Was, Is, And Will Be

Fun and games at Telegraph Media Group, but we are hardly going to buy it, are we? Still, calling itself Lloyds Bank for the purpose, BlackRock and its wider world no longer feel the need for TMG in anything like its present form.

Guardian writers believe the rubbish that is written in The Guardian, and Telegraph writers believe the rubbish that is written in The Guardian. In my experience, distinguished journalists from other English-speaking countries cannot tell them apart in blind tests.

People who thought that they were the better sort of unpopulists no longer need to be boiled like frogs by eccentrist commentators. They are ready to be served up. Fine by us. The eccentrists, the three per cent who voted for Change UK, and the unpopulists, the six per cent who vote for Reform UK where it stands, will carry on doing what they do.

I for one will continue to work to create a thinktank, a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually a fortnightly satirical magazine, all in the service of the other 91 per cent. In good, old-fashioned print, so that no one would be able to press a button and delete them. The thinktank and the weekly magazine need to be up and running at the start of the forthcoming General Election year.

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.