Breach of Security

Have I Got News for You? has never been the same since it changed to a having a different guest presenter each week, and Prime Minister's Questions is not the same since it changed to having a different guest Prime Minister each week.

Did Suella Braverman take her £17,000 severance pay along with her week off while it all blew over, before returning to work as if nothing had happened? Compare how long points for speeding by a couple of miles per hour hang around, or consider the severity of Universal Credit sanctions, and contrast that with a major and intentional breach of security by the Cabinet Minister with responsibility for it.

Expressing contempt for the whole process by not turning up is a trick that I myself have played. It clearly never bothered the man who had been put upon to chair the proceedings; he had already got me my tutoring gig at Durham, and many years later he signed my nomination papers for Parliament. Still, it does not really do in a Secretary of State, when we are talking about the House of Commons.

Yet what is the alternative? Yvette Cooper is the monster who inflicted the Work Capability Assessment, causing the bodies to pile up and the blood to run in the streets. Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, but it supported every other mini-Budget measure that even Jeremy Hunt, of all people, has felt the need to reverse. True to form, Keir Starmer has professed himself in favour of Braverman's horrific Public Order Bill.

Starmer versus Liz Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Rishi Sunak will result in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.