmless.

Former Labour voters need to see the hard left booted out once and for all before they will trust the party again or be confident that the Corbyn clique will not seize control at some point in the future.

Beyond that, people who supported Corbyn and nominated him for the leadership have no place in Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet. Take David Lammy. This week he accused Corbyn of “parroting the lines that are coming from Vladimir Putin, lines that suggest that this is because of threats from Nato, or Nato expansion”. You can’t argue with that, but did he not know anything about Corbyn’s views on foreign policy when he nominated him for the leadership in 2015?

These people need to promise solemnly that they will never again tolerate the hard left in senior positions. And Keir Starmer needs to apologise personally for asking the British people to make Corbyn Prime Minister in 2019 — and to say clearly that the electorate was completely right to make sure a Labour Party led by the hard left was beaten so comprehensively.

The British people showed more principle and political judgement in rejecting Corbyn’s Labour Party and its anti-Western world view than some people who are now in positions of power in Labour. 

Frankly, the current leadership should be ashamed that they relied on the public to sort out the problem for them.

Lord Austin is a former Labour MP