Feels About Right?

At 35, Kwasi Kwarteng was making so little in the City that he could afford to become an MP instead. Last year, we found out why. As for Matt Hancock, before being wafted into a safe seat, he worked for an unspecified backbench MP, then he was an adviser to the Bank of England on housing (one of this country's great policy failures), and then he was Chief of Staff to George Osborne. Yes, that George Osborne. Today, however, these decidedly low flyers think that they are worth £10,000 per day.

Meanwhile, never mind that in the grand tradition of Tony Blair, Rishi Sunak lives on pocket money from the wife. I had been coming to terms with being older than the Prime Minister, but it turns out that he must in fact be 350 years old, since he made only two million pounds in profit last year yet he is worth £720 million.

Sunak's declared gains of £1.6 million add up to a return of 0.23 per cent, and the one million pounds that he paid in tax represented 0.13 per cent of his wealth, about one per cent of what an average person paid. Poor Rishi is doing so badly that he never even received the recent increase in his MP's salary, since that is missing from his published tax return. Just as it is from Keir Starmer's.

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 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.