With Immediate Effect

Whether or not this image is real, it expresses many a profound truth. The man pushing the swing is Richard Desmond, porn baron turned press lord, and sometime associate of the Gambino family, one of the Five Families of the New York Mafia. The terrified little girl is, well, she is just terrified, and understandably so.

On this site, warnings against Boris Johnson go back a very long way. I have never had any time for him. For years, I told you that Britain was famous for its sense of humour because it was fundamentally a serious country. There were joke countries, I said, and they were not remotely funny to live in. This was not one, I said, so it would not want a joke Prime Minister. But you did want him. You wanted him solely and specifically because you thought that he was "funny".

Even a lot of people who should have known better tried to tell me that Johnson was truly committed to Brexit. I always said, and I also maintained and maintain this about Michael Gove, that his approach was one of pure opportunism. We can all see who was right.

Johnson embodied his party in the ways that it preferred not to emphasise, validating all the financial fiddles and the sexual shenanigans of the Chamber of Commerce set. He never attempted to hide his manner of life, including his obvious alcohol and cocaine habits. Likewise, Keir Starmer's glazed eyes, his big red nose, his Durham incident, and his flight from a traffic accident to avoid being breathalysed, all make it blatantly obvious that he, too, is an alcoholic.

On the specifics of social policy, Johnson's views were and are those of his latest wife. So, not really a Brexiteer, and not remotely a social conservative, either. In that case, why did and do his supporters like him? He was Prime Minister for longer than Gordon Brown, yet who got more done? And when Johnson did anything, then what did he do?

Do those defending him recall his colossal spending after he had won, in 2019, an unlimited bidding war the like of which we had never seen before and shall probably never see again? He did not become a big spender because of Covid-19. Did they notice that he was so pro-immigration that he even lifted the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain? Did they approve of the lockdowns, or of the Northern Ireland Protocol, or of Net Zero? Have they always thought that he was completely right about Ukraine, and do they still?

Losing by-elections would do Rishi Sunak no harm, because what good would winning them do him? 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 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.