Post and Cable

10 times, Ed Davey refused to apologise to the victims of the Post Office scandal. Ten. And on ITV, of all networks. Meanwhile, we learn tonight that the Post Office claimed tax relief on the compensation that it paid the subpostmasters, meaning that it may well be facing a bill of £100 million, potentially leaving it insolvent.

Yet the Post Office's only shareholder is the State, after it was cut out of the Royal Mail in 2011, leading to almost comical arrangements such as workers at adjacent desks that their respective employers were renting from each other, so that the Royal Mail could be privatised. Why could the Royal Mail not have been privatised with the Post Office in it? That could only have been because the City knew, even then, about Horizon.

Not only was Davey the Minister for Postal Affairs at the time, but the relevant Secretary of State on every day of the Coalition was Vince Cable. The Liberal Democrats are positioning themselves to capitalise on the well-founded public support for a ceasefire in Gaza, and on the well-founded public disquiet about the intervention in Yemen. The boundary changes have shifted the electoral focus back to their old battlegrounds with the Conservatives. They always used to argue that they had never been given a chance. Yet they were in government for five years until only nine years ago, the five years of high austerity and of the war in Libya. There is now an issue around which their failure as a governing party can crystallise in the public mind. As it should.

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. Never mind the Lib Dems.