In Conspiracyland

I remember a long-serving Conservative MP, now deceased, who really and truly believed that the government of this country was controlled by a witches' coven in Gloucestershire. People who are now Shadow Ministers have screamed in my face that I was the head of some cabal of hardline Catholic "incels", a comically inaccurate word for several of the individuals in question, who had broken with Jeremy Corbyn over his indulgence of Remainerism, identity politics and Greenery, but who were biding our time with a view to one day emerging from the sierra and seizing the organs of the State.

Barking mad stuff, of course, and in the latter case an example of what I believe is called projection. Likewise, the BBC has spent this week trying to convince the Radio Four set, of which I am part, that The Light was on the cusp of staging a national uprising from Totnes (what is it with these people and the West Country?) in alliance with its apparently close allies among the Reichsbürger. But that is not a conspiracy theory. Oh, no, heaven forfend.

Also this week, the Government has used a Statutory Instrument to enact primary legislation, and specifically to ban what little peaceful protest that it had not already proscribed, by giving absolute power over such matters to the Police. Labour whipped its peers to abstain, thereby preventing this measure from being defeated. Russia has confirmed that its nuclear weapons are in Belarus, right when the people who used to talk about Nazis in Ukraine have started talking about them again. Remember, those are our side.

And it has turned out to have been true all along that it was Mossad that bombed the Iraqi Jews in the early 1950s, in order to persuade them to move to Israel. This confirmation comes just as the British Government is planning to outlaw BDS activity, of which I am not always uncritical, but the poor timing is almost amusing. Again, that ban has the enthusiastic support of the Opposition, which will if anything say that it did not go far enough. Watch yourself, though. You would not want to sound like a conspiracy theorist.

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.