Health Warning

Will the King ever be treated by anyone without a five-year, full-time medical degree? Will Rishi Sunak? Well, there you are, then. Yet what are we offered instead? Wes Streeting, the greatest threat to the very principle of the National Health Service since it was founded, and the true heir of Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan in their 1997 transfer of the idea of NHS privatisation from the outer fringes of the thinktank circuit to the heart of government, where all three parties have kept it ever since.

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 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.