Reading The Room

As soon as the Labour whip was to vote against Second Reading of the Rwanda Bill, then we knew that it ran no risk of defeat. The same would be true of Third Reading. If there were a serious threat, then absolutely any reason would be devised to whip an abstention by the Official Opposition. Rules of the game, dear boy. Rules of the game. As for passing amendments at committee stage, amendments that would rewrite the Bill completely, don't be silly. Seriously. Just don't be silly. No one is ever going to be sent to Rwanda, and that is the whole point. At least, that is the whole point beyond the ever more enormous payments to whoever it is that is being paid for nothing at all.

Subtract those who voted against the Labour amendment, meaning that they were present, from those who did not vote for Second Reading, and by my reckoning, you come up with 28 names. That is not quite six per Family, fairly large by modern New York standards, but very small for the Old Country back when it really was the Old Country. There are 28 of them, exactly half the number of Labour MPs who voted for a ceasefire in Gaza, of which more below. As ever over the last 30 years, if the Conservative Right looked or sounded like normal people, then the media would ignore them. They are on television because they make good television, like those bizarrely attired X Factor contestants who could not sing a note and who were never going win.

This was never about Rwanda. It was about those who, as a tiny extremist minority that refused to integrate, were now barely even members of their own party. They wanted to remove Rishi Sunak so that they could remove David Cameron and Andrew Mitchell, who had dangerous tendencies towards the position of initially 76 per cent of the British population, although that figure would be even higher now, against those who had heeded Suella Braverman's call to riot at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day and stab the Police.

With confirmation that there were just the usual two dozen Righty "characters", the Government, undoubtedly with American approval, moves daily closer to the position of 56 Labour MPs, including 10 who resigned or were sacked from the frontbench; the position of Andy McDonald, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn. The Government has also followed the Biden Administration in imposing visa bans on the leaders of settler violence on the West Bank. Up your lammy, Sir Keir.

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 Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir 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.