By All Accounts?

Nigel Farage is now a highly successful television presenter, but he is no longer a practising politician, much less a "Politically Exposed Person". What would anyone ever try and bribe him to do?

But Farage has been in either politics or presenting since 1999, with a sideline in gins since last September, so how has he hitherto met the threshold for a Coutts account? His claim not to have known that there was one is laughable. Would Coutts give you or me an account?

Yet he is right that neither Coutts nor NatWest ought to have made his financial details public. The whole world knows that he has been offered a NatWest account as a downgrade. Who would want one now? Similarly, if no one else will take Farage, then perhaps his recent and ongoing conduct may not suggest an attractive customer.

The only thing that rings completely true is that Farage might have been debanked because of his political opinions. As with cancel culture, deplatforming, and all that, the Left can only reply with, "Welcome to our world." None of us has a nightly, primetime gig on a Freeview channel. Not even, for example, the member of the NUJ, which you cannot just join, who took 12,877,918 votes a mere six years ago.

So no, I am not going to stop working 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. In good, old-fashioned print, so that no one would be able to press a button and delete them. The thinktank and the magazine need to be up and running at the start of the forthcoming General Election year. If you do not like that, then carry on doing your worst.

You see, 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.