The Blond Leading The Bland?

There can be only one Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage in any party, so that rules out Reform UK for Johnson, and the Reclaim Party was set up specifically against him.

As Mayor of London, Johnson wanted to build an island. That's right. An island. He did not become a big spender because of Covid-19, or even after he had won both of 2019's unlimited bidding wars, the like of which we had never seen before and shall probably never see again. At least rhetorically, he had always been like that.

Johnson even lifted the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, making him the most pro-immigration Prime Minister in living memory, if not ever, although admittedly only because Liz Truss never got into her stride. Johnson was closer to Stonewall than any Prime Minister before or since. Net Zero was Johnson's. The lockdowns were Johnson's. The Northern Ireland Protocol was Johnson's. The war in Ukraine was Johnson's.

The BBC may think that The Light is the most influential publication in Britain, but I have only ever seen a copy of it once, when someone had left the previous month's edition in a bus station. Yet based on that, I confidently assert that its readers would not vote for a Boris Johnson Party. Or, at any rate, I cannot conceive of why they would.

Meanwhile, anyone who still believed in Trussonomics ought to vote Labour. Labour opposed only one mini-Budget measure, the only one that Truss had not pitched to the Conservative Party membership, and it would have abstained if there had ever been a Commons division on the mini-Budget. Labour also proposes a lower minimum wage than the Conservatives, and its policy of privatising the NHS in England is openly bought and paid for by the potential beneficiaries.

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.