Nowhere Else To Go?

Labour and the Liberal Democrats both made gains from the Conservatives, left-wingers who had been expelled from the Labour Party stormed home, the SDP doubled its municipal base, and the Greens ended the night with far more Councillors than UKIP had ever had, largely in what had been true blue areas. Meanwhile, no Reform candidate was elected this time, of around 400 who had been fielded, and UKIP lost its half a dozen remaining seats. Unlike Labour, the Conservatives know what poses a threat to them, and it is not tomorrow's expected accession of Andrew Bridgen to Reclaim.

Bridgen was one of all of 23 MPs who had been elected as Conservatives and who voted against the Windsor Framework, although he had already lost the whip by then and he has since been kicked out of the party altogether. The remaining 22 are the conventionally defined Right's absolute maximum, with a core that is no more than half that size, little or none of which will be permitted to contest the next General Election in the Conservative interest.

Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless held theirs seats at by-elections, and Carswell even managed to hold on narrowly at the General Election of 2015, but no one else since the War has been elected to the House of Commons against the Conservative Party and explicitly from its right. It is possible that at a General Election, no one but Carswell ever has been.

Neither Carswell, nor Reckless, nor Bridgen, nor Laurence Fox, nor Richard Tice, nor Nigel Farage, will be at London's second National Conservative conference, so alight was the heather set by the one four years ago. Instead, attendees will fawn at the feet of Michael Gove, who has been a Cabinet Minister almost continuously since 2010, who has been the de facto leader of the Blairites at least since the fall of David Cameron, and who is most notable as the father of the present state-funded education system in England. Then they will whoop and holler their adoration of Suella Braverman, who was not stopping the boats. The conference's slogan ought to be, "We Have Nowhere Else To Go."

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.