The Sense of Scepticism

Now 68 and as unlikely to wish to be employed by the Royal House of Nahyan as it would be to wish to employ him (Charles Moore is 67, Janet Daley is 79), my former colleague Con Coughlin has been a publicly acknowledged MI6 mouthpiece for 25 years, so it should be taken with the utmost seriousness that he now says what some of us have been saying all along about Ukraine.

The deal that is about to be done, ending the 10-year war that began with the putsch of 2014, would have been struck in April 2022, had Boris Johnson not put the kibosh on it. "Let the bodies pile high." 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. Gallons of blood are on your hands, and David Cameron's Foreign Secretaryship does not constitute the improvement in this area that it does in certain others.

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 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.