Special Counsel

Although he has waited until the five-year statute of limitations had run out, John Durham has shown that there was no "Russian collusion" with Donald Trump. Yet Roger Stone was convicted of lying to Congress about that, and his pardon did not erase his conviction. His conviction over something that we now know for a fact did not exist.

Meanwhile, Vsevolod Kniaziev, who has managed to become the President of the Supreme Court of Ukraine despite being younger than I am, has been arrested for corruption even there, in the most corrupt country in Europe, and in the country with more politicians than any other named in the Panama Papers. Those of us who have been right about every war, why would we be wrong this time? We are not.

Election year scrutiny of the Bidens is coming, and Westerners in general, who are in some cases literally starving, are tiring of the costs of sanctioning Russia and of arming Ukraine. Nowhere is that truer than in Britain, where we even knew better than to allow Volodymyr Zelensky onto the Eurovision Song Contest. We mostly associate him with Boris Johnson, who has just paid £3.8 million in cash for a house while we picked up his legal fees of, so far, £245,000. We still do not know why he needed a "credit facility" of £800,000, and while we do know who arranged it, we do not know with whom.

Zelensky presides over the poorest country in Europe despite its huge population, stunning natural resources, and rich industrial history. Doing so has made him a dollar billionaire four years, and in fact less time than that, after he was a stand-up comedian. He and Johnson are birds of a feather. But if you prefer craziness to sleaze, then Liz Truss is off to Taiwan to promote the independence that it did not seek, in the belief that that would annoy the Chinese as if they had ever heard of her. In the spirit of Jacob Rees-Mogg and gerrymandering, she never said any of this when she was Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister. At least she is not as bad as Suella Braverman, Shadowing herself.

Sadly, the most advanced hawkishness is now the position of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, of the SNP and the Greens, and of their assorted hangers on. 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.