Phoning It In

Pity the poor Russian spook whose lot it was to have to trawl through the fascinating telephone calls and text messages of Liz Truss. But note that an outgoing Prime Minister and his Cabinet Secretary were still able to impose a news blackout so effective that it could make someone Prime Minister who would otherwise have had to have withdrawn.

And ponder why Boris Johnson would have been so keen to have been succeeded by Truss. It was not only that Rishi Sunak had knifed him. It was also that he knew that Truss was likely to fail so completely, and to fall so quickly, that he would soon have stood a good chance of returning to office. Hence her endorsement by the likes of Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg. And hence this.

If Johnson contests the next General Election, then he has still not given up on being Prime Minister again. To his dying day at the age of 89, Ted Heath never did. He refused to retire from the House of Commons until he was a few weeks shy of 85, and even then the dream had not died. He had ceased to be Prime Minister in his fifty-eighth year. Johnson is 58 now. By the way, Heath was the last Prime Minister to have been brought to power by a General Election and then to have lost it by the same means. That defeat was in 1974. 48 years ago.

One day, and probably quite soon, we shall know why Johnson was unable to find 100 MPs to nominate him against Sunak. If he had really had 102, then he would have stood. Sunak had at least 197, out of 357. So Johnson's claim of 102, and Penny Mordaunt's of over 90, could not both have been true. As I say, though, we shall know soon enough.

In the meantime, and forever with any luck, we ought to be free of the views of those who had monopolised economic commentary in this country for 40 and more years, and who finally became the Government that they had always thought that they should have been, only to be deposed in six weeks, which would have been three if the old Queen had not died, by horrified money markets for which they had presumed to speak, but with which they had turned out to have had no affinity whatever. The second sacking of Suella Braverman, the only reason why she has been reappointed, ought to seal that deal.

Alas, there is a potential flaw. Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only mini-Budget measure than had not been in Truss's prospectus to her party's membership, but it supported everything else that even Jeremy Hunt, of all people, has felt the need to reverse. Had the mini-Budget ever been put to a Commons Division, then Labour's whipped abstention would have saved Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng from Hunt, Sunak, and all the rest of them. Labour is going into the next General Election as the only party that still thought that Trussonomics was broadly, and often very specifically, a good idea.

Keir Starmer versus Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Sunak will 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.