Of Unction and Functions

Anointing aside, although he changed the composition of his chrism, "Just Stop Oil" could be the King's motto. The Queen is probably one of those Lib Demy Tories, but it says a lot about both the King and the Greens that if he had a vote, then he would be one of those Tories who now voted Green. There have just turned out to be rather a lot of them.

The great divide in officially existent opinion is between the people who agree with the King about everything except the monarchy, and the people who agree with the King about the monarchy but nothing else. The main exceptions are the BBC, the Armed Forces, the Established Churches, and increasingly also the public schools. They agree with him about everything, as do the well-placed members of the Court Party, especially in the cultural and charitable sectors, that he has been cultivating assiduously for more than 20 years.

Such is at least part of the context for two forlorn events yesterday, with another in a few days' time. Keir Starmer's hardcore Blairite audience was bored stiff as he subjected it to the kind of stream of drivel that would rightly have attracted derision if it had been spewed by Boris Johnson, in the way that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are permitted effusions that would provoke hilarity if they were produced by Donald Trump, as they would have done if they had issued from George W. Bush or from Dan Quayle.

A month ago, if it was that long, Wes Streeting castigated the Left and the unions as "the true conservatives" for our opposition to the privatisation of the National Health Service. But now Starmer proclaims himself the true conservative for, well, what, exactly? Blue Labour, and I was there, never produced any specific policy, either. But at least it had an analysis. As a good corporate shill, and probably a planted spycop, Starmer cannot share that analysis.

For example, the public sector has adopted gender self-identification as a consequence of privatisation, since it began as corporate policy, and the State now farms out so much of its activity that whatever the corporations want, then the State finds itself obliged to provide, if by no means necessarily unwillingly. Anyone who cannot see that gender self-identification is the logical consequence of the Thatcherite concept of a self-made man or a self-made woman is a caricature of a Tory anti-intellectual, who has simply never read anything, or even given anything any thought. Including many an article by the gender-critical writers, who are almost all at least broadly on the Left, and in many cases very strongly so. Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, Suzanne Moore, Julie Burchill, Sarah Ditum, Helen Joyce, Jo Bartosch, Lucy Masoud, Selina Todd, and so it goes on. Like several of those, Debbie Hayton is also an old school trade union activist.

The entire public sector and its vast network of contractors have come to treat gender self-identification as already the law entirely since a Conservative overall majority was returned in 2015. Go back to 2010, and the concept itself was unheard of. All of the right-wing media outlets are in internal turmoil over this issue, although none more so than the Daily Telegraph. Its contributors' columns have rarely borne any resemblance to their lifestyles, and the rising stars, the Conservative MPs and Ministers of the future, have been told in no uncertain terms that their careers inside the Conservative Party were being at least potentially frustrated by the line against this change. Accordingly, a shift has long been discernible, and it is now practically complete. The Daily Mail has been there for ages, simply calling Suzy Eddie Izzard "she" and what have you. If you want to avoid that sort of thing in a print newspaper, then buy the Morning Star.

That brings us to our second event. While Starmer was boring the paint off the walls, Priti Patel, Home Secretary throughout the lockdowns, was banging the drum for Johnson, the Prime Minister of Stonewall, of Net Zero, of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and of the war in Ukraine. As well as of the lockdowns, of course. Well, the first such Prime Minister, anyway. Both of his successors were in the Cabinet through all of that, and have therefore represented no change from it. Like Patel. Or like the other two star turns at the same shindig, Nadine Dorries of the "legal but harmful" clause, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the House of Commons on every day of the Johnson Premiership.

Rees-Mogg will also be addressing the forthcoming National Conservative conference. Along with the father of the present state-funded education system in England, and along with the woman who was not stopping the boats. Like the attendees at each of yesterday's functions, the attendees at that will be speaking only to themselves. It is Labour and the Liberal Democrats who have just made gains from the Conservatives, while left-wingers who had been expelled from the Labour Party stormed home, while the SDP doubled its municipal base, and while 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. All of 23 MPs who had been elected as Conservatives voted against the Windsor Framework, although even one of those had already lost the whip, he has since been kicked out of the party altogether, and he has just joined a party on the outermost fringe. 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. Certainly, no one will be next year. Contrast that with the racing certainty that Jeremy Corbyn is going to take the 20,000 votes necessary to be the First Past the Post at Islington North, putting him in the hung Parliament of 2024.

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 I say again that on the day that Rishi 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.