Everyone's A Winner, Baby?

The night before he took his seat, then who is to make a man of Little Keir Mather? Jess Phillips? Harriet Harman? The Reverend Sir Chris Byrant? Or all of the foregoing, causing another byelection due to the poor boy's death?

Yes, of course I know. My BA was Theology at Durham. Not only Theology, but Durham. Not only Durham, but Theology. I could tell by sight, and I have on occasion been able to tell from nothing more than hearing or reading a perfectly normal name. Something in my mind just clicked. Not only Theology, but Durham. Not only Durham, but Theology. My point stands, though. If Mather has only ever been a "researcher to Wes Streeting", then he is not yet a made man. Let's get a sword and gun on the table.

There is now a Member of Parliament who was born while Tony Blair was Prime Minister, but he is openly enjoying it while it lasted. He may be back in 2029, at somewhere like Holborn and St Pancras, Keir the Second. But he is not one of the two real stories from last night.

One of those is the Liberal Democrats' resurgence in the West Country, where they denied the Conservatives an overall majority in 2010 and entered by far the most stable Government since that year. The other is the toxicity of the Ultra Low Emission Zone to the Labour Party in Outer London and the surrounding areas, where it absolutely has to win if it wished to win outright.

And 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.