Taking All Necessary Measures?

Developments of this kind are normal in wars. Allegiances shift even among principled parties. Never mind mercenaries. As to who were the Wagner Group's new paymasters, we shall find out soon enough. But they had better not include us. What if the other side won? Or another side, yet to emerge as such? Where would that leave us?

My own private military company is to be called Oliver's Army. Its badge will feature this image, in the full expectation that the enemy would die laughing. PMCs are one of his class's great gifts to the world. An Old Ampelfordian or an Old Malvernian cannot be a mercenary, so once the middle-aged Sir David Stirling and John Woodhouse were trying to find something to do after the SAS, then they had to call themselves something else. Headquartered in the swanky heart of West London. Naturally. But registered in Jersey. Naturally.

And of course the Americans have blocked the appointment of Ben Wallace as Secretary General of NATO, which had already lost Bakhmut to a private company that was largely staffed by dregs who were not allowed even in their country's conscript Army, the Army with which that company is now at war. That whole Wallace thing had the feel of the turn of the century nonsense that Tony Blair was going to become "President of the European Union", and of those 1980s tabloid claims that Queen Elizabeth II was going to become "Queen of Europe". What an insular place London can be.

Wallace's record in Northern Ireland would have been repugnant enough to the United States even if he had not faked its centrepiece, and even if the end of the pretence of Irish neutrality had not been high on the agenda precisely because Sinn Féin had given up on it, in no small part under American influence. With Boris Johnson gone, then Wallace is the figure in office most associated with Johnson's war in Ukraine, at least until Keir Starmer revived Johnson's foreign policy along with Liz Truss's economic policy.

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 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.