Bespoke?

The Times gazettes our impending reaccession to the Customs Union and to Margaret Thatcher's Single Market. The stocks are sold, the Press is squared, the middle class is quite prepared for the only thing even worse than being back in the EU, namely being bound by its rules without having so much as the tiniest say over their content. We are to be a colony, a satrapy, a vassal state.

If Switzerland is indeed to be the model, then we are even going to be joining the Schengen Area, although in reality that is the least of what was always the real reason for the removal of Boris Johnson. Rishi Sunak was also given a fixed penalty notice because of one of the Downing Street parties, yet look where he is today. Truly, his "deal" with the EU will be unique to Britain.

There will of course be no referendum. The consistently anti-EU Left that actually knows why it wants to be out of the EU has therefore been ignored for decades. The johnny-come-lately anti-EU Right can now be silenced by the mere utterance of the words "Liz Truss".

The Conservatives could defend either the Red Wall against Keir Starmer's Labour, heaven help us, or the Blue Wall against the Liberal Democrats, who would have taken scores of Southern, liberal, Thatcherite, Remainer seats if either the 2015 or the 2017 Parliament had run its natural course.

Sunak's own majority is 27,210, so he does not care either way, and it is hardly as if he needs the money from being Prime Minister. But, for example, Jeremy Hunt barely won his seat against the Lib Dems in 2005, and through wild fluctuations has ended up holding it fairly narrowly over them now. Sunak is surrounded by people in broadly that position, and in any case he is a Hampshire boy. The Blue Wall it is, then. So Levelling Up has gone. And now, this.

We are heading for 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.