Getting The Right Outcome For The People

Of course Michelle Mone should be arrested. But that does not mean that Nicola Sturgeon should not have been. Of course Boris Johnson was forced out by the Blob. But he still deserves to be out. Of course Boris Johnson deserves to be out. But he was still forced out by the Blob. Stabbed in the back? Well, yes. That's politics. Johnson himself has been known to stab people in the back.

I have done more than anyone else alive to publicise the story of Harriet Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange. Everyone knows that story now. The point is that no one cares. They just don't.

Still, what could Harman's kangaroo court now say? If it could still legitimately publish its report at all, then it could recommend only that Johnson be denied the old boys' pass. As if he would care.

Never mind this former MP. What of a current MP, Nick Brown? Where is he? If you believed the rumours, then you would have to believe that Harman and five other Labour Leaders, including two Prime Ministers and including the present Leader, engaged such a person as Chief Whip. No, nor do I.

Remaining in the North East, everyone here knows that Jamie Driscoll is going to stand as an Independent and win, which is why Labour's process for selecting a paper candidate against him has already descended into farcical tragedy and tragic farce, with Constituency Labour Party after Constituency Labour Party refusing to nominate anyone. Did the three longlisted candidates really deserve this? And that is before mentioning spoof Labour right-winger Jenny Chapman's performance on this morning's Politics North. No one needs to tell me that the Labour Right is anti-intellectual, but come on.

Jamie's victory will be the biggest ever shock to the right-wing Labour machine, which had assumed that it controlled the North East more than anywhere else in the country. Even the loss of Durham County Council and then of Nick Forbes has not shaken it from that delusion. But this will be national, and to an extent even international, news. That slaughterhouse strength stun will be administered to the beast a few months before the General Election.

At the other end of England, Caroline Lucas's retirement at that Election may deprive the Greens of their only seat in the House of Commons. They are picking up votes from the Conservatives, because of course those votes are from the Conservatives, but First Past the Post is a hard nut to crack. They have only ever done it once. Lucas's three further victories have been from a position of incumbency. Between her retirement, the collapse of the SNP, and the damp squib that is right-wing unpopulism without the now impossible Nigel "Brexit Has Failed" Farage, the balance of power is well and truly up for grabs.

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.