Inquire Within

Tomorrow, Boris Johnson will begin his performance before the Covid-19 Inquiry. If you played any part in either or both of the "Labour anti-Semitism" hoax and the call for a second referendum on EU membership, then you made that creature Prime Minister, so that he could, "Let the bodies pile high." Gallons of blood are on your hands.

Yes, Jeremy Corbyn should have fought back; when he finally sued over having been called a terrorist sympathiser, then he won. And yes, he should have sacked Keir Starmer and insisted that the second referendum was not going to happen; there would then have been no General Election until early 2022, when Corbyn's Labour would have become the largest party in a hung Parliament and Johnson would probably have stood down, having not attended the House in years. By then, Corbyn and Theresa May would have delivered a thoroughly sober bipartisan response to Covid-19.

Johnson embodied his party in the ways that it preferred not to emphasise, validating all the financial fiddles and the sexual shenanigans of the Chamber of Commerce set. He never attempted to hide his manner of life, including his obvious alcohol and cocaine habits. Likewise, Starmer's glazed eyes, his big red nose, his Durham incident, and his flight from a traffic accident to avoid being breathalysed, all make it blatantly obvious that he, too, is an alcoholic. While Johnson turned up on an essentially theatrical march by tacky turns who were pitching to impresarios by demanding the resumption of a genocide, Starmer would lead a Government that held such a line as a Permanent Member of the United Nations Security Council.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would 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.