BORIS JOHNSON: We’re now run by a small cabal of Starmer’s Lefty legal chums who rejoice in the humiliation of Britain

Most readers remember the horror inflicted on this country by the IRA. We grew up in semi-permanent fear of their outrages, not just in Northern Ireland, but on the mainland as well.

You remember how they put bombs in pubs, cars, waste-bins, shopping centres. They didn’t just target soldiers and police officers and politicians; they hit people who had nothing whatever to do with the Troubles, who just happened to be in the radius of their hideous blasts.

They attacked totally innocent men, women, children – killing and maiming indiscriminately, and then offering their sickening non-apologies. The campaign of violence went on for decades, from the 1970s to the late 1990s.

For almost the entire period – from 1977 to 2005 – there was one wolf-visaged figure who was said to have sat on the IRA ‘Army Council’ – the shadowy body that orchestrated the mayhem. In the opinion of all reputable historians of the Troubles, that man was Gerry Adams, and though he has always formally…