Reasonable Prospect

No one expects the Director or Public Prosecutions to be abreast of every case. The point is that only the DPP has the power to take over a private prosecution, of which there are never very many, and either to continue it or to discontinue it as he judged to be in the public interest.

Not only that, but Keir Starmer lobbied successfully to make it easier for him to halt a private prosecution, by lowering the threshold from there being no case to answer, to, since 2009, there being insufficient evidence to make a conviction more likely than not.

Yet he never noticed that subpostmasters had suddenly moved from being archetypal pillars of the community to being prosecuted for dishonesty at a rate of one in seven. Or he never saw it as a problem. He took up several of those cases and turned them into public prosecutions, sending a pregnant woman to prison with Rose West.

Under the old threshold, Aisling Hubert would have proceeded to court with her private prosecution of two doctors who had been filmed in 2012 offering sex-selective abortions. But under the new threshold, after the Crown Prosecution Service had refused to take up what it had accepted was a viable case, Starmer took it over and shut it down. Hubert was ordered to pay £36,000 to the doctors, plus £11,000 after she had challenged the costs order and Starmer's intervention.

Still, 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 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.