A Trip To The Vets?

Tighter vetting of Conservative candidates? It is notable that no one is going to be asking applicants what, if any, political opinions they held. The recent local elections results demonstrated that there was nothing to the party's right, and two conferences in the last week have demonstrated that there was nothing much on the party's Right, either.

As Michael Heseltine (Shrewsbury, PPE at Oxford) used to say, "Your concern is not pertinent. The top people have decided these things, and your job is to support them." And Rishi Sunak (Winchester, PPE at Oxford) was not a faux-rebellious "character" like Boris Johnson (Eton, Oxford but Classics). He was Head Boy.

Both main parties, at least, actively prefer candidates who are open to blackmail, since those are easier to control. There is no other way of explaining how a body of a mere 650 could contain that many sex pests, people who were still doing cocaine in their fifties, and so on.

Those who always run the Conservative Party, and those who are back running the Labour Party as usual, are unaware of any drug laws, see the marriage vow as a joke, and assume the age of consent to be the age of admission to public school. Common Entrance, if you will. Those who run them know the value of that. And here we are.

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 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.