Taking The Pledge?

Keir Starmer has moved on from abandoning the policies on which he won the Labour Leadership. He is now abandoning the ones with which he replaced those. A major Shadow Cabinet reshuffle is also anticipated. So much for the presentation of the current Shadow Cabinet as a generationally transformative Government in waiting.

And in The Times, the spooks' gazette with which Starmer has had a very close relationship at least since he was Director of Public Prosecutions, it is blithely announced that he considers only 10 Labour MPs to be capable of being Ministers, so that he is planning mass ennoblements to make up the numbers.

Not existing Labour Peers. Not the Labour parliamentary candidates whose selection is being ruthlessly rigged because, again, they are supposed to be a once-in-a-generation pool of talent. No, a list of anything up to 100 new members both of the House of Lords and of the Government on Starmer's first day, and quite possibly of the Labour Party as well. Will the electorate be made privy to this list before being invited to vote Labour? What do you think?

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 I say again that 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.