Passed Concerns

There has never been a taboo against discussing immigration, but there very soon may be for the rest of the 43-year-old Suella Braverman's life. When and where did she take her bespoke speed awareness course? And the Cabinet Office answers directly to the Prime Minister, so it must be Rishi Sunak himself who has referred Boris Johnson to the Metropolitan and Thames Valley Police.

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 now 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.

Although a Liberal Democrat who is currently sitting as a non-affiliated Peer while she chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Baroness Falkner is that rare thing, a Truss appointee, rather like coming across an Edward VIII postbox. So the knives are out for her.

The EHRC was beyond question when it was laying into Jeremy Corbyn's threat to make media types pay tax on their annual Lottery wins for producing one thousand words per week of whatever they happened to think, a job that it had become technologically possible to do without getting out of bed. But now that it is chaired by someone who has called a bloke in lipstick "a bloke in lipstick", then Channel 4 News is leading the charge against it, secure in the knowledge that Sunak would replace her with no one so uncouth.

Frank Furedi cannot have mentioned to the National Conservatism conference that he was in favour of the abolition of all controls on immigration, or indeed that he was married to the former Chief Executive of Britain's largest provider of abortion. But, "As someone who has fought against anti-Semitism and racism all my life"? "The real aim is to prevent the speakers at NatCon from having a voice and from potentially influencing the public. This also acts as a warning shot to others who might be tempted to step out of line"? Finding yourself moved to criticise Saint John Mann? What goes around, comes around.

Still, 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 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.