Coordinated Campaign of Interference?

I know a lynch mob, a witch hunt, a kangaroo court or a show trial when I see one, and no one stages such a thing quite like the right wing of the Labour Party. You do not have to carry a candle for Boris Johnson, or for any of the MPs or Peers named in today's report, to deprecate the vindictiveness on display. Been there, done that. Still doing it, in fact. As it happens, I do have soft spots for two of those Peers, but you do not need to know everything, and one of them would not know who I was. His father did, though. His father did.

Notice that even most of the 2019 Conservative intake has no time for Johnson, and never really wanted him as Prime Minister, or in Parliament, or in their party. Is he still a member of the Conservative Party? On the grounds cited, how can he possibly be? If he is, then that will presumably not be for very much longer. Like Jamie Driscoll, Jeremy Corbyn is being allowed to autoexclude from the Labour Party, effectively to resign, by standing as an Independent. He will remain a member in good standing until that moment. But if it has not already done so, then Johnson's party is going to kick him out.

The Conservative Right is preparing to go to the stake for a very big spender since long before Covid-19, who even lifted the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, making him the most pro-immigration Prime Minister in living memory, if not ever, although admittedly only because Liz Truss never got into her stride. Johnson was closer to Stonewall than any Prime Minister before or since. Net Zero was Johnson's. The lockdowns were Johnson's. The Northern Ireland Protocol was Johnson's. The war in Ukraine was Johnson's.

Forget about another run for Mayor of London. Take it from someone who has repeatedly seen the bottom of a poll that that would be where Johnson would place. But a London Mayoral candidate's nomination papers have to be signed by 10 registered electors from each of the 32 London Boroughs and by 10 from the City, so Johnson would never even make it onto the ballot paper. He had an electorate that made him a two-term Mayor of London, and he had a very different electorate that gave him an overall majority of 80 as Prime Minister. He has lost both of those blocs forever. Each of them still exists and always will, but neither of them will ever again want anything to do with him.

Remembrance Sunday, which is still well over four fun-packed months away, will be when we saw whether Johnson were still treated as a former Prime Minister at all. Will he be in that row of them at the Cenotaph? Or will the matter of Evgeny Lebedev have caused his removal from the Privy Council, no longer considered fit to advise the King alongside Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, and assorted Scottish and Welsh Nationalists? I cannot see what especial power simple ennoblement gave Lebedev, and it is worth pointing out that he was a major backer of the Remain campaign, but there we are. Johnson defied the almighty hired help, so he has to be made to pay. Ask Corbyn. Just do not mention Lebedev's ties to Jeffrey Epstein's apartment-sitter, the de facto Deputy Prime Minister in the last Labour Government and in the next one, Peter Mandelson.

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.