Across In Abundance

Over on the Blue Team in support of Jamie Driscoll, Simon Clarke is a serving Minister, Nadhim Zahawi is a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Ben Bradley is the Leader of a major local authority. They all retain the Conservative whip. But then, the Left is less partisan and factional than the Labour Right. Everyone else is.

An old co-imbiber confirms my suspicion, illustrated by those links, that the Blue Team had been working so well with Jamie that, entertaining no hope of winning the thing, it had invented the position of Mayor of the North East specifically for him.

Things have probably gone too far to call a halt now, but the latest heiress of T. Dan Smith and of Andrew Cunningham, a dragged up or dragged down version of Nick Forbes and of the people who had in 2021 been removed from the running of Durham County Council, need not bother expecting a call back from Whitehall.

And 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.