The Power of Three

There is obviously more going on here. No one has ever been drummed out of television for having committed adultery with a much younger subordinate. Phillip Schofield met someone who was 15 or younger, arranged a job interview for him when he was 18, and had an affair with him when he was in his twenties. So what? What even is "grooming", and how would this qualify? There is more going on here.

In that case, whither ITV? Donald Trump, or the Wagner Group, or anyone else, could probably now buy it for next to nothing. A consortium of Simon Cowell, Ant and Dec, and the casts of Emmerdale and Coronation Street, would be well-advised to do so this week.

So much for the Labour Right's in-house television station. Funded only by its giant corporate advertisers, clearly that has been what they have wanted. The same is true of LBC, with its guest presenter gigs for Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, David Lammy and Sadiq Kahn, and with its regular Call Keir feature.

Hence Liz Kendall's hectoring and defamation of Jeremy Corbyn on Peston, hence Richard Madeley's preposterous attempts to take down Mick Lynch, hence Alan Johnson on The Masked Singer, hence Piers Morgan's gushing "interview" with Keir Starmer, hence Morgan's handover of the gig to Derek Draper's wife, and hence his replacement in the morning with Alastair Campbell and Ed Balls.

In his autobiography, Gordon Brown stated matter-of-factly that his protégé, Balls, did popular television as part of a strategy to make himself Prime Minister. Well, it worked for Boris Johnson, and it yet may again. Morgan has fallen a long way since his opposition to the Iraq War unleashed the torrent of personal abuse to which he has been subject ever since. ITV has always been in the vanguard of taking down and keeping down Johnson, because he would have wiped the floor with Starmer.

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 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.